This Week: Epiphany Last B
Gospel: Mark 9:2-9
The Transfiguration is one of the stories preachers have to deal with the most. Christmas and Easter are most famously every-year celebrations. But they aren’t the only ones. This is also a story we encounter at least once every year.
Thankfully it has a lot going on it.
Dazzling lights, appearing prophets, and the very voice of God.
This, too, can be a curse, as we don’t know where to start. Here are a few different ways in.
The language
The word transfigure is not one we ever use. People don’t know it. And what they will deduce from the story is that Jesus’s appearance changed. And then the second sentence is: And that’s it.
We put a barrier between an appearance changing and what we might call “substantial” change. This is a modern (American?) bias, however, and doesn’t take the very ideas very seriously.
The story this is often paired with is Moses’s face being transfigured by God so that his own visage cannot be gazed upon. We don’t say that something hasn’t actually happened here. When we do this, we are taking a pedantic approach to scripture and language, rather than a truly accurate one.
Rather than pair the concepts of transfigure and the more familiar transform as hypothetical opposites, we ought to see them as complimentary and of the same substance.
God is showing something to the disciples that they can’t see. And teaching them about what they can’t comprehend. This is real.
Trans identity
There is an obvious connection to the nature of appearance, identity, substance, and reality that speaks loudly to those who see beyond a gender binary. The same kind of thinking that makes a binary view of substance and reality will likely do the same for gender. To essentialize appearance as separate from substance is to deny the relationship of the exterior to the interior.
In short, it is halfway down the slippery slope to gnosticism.
The gospel passage offers a far more positive relationship between perceiving and reality. Which gives us a blessed opportunity to explore changing appearances as relating to a shifting public identity.
This is an essential theme running through the whole gospel of Mark: that Jesus’s identity is misperceived by the people, must be slowly corrected, demonic revelings must be prevented, and his true self will finally be revealed when the followers can fully prehend it.
It also reveals the relationship between would-be protectors of tradition to truth. That they would kill Jesus rather than embrace him in his true self. And that the regular assistance of demons seeking to reveal Jesus’s true self — in part. In only the part that they perceive. We might compare this to the essentializing of body parts stripped of gender and without regard to fundamental lessons of biology.
Razzle Dazzle
Part of the reason the binary linguistic issue is so problematic to us and the text is because it ultimately reduces the fundamental value of transfiguration. It becomes lesser to “real” transformation. As opposed to a genuine reflection of the power of God.
When we embrace a greater synergy between appearance and substance, however, we then have a more potent vision of what is actually taking place. And more importantly, how all of this effects those three witnesses.
The greater vision of the story is that Peter, James, and John are dazzled and confused. There is something intoxicating about the experience of the moment and difficult for the people to comprehend. I think this is the most intuitively connecting moment in the story for modern readers. We know what it’s like to be confused and not know what “the right thing to do” is.
Peter’s response screams “how do I impress my teacher/boss/leader.”
Even this confusion, however, is paired with divine speech telling them to listen to Jesus.
Listen to him. And he is saying no words.
The Wider Context
I always prefer putting these stories in their context. That’s just true generally. This is a perfect example of why. Not because we’ll read it wrong if we don’t (which totally is a thing!). But because this story means something that it comes after Jesus has first predicted his death. After he has given Simon the name, Peter. And perhaps most significantly, it comes in the midst of the disciples’ overall confusion about the mission.
This moment up the mountain is paired with what happens concurrently at the foot of the mountain. The disciples suddenly can’t heal others.
When Jesus is transfigured, his identity is changing. But so are the disciples’ identities. And they are following a Messiah who is predicting his own death. Who says that the way of peace is the way of life.
These counter-confusions are messing with their sense of self and location in the great project.
Actual vs. Real
The real reason we don’t like to talk about the disciples being able to heal people is thanks to modernism. It calls into question why none of us is able to heal and exorcize demons. We’re given the excuse that it must be about our faith. Therefore, it is better to ignore that question altogether.
This is naive and ridiculous. But harmonious with fundamentalist thinking.
The Age of Modernism intoxicated us with the pursuit of what actually happened. And it is similarly obsessed with what might actually occur. This created a binary relationship between human thought and lived reality. A binary that spawned the fundamentalism we know.
The original fundamentalist project sought to maintain premodern truth claims through modern lenses. So, if a person can’t heal another with a touch, they must not believe right. But it is another kind of fundamentalist to believe it is impossible to heal, which makes this story problematic.
The problem of modernist thinking is that it gets trapped in essentialisms and fundamentalist absolutes. It can’t always help us see the truth when it only looks for actuals.
One of my favorite examples of modernist thinking being bedeviled is the adaptive phenomenon that social actions can be extraordinarily predictive when observed naturally. And yet, they can disappear when shared. Something can be absolutely true all of the time and then, just…stop being true.
What needs saying?
All of this is fodder for important preaching. Probably not the most feel-good “happy clappy” kind, but the kind of things that need saying to people.
We’re at a critical point in the still-early postmodern era in which leadership, identity, and truth are not merely being challenged, but fundamentally redefined for a whole generation. So not talking about this stuff isn’t really an option.
The days of treating the Bible like it is stuff to study “before leaving earth” are long gone. But so is correcting people for believing it.
People are getting stuck in intellectual dead ends and can’t find their way out. And sometimes, the only ways out being offered to them look a lot like Christian Nationalism or even classic millennialism.
At the same time, the modern era brought a low point in the west in Christian discipleship. In not only teaching and passing on of tradition, but in building up our relationship to faith communities as offering something truly holy to the world.
Of course, many who stood against culture merely recreated culture and dubbed it Christian. We aren’t talking about contemporary Christian Music. Or the militarized supersessionism of modern evangelicalism.
In short, we’re struggling to give to the emperor what is the empire’s and to God what is God’s.
And in this way, our very way of being church looks a lot like Peter on the Mountain saying to Jesus, I can build you stuff!
Meanwhile, the voice of God is projecting the bigger story back at us: listen to him! And his very next words will be frustration. Because we have forgotten how to heal each other.