Sunday, February 11th, 2024: "Living God"
First United Presbyterian Church
“Living God”
Rev. Amy Morgan
February 11, 2024
Mark 9:1-13
And he said to the crowd, “Truly I tell you all, there are some standing here who will not taste death until the see the majesty of God come in power.”
Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John, his brother, and brought them up a high mountain by themselves, alone. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes began shining, becoming exceedingly white, such as no cloth refiner on earth could bleach them. And then Moses and Elijah appeared to them, talking with him. Then Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; we will pitch three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” For he did not know what to say because they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Suddenly when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them, but only Jesus himself.
As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them so that they would tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Humanity had risen from the dead. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean. And they asked him, “Why do the biblical scholars say that Elijah must come first?” Then Jesus said to them, “Elijah is indeed coming to restore all things, Now, how then is it written about the Son of Humanity, that through many sufferings he is to go and be treated with contempt? Yet I tell you that Elijah has come, and they did to him whatever they pleased, just as it is written about him.”
If you’ve ever driven east on I-90 through Wisconsin, Minnesota, and South Dakota, you know about Wall Drug. Over 300 billboards throughout the upper Midwest inform you, mile after boring mile, that Wall Drug is up ahead, that Wall Drug has free ice water, that Wall Drug has 5 cent coffee, that Wall Drug has a 40-foot jackalope. By the time you reach exit 110, that number is permanently seared into your brain as the location of Wall, South Dakota, and the location of the world-famous Wall Drug.
Forgive my irreverence, but that’s kind of how the transfiguration feels to me. We’ve been on the road with Jesus now for many a mile. Right at the beginning of the journey, God announced that Jesus was the Beloved Son of God. All along the way, spiritual forces have shouted out his identity, and even Peter has declared him to be the Messiah. If we haven’t gotten the point by now that Jesus is something special, we’ve been asleep at the wheel.
So you would think that when Peter, James, and John, those disciples who have been with Jesus from the start of this road trip, are suddenly confronted with this transformed, glorious Jesus and a voice from heaven proclaiming he is God’s Son, they would be like, “Yeah, okay, we get it already!” It’s like the 298th billboard announcing that Jesus is awesome.
But instead, these disciples are like, “Whaaaa? We totally didn’t see this coming!”
It feels like that All State commercial where Patrick Mahomes is named Most Valuable Bundler and feigns surprise while he opens his shirt to reveal a t-shirt that says MVB and produces a banner and confetti announcing his accomplishment.
This feels farcical. It’s dramatic and absurd and somewhat comical. The transfiguration is the most over-the-top story about Jesus in all the gospels. And especially in the concise narrative of Mark, it stands out as somewhat bizarre.
But, in a way, that’s the point.
The gospel of Mark is obsessed with Jesus’s identity. Mark has been putting up billboards announcing who Jesus is and what’s coming for miles and miles. And still, the disciples are clearly missing it. And so God intervenes with a blazing neon sign announcing, “HERE IS GOD’S BELOVED SON,” while shiny Jesus stands in a kick line with Moses and Elijah and a Broadway musical number sings about how he is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Mark wants to make it unmistakably clear who Jesus really is. And he also wants us to see that this is who Jesus has been all along, and the disciples have failed to see it.
But even after this extravagant display, the disciples still don’t understand. So Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God - which for the Israelites could have just been a reference to God’s anointed king, not necessarily a declaration of divinity. But the scriptures say Elijah is supposed to come back from wherever he was whisked off to instead of dying hundreds of years ago. And the Messiah is supposed to come after him. They’re not really doubting what the cloud voice just said, they’re just asking Jesus for some clarity about the order of things. After what they’ve just witnessed, the disciples are tripped up by a technicality instead of convinced of Jesus’s identity.
This story is the perfect antidote for those who say, “I can’t believe in God because I don’t have proof.” Peter, James, and John had all the proof in the world. The divinity of Jesus was as plain as the noses on their faces. And they still didn’t get it.
In Mark’s gospel, there is only one human who does actually get it. When Jesus dies on the cross, a Roman guard proclaims, “truly, this was the Son of God.” This Roman executioner recognizes Jesus’s divinity, not in the shining glory of his transfiguration, but in the humiliating agony of his death. He didn’t get a neon sign pointing to Jesus as the Son of God, he got a crude and sarcastic wooden board nailed to a cross announcing that the person hanging there waiting to die was the King of the Jews. He didn’t see Jesus conferring with Moses and Elijah, he heard him cry out in abandonment with his last breath.
And somehow, Mark tells us, seeing Jesus die in this way convinced this man that Jesus was God’s son.
We have been on the road with Jesus for a long, long time now. There are 2000 years’ worth of billboards pointing the way to Jesus, neon signs highlighting his glory, and friends, we are still missing it. We are still as frightened and confused as Peter, James, and John.
Like those first disciples, we’re hoping that following Jesus makes us good people and that good things will happen to good people. We’re ready to vote Jesus for president and let Jesus be our co-pilot, and we know that all we need is Jesus and coffee. Jesus can heal diseases and calm the storms of life and provide for us in abundance. Jesus is like free ice water and 5 cent coffee and 40-foot jackalopes.
This is what Barbara Brown Taylor calls “full solar spirituality.” It “focuses on staying in the light of God around the clock, both absorbing and reflecting the sunny side of faith.” If we’re going to follow Jesus, there should be benefits, certainty, guidance, positivity. We should know where to find Jesus as surely as we can find exit 110 on I-90. We should know the loving presence of God in our lives at all times and be covered by God’s gracious provision in all circumstances.
And this is what is causing us to miss out on who Jesus really is, where Jesus really is, and what Jesus is really doing.
What the proclamation of the Roman guard at Jesus’s crucifixion tells us is that the face of God is revealed to us is not just in the glorious or the miraculous, but also in suffering and death. We don’t need to wait for a spectacular epiphany to see God, we need to look into the face of a human being.
Reflected in each face we see is the image of the living God. Frederick Buechner wrote that the transfiguration of Jesus was “the holiness of the man shining through his humanness, his face so afire with it [his disciples] were almost blinded.” He claims that this is something we can still see today, if we are looking for it. He says that this transfiguration can be witnessed in “the face of a man walking his child in the park, of a woman picking peas in the garden, of sometimes even the unlikeliest person listening to a concert, say, or standing barefoot in the sand watching the waves roll in, or just having a beer at a Saturday baseball game in July. Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive transfigures the human face that it's almost beyond bearing.”
For the Roman guard, it was the suffering face of Jesus that transfigured him into something that was “almost beyond bearing,” but that also revealed his glorious identity. If we cannot bear to look into the face of suffering, we cannot begin to understand who Jesus is.
That was ultimately the disciples’ challenge. When Jesus spoke of his suffering and death immediately after the magnificent revelation of his glory, his disciples couldn’t bear to look at it. That’s why they brought up technical questions, logical observations. They were terrified and in awe of the face of God’s glory. But the face of suffering was unbearable.
It is possible to see Jesus, even today. If we, like the Roman guard, can bear to see it. Trusting that the weight of glory can bear the weight of suffering, we can look at the face of each person who suffers - meaning each person who exists because we are all of us suffering in some form or another - and see in each face the glorious image of God.
That is where we will find Jesus. When we gaze at those we love, and when we glare at those we despise, we will see Jesus. When we glance at a stranger, and when we greet a friend, we will see Jesus. And when we scrutinize our own reflection in the mirror, we will see Jesus.
Jesus did not stay on the mountaintop in all his wondrous, shiny glory. He climbed a different mountain, where he died with the face of God still shining through his suffering. And in his resurrection, he is revealed by the power of the Holy Spirit through every human face we encounter. And we are blessed to see it, if we can bear it.
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