A Sign of...What? (Reflections on the Feast of the Transfiguration, Year C 2025)

 

Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” (Luke 9:35)

Have you ever had an out-of-the-body experience? I can’t say that I have but I feel like the Gospel lesson for the Feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord (Luke 9:28-43a) describes what it must be like to be transported out of oneself into the realm of God’s mystery. Here we have Jesus, Peter, James, and John off on a prayer retreat on a mountaintop. Luke tells us that, while Jesus was praying, his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. I don’t think this passage is really about what happened to Jesus. I think it’s about the effect this moment had on his disciples.

Peter, James, and John—without the benefit of ingesting any really funky mushrooms—were transported out of this earthly kingdom and given a glimpse of heaven. They beheld their friend and rabbi in his glorified form, glowing brilliantly like a halogen headlamp and in the company of two heroes of the Jewish faith who had already passed into God’s presence. They got this little, tiny peek at eternity. You have to wonder what they were feeling when they experienced it. When the curtain closed, they seemed to have been too overwhelmed to even speak about it. But I’ll bet they knew something was up.

This was a moment of transition. But was it the beginning of the end or just the end of the beginning?

We in the Church celebrate this story of Christ’s divine manifestation as the last Sunday in the Epiphany season. On Wednesday the holy season of Lent will begin. In Luke’s Gospel, the vison on the Mount of the Transfiguration comes before Jesus’ prediction about his own betrayal, the journey to Jerusalem, and his appointment with the cross. In our natural world in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a time when winter is coming to an end, but spring hasn’t yet begun.

So, Peter, James, and John come down the mountain having had this vision and not knowing what it might mean. They know a change is coming, but they can’t quite get their mental fishnets over it. Something is about to happen, just not quite yet. Back on level ground stuff is still pretty much the same. A dad needs healing for his son. Their nine colleagues still seem inept and clueless. Even Jesus is starting to wonder how long this period is going to last. They feel the change, but they’re as much in the fog as they were up on that cloudy mountain.

Do you ever feel that way yourself? Do you ever get the feeling that something is about to end, or something is about to start, or your life’s about to change in some way? Sometimes we feel in our flesh that the pages of our lives are turning. You’re almost out of school but you wonder where your education will take you. Is it time to get married? Have a baby? Change jobs? Do you need to cut something or someone loose from your life? Is it time to move or to downsize? Wouldn’t it be swell if God just sent you a postcard informing you what’s about to happen and what choice you ought to make about it?

Unfortunately, God doesn’t always work like that. God nudges us with the prickly notion that times are shifting but doesn’t provide us with a crystal ball to see how or why or when. In the Church and in our nation we sense and see the change. This is a moment of transformation. Will the Christan faith adapt and grow even as churches are closing? Will America fall into a Philly-sized sink hole of rot and decay, or are we on the cusp of our finest hour?

Fortunately, we are still provided with those momentary glimpses of God’s control and goodness every time we choose to worship together, to sit with one another in the light of God’s redeeming grace, to pray for and with each other, and to come in both joy and humility to the table of our Lord to be assured that this is, indeed, our Father’s world.

The change which was immediately in front of the disciples was not going to be a day at Disneyland. There would be persecution, betrayal by one of their own, fear, dissention, and torture and death for the teacher they so dearly loved. But in the end, it would all be worth it.

How do we navigate through this liminal time we find ourselves in? We can start by doing what Jesus took his friends up the mountain to do—pray. We can also do what the voice from the cloud directed—listen to Jesus. In these past Sundays of the Epiphany season Jesus has told us to speak good news, prepare ourselves for rejection, keep fishing for people, lift up the poor, give to those in need, and love our enemies. We can also continue to partake of the transformational nature of God’s love by gathering as a family in God’s house every week.

Everything transitions but the love, grace, and promise of God.

Hang in there, and please come visit me again.