Mark 9:2-8, Wed. 5^th March 2008. Jesus the Beloved.

Thanks be to thee, my Lord Jesus Christ, for all the benefits that Thou hast given me, for all the pains and insults thou hast borne for me. O most merciful redeemer, friend and brother, may I know thee more clearly, love thee more dearly and follow thee more nearly, day by day.

You may find it best to have your Bible open at Mk. 9, so that we can work through the first few verses together.

V. 2: It was Jesus who chose the three and took them up. The privilege of witnessing the Transfiguration was unimagined beforehand, unsought, and unattainable except by grace. The account of the Transfiguration is about seeing Jesus as He is. Peter, James and John are led to see a Jesus who is more even than the Messiah of Peter’s recent acknowledgement, much more than the triumphant, political Messiah for whom he had hoped, truly the Son of the living God with all that implied. Peter and the other disciples are being asked to add to their first steps of faith, to grow and be stretched to the point where they see Jesus as the Man from Heaven that He truly is.

V. 3: We know that our God dwells in light unapproachable. Just as we cannot look at the Sun even in eclipse in a clear sky, without being blinded by it, but must view it through a filter so thick that it passes less than 100,000^th of the light, so even the incarnate Son, God so to speak scaled down for us, once transfigured, was too bright to be gazed at. This is our Lord.

Vv. 4-6: You and I have probably never been in the company of any one remotely as great as Moses or Elijah. For devout first-century Jews, to see their Jesus consorting with these as at least their equals was an experience so overwhelming that Peter, always impulsive, opens his big mouth and says something really stupid.

“How odd/of God/to choose/the Jews”; and how very odd of Him to choose you and me, members of the new Israel! To set His love upon a small tribal grouping, to rescue them from slavery, and to “spend several centuries hammering into their heads what kind of a God He was and that He cared about right conduct” (to quote Lewis), this is pure grace. All our inheritance comes out of grace, the great statement of God’s nature and requirements represented by Moses, and God’s great reminder represented by the greatest of the prophets. Our passage does not say what subject was discussed. But in Luke we learn that it was Jesus’ Exodus, or deliverance, that He was to accomplish at Jerusalem. So the subject is grace, grace and grace.

Peter has not understood what this means, but, always so human, he wants to prolong the privileged experience indefinitely. In other words, he wants to live in the past. After over 70 years I have plenty of past myself, and I understand how that can happen, whether the past is remembered as happy or not.

V. 7: This is a bright cloud, the cloud which represents the very presence of God: not a damp grey cloud, but a dazzling one. The Transfiguration is a subject that as the days have elapsed since I consented to speak about it has got harder and more mysterious. I have wrestled with its essential meaning as I did once years ago with the Ascension, more recently with the Virgin Conception, and do all the time with the Resurrection. I have concluded that what makes it so hard is that it has nothing to do with any human being’s view of Jesus, and everything to do with God’s. One basic difference between a naturally virtuous, even enlightened, person and a genuine Christian is that the one will sit on a plateau from which the world, so hard on idealists, may over the years drag him down, whereas the Christian must be ever changing and growing, seeing and knowing Jesus ever more clearly. When we are young we may easily catch a vision of Him and His beauty, His exemplary character and the perfection of His moral teaching, of how well they correspond to our own ideals. But it is not enough just to stick there, with an ordinary Jesus who, however many spiritual notches above us, is essentially prosaic and moralising, bland and digestible: we have to grow more and more into worshipping Him as God. We need to come to terms with the Jesus who is not a high-grade social worker cum self-help expert, but essentially uncanny. We have to submit our minds more and more to the Word, including those aspects of it which may seem to cut right across our ideals. We are to be always hearing Him.

V. 8: Suddenly it is all as though none of this had ever been. And if we read further we find that down at the foot of the mountain nothing has changed, in fact the situation has gone from bad to worse.

Those who do not know themselves very well may ask how it came to be that after such an experience James and John could be found bickering over their status in the coming kingdom, and Peter be involved in such a cowardly denial of Jesus, even a denial of ever having known the man. What good had it done them, that Jesus had been transfigured before them, and received the stamp of God’s unqualified approval? They had had the archetypal mountaintop experience, learned the only opinion of Jesus that really matters, and were capable of descending to such a low level so soon! We need to understand that though we may often descend below the level of our most overwhelming experience of Christ, we shall never rise above it. It is a documentable truth that the real dynamic for change in this world has only ever come out of a vision of the life of Heaven. To be “so heavenly-minded that we are no earthly good” is not the danger for modern Christian people. Unless we catch a glimpse, however brief, of Jesus as He really is, we shall never know anything of the power which flows from Jesus. I sometimes know little enough of it, though I have had experiences at the height of which I have been sure that I would never doubt again. But descend we must, like the disciples, to tackle the crying needs down at the foot of the mountain. Privilege must issue, not in more privilege, but in deeper love and finer service. To use the slogan that was taught to me when I was a young Christian, we are saved to serve. We too can cling to the past, perhaps to our conversion-story, and forget what that conversion was really all about, and how it is intended to lead to a life of service to God and man, the only truly human, truly Christian form of life.

My London school had as its first Director of Music Gustav Holst, who composed The Planets and much else in the large square room below the large square room where I much later had violin lessons. Probably quite true is the tale of the girl to whom one day he handed some manuscript sheets of music, asking her to make fine copies; and when she brought him back her work, after thanking her he immediately handed her more to do. She looked at him with a bit of a query in her expression. He said, “Yes, the reward for hard work is more hard work!” Work and service are not things that we tack onto our discipleship, any more than they were things that Jesus tacked onto His Sonship: they are of the essence. The service is the leadership, the service is the privilege, and in dark times the service is the healing too. But like the three in this account, though they represented senior leadership within the leadership of the nascent Church, most of us are slow learners.

Look, Father, look on His anointed face,
and only look on us as found in Him;
look not on our misusings of thy grace,
our prayer so languid, and our faith so dim:
for lo, between our sins and their reward
we set the Passion of thy Son our Lord.

Amen.