The Last Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A)
Exodus 24:12-18 | 2 Peter 1:16-21 | Matthew 17:1-9
I wonder whether Jesus knew what to expect, going up onto the mountain.
I wonder whether Moses knew what to expect going up onto the mountain.
It’s pretty clear that Peter and James and John had no idea what to expect. Peter, as he frequently is, is caught completely off-guard and is sort of babbling–like, oh, there’s Jesus…and now he’s glowing, and there’s Moses and Elijah, and maybe we should build them houses, that seems like a good thing to do!1 He doesn’t quite recognize the exact meaning of what’s going on, but he certainly recognizes its significance. He sees that something important is happening.
Something central to Jesus’ identity is being revealed here to a very small group, something that is both always and not yet true. Something that was in the beginning, before time, about Jesus being the Son of God, the Only-Begotten by whom the worlds were made. And yet, also something that’s not yet fully manifest in the world, something that won’t become fully apparent until after his death and resurrection and ascension. But it’s important to Jesus to show this now, to these three people he trusts the most, and also to keep it secret (for now) from the wider world.
Our experience of identity forming in God often works like this. As our understanding of who we are in God changes and becomes clearer over time, it’s often in this kind of “already and not yet” way.
Think, for example, I’m pregnant, and nobody else knows yet.
Or, oh…I think I’m gay. How do I talk about that?
Or maybe it’s something like, I really don’t know if I can stay in the church unless I have a satisfying answer to the question of why a good God lets evil exist. That’s pretty existential.
Or for some of us, it’s, boy, I really think I’m interested in church, but I don’t know how to talk to my secular friends about that because they’ll think it’s silly.
Or, I think I have a religious vocation. What’s that?
Things that are deeply true that are written on our hearts by God, that we can’t go back from knowing in our hearts, but also things which haven’t rippled out into our worlds and affected them yet.
And this could happen to us at any stage of life. It happens on an almost daily basis to teenagers and twenty-somethings. (That’s part of the peril of being a teenager or a twenty-something.) But God doesn’t stop calling us, and changing us, and revealing new things that upend our lives. These are mountaintop moments, sometimes, when we have revealed to us something wonderful, something straight from God, something divine. But they are also precipice moments. Like in a Roadrunner cartoon, when Wile E. Coyote has chased the roadrunner off a cliff–but he hasn’t looked down yet, and gravity hasn’t kicked in. So it’s a vertiginous moment, between knowledge and expression, between already and not yet.
A vertiginous moment, between knowledge and expression, between already and not yet.
T.S. Eliot has a poem called “The Hollow Men”, which is primarily about the experience of soldiers coming back from war and being sort of dislocated from themselves and from their communities. But where he ends up with the poem, in its last section, I think gets to a place that’s much more about universal human experience–that expresses this kind of precipice moment and how we can get stuck there. He says,
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the ShadowFor Thine is the Kingdom
Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the ShadowLife is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the ShadowFor Thine is the Kingdom2
Jesus is coming, at this point in the Gospels, to accept and fully understand his vocation as God’s Son; that is, his vocation to suffering and horrible death. And that is a very hard vocation to accept for someone who is, after all, fully and painfully human. He can’t do it on his own. All the knowledge and understanding in the world can’t save us from fear, from that Shadow, from the temptation to turn away from a difficult vocation to an easy death.
But this is how we defeat the Shadow: by remembering that we are not alone. Jesus shares something deep and strange and–as yet–not fully formed about himself with his friends, with the people he trusts the most. And his face shone like the sun, and his clothing became dazzling white. This is how we grow into the person God is calling us to be.
One way to start is to go to the people we trust and say “I have something important about myself, something important about God, about the world, to tell you.” Saying it makes it real, in a way. Because saying it makes it not only ours. And that’s scary! Because this kind of revelation that God writes on our hearts is a sacred thing. It carries life-changing power. And we can certainly misinterpret it or mishandle it, or have others misinterpret or mishandle it. In fact, this is frequently what happens, because we’re talking about the most squishy and vulnerable and awkward parts of ourselves–the most achingly sincere core. And that’s hard to talk about. Sometimes we use the wrong words, sometimes we don’t respond exactly the right way. But we have to engage with it anyway.
Saying it makes it real, in a way. Because saying it makes it not only ours.
I think there are two ways that we can betray this vocation that God gives to us. One of them is to capitulate to that Shadow, to refuse to act, to know what God has told us and not to say anything about it. Sharing with others, after all, makes it part of the world; that opens it up to other people’s interpretations and judgments. So sometimes, we know what is true or right and we say nothing. We make excuses. We say, “I’m too small. I can’t say this myself. That’s a dangerous thing to say. I could get in trouble for that. I could go to prison.” Or maybe it’s a much lighter consequence: “I’m just going to be really embarrassed if I say this with my own words. So I’m never going to.” And that is both understandable, and also a very easy betrayal of what God is calling us to.
And the second way that we betray this vocation is a little subtler and, I think, quite a bit more insidious: by refusing to listen in the first place. Not to question. Not to pay attention to our own conscience. Not to listen to God. To shy away from subversive or uncomfortable thoughts. To think, “oh, that’s a question I just can’t bear to ask, so I’m not even going to.” Instead of, “I know and I can’t do”, it’s, “I know–no, I don’t know, la la la la…”. And we all do this too. Part of it is because it’s so tempting to outsource our discernment to somebody else. Even to the authorities that we trust, even to the church, to our society. And it’s so easy to say, “oh, I don’t really need to think about this for myself”, because my church has told me what to think, or my political party has told me what to think, or my neighbors, or my parents, or my friends.
It’s so tempting to outsource our discernment to somebody else.
But have you ever heard somebody say, “have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior?” It’s a phrase I don’t tend to use a lot because I think it’s been catastrophically mishandled by a lot of the church, but there’s a point there. We have to have a personal relationship with God, and that means all of us. It means our feelings and our actions and our will, and it also means our questions and our doubts.
Peter’s letter today is concerned with interpretation, and he says something a little bit cryptic: “no prophecy of scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by human will, but men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.”3 But what good is a prophecy without interpretation? We wouldn’t have any of the prophecies we know if somebody hadn’t translated them out of Hebrew and Greek and Aramaic! And you have to interpret prophecies all the time–most of the time they’re pretty cryptic. What I think Peter is talking about here has to do with that personal apprehension of God, of not relying on somebody else to do your discernment for you. Because in the very next chapter, that follows immediately on from this verse, he starts talking about false prophets and people who will lead us astray from God.
I think it’s no coincidence that he leads into this by talking about the Transfiguration: about this inexplicable, visceral, personal experience that Peter had of the living God. And he can try to interpret that to his readers, but what they really need to do is to come to that same kind of direct experience and understanding of God. To use all of their faculties–their critical thinking, their questions, their doubts, their intuition–and to think for themselves, to experience for themselves. And then to go on and, like Peter did, like Jesus did, share that experience with others.
It’s a personal relationship, but it’s not a solitary relationship that we’re called to. When we listen and share what’s been written on our hearts from God, we light up.
When we listen and share what’s been written on our hearts from God, we light up.
So go into that space between, where the Shadow lurks: the space between unknowing and knowing, the space of questions; the space between doing and knowing, the space of the precipice. Think, with Peter and James and John in the Gospel, how you might be called to witness God in other people–how you might be called to fall on your knees and babble before this great and inexplicable thing. And also consider how, with Jesus, you are called to listen to God, to embrace your call, and to show it to others.
This brings our season of Epiphany to a close. We’ve been hearing about revelation since January 6th: about the Magi, the Confession of St. Peter, the Conversion of St. Paul, about all of the ways that God has manifested in the world. And it feels quite right to sum all of that up in the Transfiguration: in God manifest, and in Peter and James and John going on to talk about that–to manifest God to others. It’s a constant cycle of knowledge and sharing and interpretation that takes root in each of our lives. So, go be a light to others–a light to yourself–a light from God.
- Matt. 17:4 (…ish) ↩︎
- https://poets.org/poem/hollow-men ↩︎
- 2 Peter 1:20-21 ↩︎