When Rosie and I were in Galilee in 1981, we visited Mt. Tabor, which is supposedly the site of Jesus’ transfiguration. The bus parked in the lot at the foot of the mountain and a team of five or six taxicabs driven by extremely manic Palestinians took us to the mountain top along a very windy road that looked to me like it was only one lane, except that we passed a couple of speeding taxis that were also coming down the mountain. We were all terrified. When we got to the top, we saw a beautiful basilica and a mountaintop that was shrouded in cloud. I took a picture of this that hung in my office for many years. There was a tour of German people in the basilica singing and their hymns added to the profoundly religious atmosphere that we found in that place.
I’ve always been struck by the story of the Transfiguration. It seems to be such a wonder. Jesus in prayer with Peter, James and John with the cloud coming down to cover them, Moses and Elijah showing themselves. Peter (as always) speaking his mind: Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah! and the Gospel of Mark goes on to say that he “didn’t know what to say, for they were terrified.” Of course they were, and so would all of us have been, and they didn’t have Palestinian taxi drivers getting them to the top. It is then that God’s voice speaks out of the cloud: This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him! I’ve always wanted to preface that statement by God with a “shut up, Peter!”, but that seems to me to be a bit too obvious.
What do we make of this story. Some scholars want to call it a misplaced resurrection appearance, but I think it has an authenticity much beyond that. It appears in the three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke, in pretty much the same form. I suspect that Mark’s is the earliest and the others took it from Mark, but that isn’t important. What I think is important is that all of these writers chose to include the story because is is an elegant prefiguring of the resurrection, somehow making wonderful sense out of the ministry of Jesus that to his disciples who were living in it, was an incredible mystery. Jesus tells the three of his followers to “tell no one of this until after the resurrection”. Did that sink in to them? I suspect not at the time, but after Jesus rose from the dead, the three of them remembered that experience and talked about it openly. That is how the story got into the Gospel and was handed down to all of us. It is, I think, a valuable insight into the mind of our Lord and the way that his followers came to understand what he was about.
What the resurrection provides for all of us is certainty beyond the grave. A knowledge that when we die, we will find ourselves in the presence of our God and will be cared for with his undying love. It is a matter of faith and faith alone. I can’t prove it in any way at all, except by listening to the words that Jesus gave us and the example that he set. His resurrection is the conquest of death once and for all. Hope in a life full of disappointment and ultimately death that gives us a unity with our Creator and an elegant possibility of seeing all of those whom we have loved in our lives again present before us, recreated in wholeness, the way that God intended for them from the beginning.
C. S. Lewis in his book The Great Divorce, talks about how busloads of people travel from the rainy city, which is his metaphor for hell, to heaven, where they meet many people. Some of the travelers see some folks whom they don’t believe belong in heaven and so they get back on the bus to go back to hell, purely their own choice. I think that is a wonderful description of our relationship with our God. We have the choice always to remain with God, in all of our life, in the moments of our sins, even at the moment of our death. But God never goes away and will always remain with us. Those people who went back to hell were perfectly free to get back on the bus at another time to come back to heaven.
The prefiguring of the resurrection in the middle of Jesus’ ministry is an important reminder of where this all is going, and how our own lives are tied up in the Gospel. Who of us hasn’t lost someone? Our losses are a terrible grief and we live through them always with some kind of hope. Our funeral services cry resurrection from their beginning to their end. It is the essence of our faith. Seeing our loved ones again in the pureness of God’s original creation is what we all long for. Jesus’ resurrection promises that. That is what the Transfiguration is all about and what it promises to the twelve and to all of us.
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