Sermon for the Last Sunday after Epiphany February 14, 2021

by the Rt. Rev. Donald Phillips

Let us pray.  Holy and gracious God, we give you thanks for your presence in this time and place and within each one of us and the locations where we dwell.  Help us now to open our minds, our hearts, our whole lives, to receive the gift of your living Word for us this day; and may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.  Amen.

Well we have just heard Mark’s Gospel’s version of the Transfiguration story in Jesus’ life.  It is a very key story.  One of the ways we can be sure of that is the fact that it appears in all three Synoptic Gospels and it’s also referred to in the 2nd Epistle of Peter.  I want to focus on that story, especially today, because it is the last Sunday after Epiphany and before we begin the Season of Lent this Wednesday – Ash Wednesday.  It also happens to be Valentine’s Day.  I’m not going to attempt to preach on that except, perhaps, to make a brief comment at the end of the sermon.

Since Christmas the readings from Mark’s Gospel have been focusing on showing us more and more exactly who this Jesus of Nazareth really is.  We’ve been journeying with his disciples as they experience his revealing presence – becoming more aware that this is no ordinary person.  They have witnessed miraculous healings, delivering persons from oppression by evil powers – impressing everyone with his authoritative teaching – revealing more and more that he is not merely a wise teacher but the One sent from God.

Today’s Transfiguration story is, in a way, a climax of that progression.  Some of the subtleties of this story may not be obvious to us, but this Transfiguration story is brimming with apocalyptic symbolism – about the final resolution of God’s Kingdom.  First of all, it takes place on a mountain top.  Biblically, that is where great encounters with the divine happen – Moses and the giving of the Law; the Old Testament prophecy that when the end comes God will host a banquet for all peoples on a mountain.  This is where one encounters the divine.

There is dazzling white brightness – the sign of the divine presence.  Moses’s face glows after he’s spoken with God; prophets’ visions of God always seem to include this dazzling bright light; Paul’s encounter with the Risen Christ on the road to Damascus where he experiences a dazzling light which temporarily blinds him.

And then there’s this image of Jesus engaging with Moses and Elijah – summing up the Law and the Prophets, and also the association of the two of them, Moses and Elijah, with the coming of God’s Messiah contained in a prophecy in the book of Malachi. 

Then there’s the overshadowing cloud.  Moses, when he is on the mountain, enters into a cloud to hear God speak.  The ‘Holiest of Holies’ in the Tabernacle and later, the Temple, become filled with a cloud as God fills it with God’s presence 

And finally, the divine voice speaking itself: “This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him.”  But this climactic event is only a foretaste – a foreshadowing of the full revelation which will come at Easter with the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Mark’s Gospel is a carefully-narrated story to gradually reveal the full and true identity of Jesus.  Wisely, Mark does this by telling the story through the eyes and understanding of Jesus’ disciples.  Mark says that Jesus tells these 3 witnesses (Peter, James and John) to keep quiet about this mountaintop revelation until after Jesus’s resurrection, because only then will it make sense.

Mark skilfully recounts this gradual revelation through the use of the statement regarding Jesus’ identity:  “This is my Son.”  We first hear it at Jesus’ baptism by John, at the beginning of his ministry.  And there, the words are spoken only to Jesus.  The second time we hear it is at the Transfiguration (today’s story) where it’s spoken to a few disciples – 3 of them.  And finally, as Jesus dies on the cross in Mark’s Gospel, by the Roman centurion who looks up and says, “Truly this man was God’s Son.”  The revelation of his identity has gone beyond even the People of God’s Covenant, the Jews, to a Gentile centurion.

I’m laying this out so we can consciously realize that the whole purpose of the Gospel (in this case, Mark’s Gospel) is to indelibly fuse the person of Jesus of Nazareth with the divine Son of God – one in the same!  This reality, of human and divine, is difficult for the first disciples.  And it has been difficult for disciples ever since.  We, at least in the modern western world, have been steeped in dualistic thinking: right or left, male of female, sacred or secular, lawful or unlawful, human or divine.

As a result, we have a natural tendency to emphasize either the humanity of Jesus or the divinity of Christ.  For example, if we tend to want to emphasize the humanity of Jesus, we can relate to him as ‘brother’ or ‘friend.’  We gravitate to his teachings, his ethics and his morality, and he becomes for us the great “human example” for us to learn from.  If we emphasize the divinity of Christ, we stand at a distance from him and praise him as God.  We don’t relate closely to him because he is the divine Saviour who has come to rescue we poor mortals.  He has nothing in common with us because he is God!  We don’t try to compare him to us – he wouldn’t understand, so we think.

But the truth of the Gospel will not let us do this dualistic thinking!  Today, on this Last Sunday before we Lent, with this glorious transfiguration story, we bask on the mountain top with the divine Jesus Christ.  But, we are about to plunge into Lent when we will hear first-hand in the Gospel readings how this Jesus is misunderstood, challenged by religious authorities, betrayed, arrested, publicly mocked, sentenced to death, and executed like a common criminal.  We will be able to identify with him by looking around at what happens to persons like him in our world.  He will be very human.

And in our readings and prayers during Lent, we will be confronted with the fact that everything he suffered during his life – and his death – was because of, and for, us!  We will come face-to-face with our own failings – our own indifference to the suffering of those we label as “them” – not “us”; the injustices in our personal lives, and systemically in the political and socio-economic patterns we support and benefit from.  And we will read, and be taught, about how this Jesus of Nazareth, in obedience to God, offered himself – his life – in order to overcome and deliver us from it all – from all of the sin that separates us from our Creator, from each other, from the ecosystem of the earth, and even from the people we were created to be – our own true selves.  We will need today’s glorious vision of the transfigured Jesus to carry us through – to assure us that this Jesus IS the divine Son of God, sent to us entirely out of God’s love – for us and for this world.  And that this Jesus lived our humanity – fully understanding us – and fully overcoming everything that makes us less than God intends us to be.  We will be able to pray as we will in the Prayer over the Gifts today: “Bring us to that radiant glory which we see in the transfigured face of Jesus Christ our Lord.”

And we don’t do this Lenten journey for ourselves alone – we do it for the world!  As we’ll pray at the close of our service today:  “May we … reflect his life in word and deed, that all the world may know his power to change and save.”, through what they experience in us.

What about that reference to Valentine’s Day?  Simply that what we experience in the gift of the divine and human Jesus Christ is the greatest love we can ever know – far beyond all that we can ask of imagine.

Amen.