Sermon text: Luke 9:28–36
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the moment that Jesus was transfigured, Peter, James, and John thought it meant for them a much better and easier life: a life of glory and honor and importance as they would handle the deep crowds that would gather around Jesus wherever He went. After all, if He looked like that, He certainly must be an extraordinary man — or maybe even God Himself.
Peter, James, and John were the inner circle of the disciples. So when it came time to head up the mount to pray, Jesus called on His inner circle to go with Him, to be witnesses of what was about to transpire on the top of that mountain. When they get to the top, Jesus does what He came to do: He prays to the Father, to His heavenly Father. And the disciples do what they do best when Jesus goes off to pray: they fall asleep. When they wake, they wake to a bright light shining, glory radiating from inside their Lord Jesus. The appearance of His face became different, and His clothing became white and gleaming. That’s not something that ordinary humans do. So once they see this, they know instantly there’s something great taking place — great, great for them at least, they’re thinking. What they don’t realize at the moment is that it’s a precursor to something much greater and much darker.
In that sense, now we live at a disadvantage. We are people way past the days of the apostles. We are people who are willfully — both clergy and laity — willfully ignorant of the Old Testament and all of the things that took place in the Old Testament and all of their meanings. For example, a Transfiguration image: Daniel 7:9 — “As I looked, thrones were placed, and the Ancient of Days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool.”
We live under a self-imposed handicap when it comes to the events of the New Testament. We know so little about the Old Testament, its history, its images. So when we come to major events, even minor events in the New Testament, we’re a bit at a loss. We have a kind of shallow understanding of what’s taking place. We don’t make the connections as quickly as we should. Unlike the connections between the Transfiguration of Jesus and the shining face of Moses: that every time he came down from Mount Sinai, and eventually every time he exited the tabernacle, his face shone like Jesus’s in the Transfiguration — bright and brilliant, to the point of terrifying the Israelites who would look upon his face. Thus he began to veil his face. Exodus 34: “And it came about when Moses was coming down from Mount Sinai that Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because of his speaking with the LORD. So when Aaron and all the sons of Israel saw Moses, behold, the skin of his face shone, and they were afraid to come near him. When Moses had finished speaking with them, he put a veil over his face.”
Peter, James, and John — though they knew the Old Testament better than the average layman or pastor today — they knew what the shining light from Jesus’s face and clothes meant. And when the two figures appeared next to Him, they also knew who they were: Moses and Elijah. And they were speaking about His departure, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Translators often use the word “departure,” but the Greek word here literally is exodos, and it means Exodus: the kind of thing that happened in the Old Testament with Moses and the children of Israel. It’s an exodus — but this Exodus would be from sin, death, and the power of the devil, not from mere bondage of slavery of one empire over another.
Why Moses and Elijah? It was to Moses that God gave the law on Mount Sinai. And it was Elijah who defeated the 450 priests of Baal and Asherah on Mount Carmel, cementing his place in the Old Testament history as the greatest of all the prophets, second only to Moses. Between the two of them, they represent the Torah and the words of God.
So Peter has a choice: between a theology of glory and a theology of the cross. A life lived on easy street — after all, who could challenge a transfigured Jesus? — or a theology of the cross. Peter would later opine, “Master, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” And as he was about to build his theology of glory, why, a cloud formed and began to overshadow them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud.
You see, it’s not your average cloud. The Old Testament cloud is the Old Testament Cloud. Everybody knows what that is. It’s the kind of cloud that led the people out of Egypt and across the Red Sea and through the wilderness. The cloud of the kind that descended on Mount Sinai when God gave the Ten Commandments to Moses. The kind of cloud that filled the tabernacle and the temple, driving out the priests because of the glory that emanated from Moses’s face. And the voice which would come from the clouds: this cloud indicates that God the Father has come to the Mount of Transfiguration. He came to bear witness to Jesus as He did in Jesus’s baptism three years prior. He came to make sure that the three witnesses understood who Jesus is. So the Father declares: “This is my Son, my Chosen One; listen to him!”
Peter, James, and John in that moment had no doubt: their teacher Jesus is most certainly the Son of God, fully human and fully divine, the long-awaited Savior promised by God and born of the Virgin. No matter what happens from here on out, they can look back at the Mount of Transfiguration of our Lord and be sure that Jesus is in fact the promised Messiah, the Savior of all.
But from here on forward, for Peter, James, and John, it’s downhill. Jesus’s glory will be hidden for a little while longer, and the most well-known image of Jesus will not be the Mount of Transfiguration, but rather His body hanging on a cross. Jesus will shortly go back down the mountain to perform some miracles, to teach some more about the kingdom of God, and to confront the religious leaders — so that He will be rejected, He will be made to suffer, and He will be crucified on Good Friday. And as He draws closer and closer to Good Friday, the leadership’s rejection of Jesus Christ grows more and more intense, and the plan of His death more and more solidified.
The disciples have already heard at least one menacing statement about Jesus’s future. Just 8 days before the Transfiguration, Jesus told them that He would be rejected, He would suffer at the hands of the religious leaders, and that He would be crucified and raised on the third day.
Transfiguration, though — transformation, change — are threads that run through the entire tapestry of Jesus’s life. Even on the Mount of Transfiguration, it wasn’t the first time that Jesus was altered, changed. The Son of God was transfigured when He left His home in glory to take on human flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary and become man. He was transfigured in His suffering: He who knew no sin was transfigured, changed to be our sin, and suffered and died on our behalf, that we might become the very righteousness, the glory of God. Jesus was transfigured in death: as the author of life, He lay still in the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. He was transfigured in His resurrection when He rose on the third day and proclaimed victory over death, sin, and the devil for 40 days before He ascended into the clouds to be seated at the right hand of His heavenly Father.
Some 30 years later, Peter would write: “At that moment of Transfiguration, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, listen to him’ — we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain.” Peter describes what he saw as a Majestic Glory, describes the mountain as the sacred mountain. During that time, Peter and all the rest saw the wonderful, marvelous, glorious things that Jesus had accomplished in the life of the people.
Paul saw the glory of God too when he was traveling to Damascus. As he went on his way, he approached Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven shone around him. And falling to the ground, he heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” And Saul said, “Who are you, Lord?” And he said, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.”
Throughout the Old and New Testaments, when sinful human beings are given a glimpse of God, the word kavod — that’s Hebrew — and doxa, glory, are the words God uses to describe Himself. In the Old Testament, before the veil of the temple was torn in two on Good Friday, God hid His glory behind the curtain. Exodus 16:10: “And it came about as Aaron spoke to the whole congregation of the sons of Israel, that they looked toward the wilderness, and behold, the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud.”
There are two more things that should be said about the glory of God manifested on the Mount of Transfiguration. The glory of God is always tied to the word of God. Where the glory of God is, there the word of God is. It’s always tied to the word and sacrament ministry of God: word, the sacrament ministry of the church. In these two and three verses of Exodus 24, we read: “Moses alone shall come near to the LORD, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him. So Moses came and told the people all the words of the LORD and all the rules. And all the people answered with one voice and said, ‘All the words that the LORD has spoken we will do.’”
In Second Peter, Peter wrote again of the Transfiguration: “For when he received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, ‘This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain. And we have the prophetic word more fully confirmed.” Where the word of God is, there is God’s transfiguration. We don’t see it with our eyes. We’re transfigured in the moment of our baptism into the very glory and image of Jesus Christ in the eyes of God the heavenly Father.
And what did God the Father say to Peter as he looked upon the glory of Jesus Christ? “Listen to him.” That is, hear His words. He speaks the words of God, and you, the disciples — Christians — are to listen, to believe, and to do. The glory, which also, by the way, means the heaviness — the heaviness of His holiness — is present wherever God Himself is present.
Throughout His earthly life, Jesus was hiding His glory, veiled in His state of humiliation. He looked like any other ordinary baby, ordinary boy, ordinary man. Isaiah said of Him: “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him.” He was, though, the Word made flesh. His power, majesty, honor, and glory were hidden in a manger, in the flesh of the Babe of Bethlehem, in the boy of Nazareth, in the traveling Rabbi, and in the condemned man who hangs on the cross of Good Friday.
His glory is still there, but hidden in the New Testament period. Our God hides Himself in words, in water, and bread and wine, in the office of pastor, in the sacrament. Your Lord comes to you hidden in the elements, and with His word He comes to you in His body and blood and gives you a foretaste of the feast to come, where you, by God’s grace alone, through your God-given faith in Jesus Christ, will be at an eternal banquet filled with glorious brothers and sisters, heavenly saints in Christ. There you will see the glory of the Lord Jesus face to face. His appearance will not invoke dread as it does now in this world, but it will be beautiful to the children of our heavenly Father. For you too will have been transfigured, made perfect, regaining the image of God which was lost in the fall into sin.
In the words of the blessed apostle: “Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed — in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.’ ‘O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Christ was transfigured before He was hung on a cross, beaten, bloodied, mocked, and then died. He was transfigured on Easter morning as He rose from the dead in His glorious body. And one day you will be too. That which is hidden in you now will be manifest for all to see, for you are saints: ones transfigured in Christ. Amen.
May the peace that surpasses all understanding keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.