[Sermon to be delivered at St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, Quinquagesima Sunday, February 19, 2023]
✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.
Who here has NOT heard the account of the Transfiguration before? I will tell you, for those who have, this account in its multiple retellings can fade into the background as yet another of the stories of Jesus of Nazareth. But for those who were not, I would imagine it might make one sit up a bit. After all, the physical form of Jesus of Nazareth becomes nigh impossible to look at, leaking light all over the place. Add to that, the Apostles Peter, James, and John get introduced to Elijah, who had last been seen almost nine hundred years previously, and Moses, who had died anywhere between thirteen and fourteen hundred years previously.
Jesus then told Peter, James, and John, “Tell no one about the vision until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”[1]
I can imagine St. Peter, the always impetuous one, saying, “No problem. Everyone thinks we’re mad already, why confirm it?”
Still, one must ask why did Jesus have these three of his disciples witness this incredible wonder only to bottle it up until a specified event which frankly they did not understand? Raised from the dead? What on earth could He be talking about?
The Gospels of Ss. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are very similar in their accounts. In the Gospel according to St. Luke, however, we get some information that sheds a bit of light on Our Lord’s need for keeping this meeting on the down-low. St. Luke tells us that, “They [Moses and Elijah] appeared in glory and were speaking of His [Jesus’] departure, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”[2] Here, the two greatest prophets Israel had ever known, Moses, who had led Israel from Egypt and had established the Law, and Elijah, who epitomized the role of the Prophets, were speaking to Jesus, who had just happened to drop the veils over His Dual Nature to speak clearly with them about the upcoming Jerusalem mission, none of which would have made sense to Jesus’ most advanced students until they had seen it for themselves.
What would you think? Jesus’ appearance changes to the point He looks like a celestial being. Jesus meets with two that had major roles in God’s interaction with Israel in the past. The three of them discuss Jesus making a controversial and high-profile entry into Jerusalem that is more pointed message than transportation. They likely discussed Jesus provocatively getting into the face of the religious and political authorities of Judea. They likely made note of Judas’ betrayal of Jesus into the hands of these same authorities, the trials before the High Priest, the Sanhedrin, Herod, and Pontius Pilate. They probably discuss the upcoming painful and humiliating execution. The discussion then, I imagine, turns to what Jesus would do among the dead. Then finally, the conversation turns to Jesus returning from the dead, how that would happen, and why that would happen.
This plan would make zero sense to the disciples. It did not promise a military leader like Judas Maccabeus, who had liberated Israel from the Greeks. It did not set Jesus up as a great sage and rabbi of their time like Hillel the Elder, who set the stage for modern Rabbinical Judaism or Shammai, whose teaching drove the Scribes and the Pharisees of Jesus’ day. Such a plan deliberately took Jesus on a collision course with His enemies and guaranteed His destruction, and for what? Resurrection from the dead? What possibly could be effected by that, remarkable though it might be? There was no promise of driving the Romans out, or of “Restoring the kingship to Israel.”[3] Indeed, when Jesus shared this plan later with a larger group of His disciples, St. Matthew relays to us that, “they were greatly distressed.”[4]
Would you not also be a bit distressed? Deliberately “poking the bear” knowing fully well the consequences thereof makes zero sense to anyone with half a rational thought in their head. Couple that with a major dose of skepticism about details like transfiguring one’s appearance, talking with people centuries dead, and one’s rising from the dead, people can understandably drop the whole plan as a delusional political or religious statement. The odd thing is, this delusional political and/or religious statement has echoed through the earth now for thousands of years, leading us to ask why.
We first need to establish context. If our context is material only with no room for the metaphysical, if the context is only of this world and not the world to come, the plan makes no sense. However, if we break our twenty-first century blinders and accept that there is a metaphysical, that there is an unseen spiritual world beyond the range of physical senses, then we start to build a context within which a plan such as this can make sense.
Our Lord’s mission is all about establishing that context, then executing the Plan in the light of that context. The Gospels lay out the Plan clearly with Jesus’ teaching, which itself is midrash, or explanation of Moses and the Prophets. Jesus brings to the forefront that God, Who transcends everything, still owns everything, Who did not create the cosmos only to abandon it, still possesses it, and that God is immanent, present and all around us, intimately involved with the work of His own hands. Within that context, Jesus recapitulates and refreshes the messages in the Law and the Prophets, both interpreting them more mercifully than Hillel the Elder’s already sensitive teaching and yet holding us to a higher standard that Shammai’s inflexible teaching. After all, according to Jesus, “Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”[5] For the attention deficit, Our Lord expresses this teaching with two key concepts that He drew from the Law:
“’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”[6]
Our Lord Jesus, however, reveals another concept, one that the sages of His day have overlooked. While God is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-seeing, there are spiritual powers who were created by God yet are in rebellion against God, and who, thanks to their skullduggery have corrupted His creation and now hold it, humanity and even the House of Israel included, in its thrall. The real enemy of Israel, indeed of mankind as a whole, is not Rome, or any other political power that had afflicted Israel in the past, no, the real Enemy are the principalities and powers of darkness and their captain, the one whom Jesus Himself testifies, “Fell from heaven,”[7] who went out of his way in the Garden to first ensnare a new creation in the web of Sin and Death. This Enemy had humanity, indeed all of creation, in his grasp, his chief chain being Death and its creator and perpetuator Sin. Rome was not the real enemy, just one of the many tools of the Enemy, the Adversary, the Accuser.
This is where the “Plan” discussed by Jesus, Moses, and Elijah comes in. What appears to be utter futile madness is instead a well-crafted and finely tuned operation. Humanity’s nature is corrupted and that corruption effects a permanent separation from God. In order to reverse that separation, God has to eliminate that corruption. To eliminate that corruption, Humanity’s nature has to be remade. To remake that Nature God has to free it from the Death that enwraps it tightly. Therein lies the plan. Jesus, who to that point had built on what Moses and the Prophets already taught, had to enact the final gambit in the mission. Had Jesus been another human prophet like Elijah or even Moses, His efforts would have been insufficient, for despite the efforts of the Prophets the problem still remains.
No, in order for the cornerstone to be knocked out of the Enemy’s edifice of despair, God Himself has to take on Human nature, and in unifying Human nature with Divine nature enter Jerusalem, poke the bear, and die because of it. When that happens, Death, which has a claim on Human nature, is confronted by Divine nature, over Which it has no claim, and in Whose presence cannot even exist. And because Human and Divine natures are perfectly united in the person of the Word, in Jesus Christ, Human nature suddenly is freed from the grip of Death, free from the cycle of Death and Sin, and remade anew in God’s image, a nature we now assume at our baptism, in which we are remade by the Holy Spirit, so that when we inevitably die, Death no longer has a hold on us either.
That is the plan. That is what happened on Mt. Tabor in our Gospel reading today. That reading is about the last strategy session before the pivotal battle between God and the Rebellion. Today we are made privy to the plan. In the weeks to come we get to see it unfold. We will walk over the next five Sundays with Jesus in His ministry. Then we shall accompany Him on that provocative ride into Jerusalem which enraged Rome, His cleansing of the Temple which alienated the Sanhedrin, His final days with His disciples, then His Passion, then the Death on the Cross, and finally His Resurrection from the Dead.
May we all have a Holy Lent. This Lent, let us focus on the Plan, and, as His disciples did before, experience the mystery of our deliverance.
✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.
[1] Mt. 17.9 [2] Lk. 9.31 [3] Ac. 1.6 [4] Mt. 17.23, cf. Mk. 9.32 [5] Mt. 5.20 [6] Mt. 22.37-40, taken from Dt. 6.5 and Lev. 19.18 [7] Lk. 10.18, cf. Is. 14.12
For more on the rival schools of Judaic thought in the century and a half bracketing the ministry of Jesus,