The Transfiguration of Our Lord – Sunday 21 January A✠D 2024
✠ Psalmody: Psalm 77:18b;84:1–2a, 4, 10–11;45:2a;110:1;96:2–3
✠ Lection: Exodus 34:29–35;2 Peter 1:16–21;St. Matthew 17:1–9
In the Name of the Father and of the ✠ Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
As with Saints Peter, James, and John, the Lord has been showing and teaching us much as He’s brought us to His Transfiguration. Our flight up to the top of this mountain of remembrance has been swift, being that it was still but a month ago that we were preparing to celebrate the Nativity of our Lord. And here we are today closing out Epiphany in this glorious way before setting our face toward Jerusalem through the Lenten Spring. Behold, God has revealed the glory of Jesus to you here, in this life, not so that you desire to remain here, where you are, but so that you trust your Savior everywhere He leads.
Do not love the here more than you love Jesus. That’s a pretty easy task when you think about the detestable things of this place: pornography, lying, drunkenness, propaganda, outbursts of wrath, abortion, schemes in an election year. You know that God detests such things and thus should His people. Only abuse and indulgence in the practice of such things lead the flesh to desire more of them. Make a covenant with your eyes, speak truth and blessings with your tongues, control your anger, and do not swim in the political sewer of this temporary place thinking that doing so is necessary to discern that the water is dark and smelly for a reason.
We’re also to take heed lest we come to love the good gifts and the good of this life more than God and how He says we are to treat them. We need food. He provides and we give thanks, yet we are neither to abuse it nor to feel more secure because we have much of it in cabinet, fridge, and freezer. We need clothing. God provides and we give thanks, yet we are not to vainly love or loathe how we may look in what we wear, but to seek what He desires as He clothes us. We need shelter and protection from the weather. He provides house and home, yet these are not more valuable, or protective, than He is. We need each other. He gives us family, yet not even these are we to love more than the One by Whom we have received them. We most certainly shall not despise His good gifts, but hold them in godly perspective so that they are to us as He intends, and more importantly, that He is to us as He intends There is much here to entice us with wanting this to be home and last forever, but it is not, it will not, and that is a good thing.
This struggle against the flesh, and its desires to avoid what it doesn’t want and to gorge itself on what it wants too much of, is what led Peter to speak out foolishly at the Transfiguration. Before Jesus led the three disciples up on a high mountain, He had taught them a hard saying. Jesus had asked who people were saying He is. Then, He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”, and Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” By Jesus’ Baptism in the Jordan, we know him to be spot on. Jesus is the Christ. Yet, this Anointed One tells them, then shows them by His transfiguration, what they didn’t want to hear, especially not Peter. From that time Jesus began to show to His disciples that He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and be raised the third day…Then, Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” If Jesus is to be the One that we follow, then there will be self-denial involved, crosses involved, suffering involved, for every Christian, for such was our own Lord’s path. If we jump on board at the news of the coming King, rejoice at His Birth, praise Him as the eternal One incarnate, are baptized into Him, then we cannot think that our path through this life will be different from His. We shall not suffer God’s wrath for our sins, but we shall suffer the effects of the devil, the world, and our sinful nature until we sleep in death or Jesus returns before then. If we are robed in Christ, the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh will revile and treat us as it did Him. Though we bear the Light, we still have the darkness of this age to endure until our race’s end.
This is why the Transfiguration got the better of Peter. Must Jesus suffer? Must we suffer? Yes. Peter had just heard His own Lord’s teaching that suffering and death, specifically in Jerusalem, was His course, but behold, here they are atop a high mountain for an extraordinary event. God the Father, by sending two great prophets of old and by being present Himself in the bright cloud, was there meeting with His beloved Son and His disciples in order that they may all be encouraged to face what lay ahead. As those in Christ, we have Him and all that we need to face everything that we encounter in this life. Yet, these three, or at least Peter, did not want it to be true about what was to come in Jerusalem and in His own life. Wouldn’t it be better than suffering and death to just remain here, where we are on the mountain? “Lord, it is good for us to be here; if You wish, let us make here three tabernacles: one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter is typically bold and later promises to die with Jesus if he must and most certainly to never abandon Him, or heaven forbid, deny Him. But in the weakness of fallen flesh, Peter would rather take the easy path that doesn’t lead out of here, yet one that has none of all those necessary hard times on it. He desired to keep Jesus there, bright-faced, light-white clothed. He desired a reality that could not be. All of this must pass away. All of this must be made right. For his words interjected into the holy conversation among Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, the Father rebuked Peter, in that While [Peter] was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them; and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud saying, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” We must not insist on our own path, our own desires, our own thoughts, but must instead hear Jesus.
Christ had made it clear the path that He was to take and the one that all of His followers were to take with Him; both those followers on the mountain and those followers who call upon Him as Lord afterward, even 2,000 years afterward. He came forth from everlasting, the Son, the eternal Word, and was made man, born of the Virgin Mary, worshiped by those from the east who bore royal and priestly gifts. He grew in wisdom and stature and came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John, to be counted among you that He may sanctify the waters of your baptism and thus rescue you from the curse that the law pronounces upon your sin. St. Paul says that in Baptism, you were buried with Christ and raised with Him through the glory of the Father to walk new in the newness of life, and are thus adopted as children of God, and if children, then heirs—heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if indeed you suffer with Him, that you may also be glorified together. Your place in this life is not on the easy mountaintop. Life isn’t meant to be easy in earthly ways by being a Christian. The mountain is not your home. There is still much that lies ahead.
To put this brief Epiphanytide in terms of your spiritual life, the Christ Child has been revealed to you by the proclamation of Holy Scripture to be your eternal King, worthy of all your worship, immeasurable Reason to rejoice always. This same King, God Himself in humble human flesh, Who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, … made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and came in the likeness of men. It is in your likeness that He was baptized with your sinner’s baptism, so that you might receive the greater one, His Baptism, the washing of rebirth and renewal. By those means of grace, of God cleansing you in the water that is included in His command and combined with His Word, you are washed, you are purified, you are able to encounter the holy, living God. It is in Jesus, by Jesus that you ascend before the Father, like how the Lord Jesus led Peter, James, and John up on a high mountain, so He, too, leads you up in His merit and worthiness.
We remember that this is a most gracious ascent to Him, because in the Scriptures, encountering God is strongly tied to meeting Him upon a mountain. More than that, it is written in Exodus 20 that unto Mt. Sinai Moses drew near the thick darkness where God was. There was darkness because of the threat of the Law that was being given. The people had already shown themselves to be rebellious and in need of threat, so God did so in giving clear commandments about holy living; of what it meant to be His people, to be Christian.
But Jesus, in keeping Himself all the commandments that you break, leads you up to the Father that you might encounter Him, not in dark threat, but in bright glory, because all threat is satisfied in the perfect work of Christ that is credited to all who are baptized into Him. See that you are reconciled to the Father having the Light of Christ now shining brightly within you. But up to a place in this life is not as far as God desires to take you. Where you are now is not your home. You cannot ask Jesus to give you here a life that is impossible here. You can ask Him to give you life in Him; a life that has certain hope in a certain eternity, but one that must not seek to stay on a mountaintop when life here is left to be lived. We cannot long for time, when He gives us eternity. So, no matter if you think that you are nearing the end of your earthly days, or that you’re young and they seem that they may continue on endlessly, see that your home, and the path of suffering that leads you to it, is still a different place. It is not here. The trade-off in realizing this in your heart is not one that loses something greater for the lesser, but the other way around. To give up the love of this temporal place is to embrace the eternal gift your Father desires you to enjoy as you even endure the suffering of the valleys on your way to that eternal land.
This may disappoint you, but do not follow the flesh, but instead the Spirit, for He gives you many true things to enjoy rightly in this life and to be thankful for. Embrace and rejoice at the heavenly Fatherly gifts of the blessings of children, of brothers and sisters of the eternal family, of clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children. View and treat these things as the Scriptures bid you do, neither detesting them nor idolizing them. They are blessings given to you here as the Lord touches your life and tells you do not be afraid, so that, even in your suffering, even in your gifts, even in the rebuke of your sin and the call to look first to Christ, you come to lift up your eyes and see no one but Jesus only.
You do not descend into life’s valleys on your own, but it is Jesus Himself Who leads you there, Who strengthens you there, Who protects you there. While you suffer, you are protected by Him Who purifies your faith and sustains you unto life everlasting. Behold, God has revealed the glory of Jesus to you here, in this life, not so that you desire to remain here, where you are, but so that you trust your Savior everywhere He leads, for beyond the suffering is the eternal inheritance that He has won for you.
In ✠ Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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