Reflection for North Balwyn Uniting Church
2^nd of March 2025

Exodus 34:29-35
Psalm 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2
Luke 9:28-36

The Lord our God is holy, and God’s holiness can be confronting, terrifying, beyond human understanding. When Moses spent time with God, his own face began to reflect God’s glory, and the people of Israel were so terrified that Moses had to veil his shining skin when he was not directly mediating between God and the people. Centuries later Peter, James, and John also encountered the glory of God on a mountain, and they too were terrified. Now, thousands of years later, we listen to these stories and, like Peter, we are confused, even afraid, not knowing what to say about them. We are told that ‘the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend’ (Exodus 33:11) and that Jesus’ three closest disciples saw him speaking with Moses and Elijah, who had lived centuries before, and we are obviously in the realm of dreams and visions. What are we to do with these stories?

The author Madeleine L’Engle, whose most famous book is the children’s fantasy A Wrinkle in Time, has said of the Transfiguration:

… we should be less restricted than we are. We are not supposed to be limited and trapped. As a child it did not seem strange to me that Jesus was able to talk face to face with Moses and Elijah, the centuries between them making no difference … As I read and reread the Gospels, the startling event of the Transfiguration is one of the highlights. You’d think that in the church year we would celebrate it with as much excitement and joy as we do Christmas and Easter. We give it lip service when we talk about ‘mountain-top experiences,’ but mostly we ignore it, and my guess is that this is because we are afraid … the whole story of Jesus is confounding to the literal-minded … Instead of rejoicing in this glorious ‘impossible’ which gives meaning and dignity to our lives, we try to domesticate God, to make his mighty actions comprehensible to our finite minds.[1]

Today we will not fear the Transfiguration, nor try to domesticate it to make it comprehensible to our finite minds. Instead, we will look at some of the truths it tells us.

One of humanity’s most common sins is the creation of boundaries to divide one thing from another. It might seem an innocent way to organise the world; where would we be without binary distinctions like north and south, left and right, here and there, natural and artificial, hot and cold? Somewhat confused, I imagine, and in real difficulty if we ever had to read a map. But our desire to use binary distinctions is not limited to directions or borders. We also do it to people. Humanity is divided into a variety of classes that range from the sublime to the ridiculous: male and female; old and young; black and white; straight and gay; rich and poor; native and immigrant; employed and unemployed; intelligent and stupid; able-bodied and disabled; urban and rural; native and settler; criminal and law-abider. Not only does herding people into these categories deny them their full humanity and identity as children of God, we also use them to prioritise one group of people over another. When humans are divided into two groups, one group seems to automatically become more important than the other.

Christianity condemns this sin of division with the emphatic declaration that we are all one in Christ Jesus. The Apostle Paul denied the three biggest distinctions in his society when he wrote to the Galatians that: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female’ (Gal 3:28). For Christians, all such distinctions are washed away in the waters of the font. That does still leave a distinction between Christians and non-Christians, just as the covenant the Lord made with the people through Moses created a division between those who ‘kept [God’s] decrees, and the statutes that he gave them,’ and all the other people. The Lord tells Moses that he will drive out before his people ‘the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites,’ and that Israel is to hold itself apart from the indigenous ‘inhabitants of the land’. (Exodus 34:11-12) Moses’ God is the one who forgives his ‘stiff-necked’ people but avenges any offences against them. Yet this is one of many cases of a debate within the Scriptures, because at the very beginning of the Bible we are told that ‘God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them’ (Genesis 1:27). On the one hand the Scriptures divide humanity into the people of God and all those others; on the other the Bible tells us that every single human being has been made in the image of God.

Jesus was the ultimate breaker-down of barriers and binary distinctions. In Jesus the barriers between humanity and God, between life and death, between the centre and the margins, between endings and beginnings, between the past and the future, were all swept away. Peter, James and John see this in the story of the Transfiguration. They go up a mountain with their friend and teacher, the fully human Jesus, because Jesus wishes to pray. Throughout the Scriptures, mountains have always been places where the division between heaven and earth is broken down, where the Lord could speak with Moses face to face as with a friend, and that happens here. While Jesus is praying, the appearance of his face changes, and his clothes become dazzling white. Jesus is transformed into an image of glory, the veil between heaven and earth is removed, and just for a moment Peter, James and John see Jesus as the glorious Son of God.

In the Transfiguration the distinction between past and future also disappears. Elijah and Moses appear in glory to speak with Jesus about his forthcoming departure, his exodus. Just as the original exodus, led by Moses, freed the slaves from Egypt, Jesus’ exodus, his crucifixion, will free humanity from all that keeps it captive. But in the Transfiguration the past has not just appeared in the present. The future is also appearing. Eight days before the Transfiguration, in the passage of the gospel immediately before today’s reading, Jesus said that the Son of Man would come ‘in his glory and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. But truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God.’ (Luke 9:26-27) That future glory of the Son and of the Father and of the holy angels is being revealed here and now, on the mountain. Rather than being in chronos time, clock and calendar time, Jesus and his disciples are now in kairos time, the right time, the God moment.

A cloud overshadows all those on the mountain, and a voice comes from it saying: ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’ Before they went up the mountain Jesus told the disciples that, ‘“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” Then he said to them all, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”’ It is to this that the disciples must listen. Jesus will die in Jerusalem, but through his death the glory of God will be revealed. As followers of Jesus we are called to lose our lives daily, too, because by doing so, we will save them. We see life and death as opposites and fear death as the loss of life, but in the glorious impossible of God human death is not distinct from eternal life.

The story of the Transfiguration is a story of the holiness of God being revealed in Jesus, glory to which the only appropriate reactions from the disciples are silence and awe. ‘The Lord our God is Holy,’ we sing, and that holiness causes people to tremble and the earth to quake. Paul reminds us that in Jesus God’s holiness and glory has come so close to us that we, reflecting him as Moses reflected God, ‘are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another’. God alone is the Holy One, and we are called to imitate God’s holiness. God’s glory is far beyond humanity, and we are being transformed into the same image. In Jesus so many boundaries are overcome, and the greatest of them is the division between humanity and God. In the words of L’Engle, we cannot make God’s mighty actions comprehensible to our finite minds. But we can ‘choose to live by the most glorious impossibles,’[2] in the freedom of the Spirit, with hope and great boldness, because God is with us and we are in God. Amen.

[1] Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: North Point Press, 1980), pp. 79-82.

[2] L’Engle, Walking on Water, p. 105.