Love Was God's Reason

Last Epiphany B: Mark 9:2-9; St. Paul’s, Smithfield 2/11/2018

Jim Melnyk: “Love Was God's Reason”

The Transfiguration is epic storytelling at its best.  It’s also an important enough event in the life of the church to be told twice every year – once on August 6, and then again on the Last Sunday After the Epiphany.  But the stage is set in the chapter leading up to today’s story.  Halfway through Mark’s gospel Jesus asks his disciples, “What are the people saying about me – who do they think I am.”  After some back and forth dropping some pretty heady comparisons – like John the Baptist or Elijah come back to life – Peter blurts out, “You are the Messiah!”

In response to Peter’s declaration Jesus begins to teach them exactly what being Messiah will look like – and he isn’t willing to sugarcoat the realities they will all face as he turns his face toward Jerusalem and the cross.  His followers – his close friends – stagger at the picture of violence and death Jesus paints for them – and perhaps they are shocked when Jesus tells them that they must be prepared to take up their own crosses as well.

The response of the disciples is what we might expect of anyone – their confusion – their sorrow – their pain – is palpable.  It leaves me mindful of the lines from John Donne’s poem, The Broken Heart, which though written about a mortal love, most surely speaks to the sorrowful challenge faced by those who most love Jesus in the days prior to his death:

Ah, what a trifle is a heart,
    If once into love's hands it come!

If 'twere not so, what did become
    Of my heart when I first saw thee?

I brought a heart into the room,
    But from the room I carried none with me.
If it had gone to thee, I know
Mine would have taught thine heart to show
    More pity unto me; but Love, alas!
    At one first blow did shiver it as glass.

           

Which brings us to today.  Jesus knows the disciples’ hearts will soon be shattered as if made from glass, and that they will need something hopeful from him that will help them gather the shattered pieces together and make their hearts whole once again.

The story of the Transfiguration is an especially fitting story to lead us into the season of Lent, because the whole reason – the sole reason – behind the epic story of the Transfiguration is love.  The only reason Jesus takes Peter, James, and John – his most inner circle of friends and followers – up the mountain is his deep, abiding love for the three.  Jesus knows the disciples have left everything to follow him.  He knows they are committed to following him despite his predictions of what awaits them all in Jerusalem.  Jesus knows that they have given their hearts to him as surely as he has given his own heart to them, and he wants them to have hope that it will all work out in the end – that despite the harsh reality of crucifixion, God’s coming kingdom will not be stopped.

The Transfiguration is Jesus showing his disciples that the world’s greatest violence cannot stand against the promise of God for creation.  The Transfiguration is Jesus’ attempt to offer hope to his disciples in the midst of their deepest disappointment – his attempt offer encouragement in what is becoming an almost daily assault on their hope for a new world that mirrors – that embraces – the teachings of the One they have come to know as the Christ of God.  Empire will have its say – Empire will have its day – but the promise of God cannot, and will not, be denied.  Jesus offers his closest friends a glimpse of resurrection glory, and tells his followers to live their lives as if resurrection has already happened in their lives. 

We live in a world that needs encouragement as well.  Children in our nation – children in our own state – go to bed hungry every night while we offer the band aid fixes of charity rather than working to change the system.  We live in a nation – we live in a state – where fellow human beings have to resort to “Go Fund Me” pages online to pay astronomical, debilitating, and dehumanizing, medical bills while we make donations rather than address a health system that’s out of control.  We struggle with fears about job security as well as national security.  We live in a world where police officers get shot while carrying out their duty, and where innocents lose their lives to gun violence as well.  We live with people who have been renamed “Dreamers” – some of whom are police officers, fire fighters, and even decorated military veterans – each living with the constant nightmare of possible deportation.  We wonder what our world might look like if humankind was actually made up of kind humans.

Author Frederick Buechner once wrote, “Every once and so often, something so touching, so incandescent, so alive, transfigures a human face that’s almost beyond bearing” (Synthesis Today, 2/5/2018), and that’s not only what happens with Jesus on the mountaintop in today’s gospel story – it’s what God wills for all humanity.  The Transfiguration of Jesus is not a one-time historical event – but rather a promise that is made real for each of us in resurrection – a promise challenging us to live our lives as if the promise of resurrection is real in our lives today.

In the Transfiguration “God comes close,” writes Diana Butler Bass.  “God comes close, compelled by a burning desire to make heaven on earth and occupy human hearts” (Tweeted earlier this week).  If we were ever to wonder about God’s reason for the presence of Jesus in our lives there can be no doubt.  Love was God’s reason.  As followers of Jesus we have to decide what we are willing to do with that – we have to decide what we are willing to do with a God who is compelled by a burning desire to make heaven on earth and occupy human hearts – occupy even more specifically our own living, beating hearts.

Transfiguration is about change – it’s about changing who we are and how we respond to the burning desire of God – the love of God – being made real in our lives and in this world.  Change is about transformation.  Change is about our hearts being transformed into the heart of Christ – change is about the principalities and systems of this world being transformed into the kingdom of heaven. 

Years ago I came across a comment on a site called “The God Article.”  It read, “Charity pulls people out of the river. Justice jumps in, swims up stream, and stops the people who are throwing them in” (The God Article).  That’s transformation.  That’s transfiguration – not just our transfiguration – but the transfiguration of the world.  That’s the people of God declaring that no one is this town – no one in this county – no one in this state – no one in this country – no one in this world – is disposable.

At a moment of deep despair in his community, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them…. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’” (Mark 9:2, 7).  And now, even beyond the command to “listen,” Jesus calls us to follow.