This Week: Epiphany Last C
Gospel: Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
In the Transfiguration, we have at once, an exciting and incredible story with visual and narrative excitement. We also have a moment of curious character and reverberating outcomes. What happens because of this moment?
The Transfiguration also offers a rhetorical point of question about what physically happens and what does this honestly represent?
We also have a story with a deeper context for the disciples. And this is where my own attention goes 97% of the time.
In a way, this moment has deeper resonance in Mark, in which a pattern of failure is developed with the disciples starting in chapter 8 and extends through this moment in Peter’s confusion up the mountain and the disciples’ confusion at the foot of the mountain.
What is the effect for the reader to address this failure in their analysis? And failure is what we’re talking about here. The disciples have been healing people and exorcizing demons with great success and now, in this moment, they can’t. In this way, they are part of this “faithless and perverse generation”: seemingly incapable of true faith and perverting the gospels.
And if they are, what then?
I suspect most of us can recognize this, not as condemnation of the disciples exactly, but something more akin to disappointment. Jesus expects more from them. This tracks. It is also somewhat delicate thinking we’re doing. Like we’re walking a tightrope of understanding the nuance of a rebuke as not being a universal condemnation, but also not a condoning of the mistake, either.
What we don’t seem to do with the Trasfiguration, or at least, I rarely hear us talk about it this way, which is what would a faithful response to the moment be like? Can we even conceive of it?
Many of us will rightly draw one another’s attention to the words of God coming to the people: “listen to him!” Yes, listen to Jesus. And pretty much the only words he utters in this passage are how faithless and perverse they are being.
I draw my own conclusion from Mark, where it appears that the focus of the disciples changes after they come back from being the hands and feet of Christ to the world. They come back having done the miraculous and then what? They start to fail at doing the miraculous. Why? Well, why do any of us fail? Our heads get in the way. Our egos inflate. We start to think we are the miracle.
Luke’s gospel is more complicated (it always is!) and gives us this vision after Jesus sends the Twelve and then, after this and a few other things, he sends out the Seventy disciples. This isn’t an end point, but a speed bump for the Twelve. The mission is too big for them. It isn’t supposed to be them, only. They aren’t all that special.
This is, after all, the paradox of discipleship. That we are are not not special. God picks the lowly Mary and Jesus picks the lowly fishermen. The outcast tax collector. They are given incredible honor. And honor is also reserved for God. They are revealing God’s glory, not their own. It is a delicate balance between needing enough ego to do the job and not any more than that.
I suspect there is nothing more challenging for followers of Jesus in any age. That we, too, are called, not because we’re special, but because we’re not. We need to not be special. And the second we start to see ourselves as special, deserving, inheritors of the glory, it all goes away.
I suppose this means the main recipe for faith is humility. But I’m starting to think it needs to be more than that. Something more in line with persistent generosity, modest self-awareness, and an abiding fixation on helping others in their need.