The Path of Life Goes Through the Grave: A Sermon for the Feast of the Transfiguration

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Feast of the Transfiguration by the Rev. Holly Huff.

The Transfiguration is a curious incident. This dazzling light on the mountain reveals the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, and among the great Christological feasts, it calls back to Jesus’s baptism and anticipates his coming Passion and Resurrection. At Jesus’s baptism the Father’s voice was heard saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved,” words that are now echoed to Peter, James, and John on this mount of Transfiguration. And the Transfiguration gestures forward to the crucifixion and resurrection—Luke tells us that Moses, the giver of the Law and Elijah, the quintessential Prophet, who both embody the promises of Israel, are talking with Jesus about his departure or literally the “exodus” he is about to accomplish in the Jerusalem. This Exodus, that other, more fiery baptism with which he is about to be baptized, is a great crossing over of the chasm between life and death. In the radiant shining of Jesus’s face and clothing we are given an image anticipating the glory of the resurrected Christ who has crossed that chasm, opening up a new and living way for us through his own dying and rising. 

The Transfiguration, as a strange midpoint, holds all of this at once. It is right after this mountaintop experience that Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem, walking a path that leaders surely to the cross and the empty tomb. Death and resurrection, cross and empty tomb. There is no separating these out, much as we might prefer to. In the arc of Christian redemption, new life comes out of death. We are saved by grace after the failure, the death of every effort of our own. God’s abundant life is given to us in the midst of death, and there are no shortcuts to avoid this confrontation with our weakness and mortality. 

In the burial liturgy, we pray this prayer: “Give us faith to see in death the gate to eternal life” (BCP 493). Dying and rising, there it is again. It seems to me that the Transfiguration falls where it does in order to show the disciples the glory that will be revealed through Jesus’s sufferings. In the passages just before this episode, we hear Peter’s confession of faith that Jesus is the Messiah, God in human form come to bring life to God’s suffering people. “Truly you are the Messiah,” Peter affirms, but when Jesus starts explaining that he will be no conquering warrior in military regalia but a suffering, dying and rising Messiah, Peter can’t see how this could be. In Matthew’s account, upon hearing that Jesus must be killed, Peter exclaims, “This must never happen to you, Lord.” This isn’t the sort of divine rescue he was hoping for. But Jesus says it is necessary, it is fitting that God in human form come to dwell with his people does so fully, not just in their joys but also inhabiting their sorrows and pains, sufferings and death. Is it not death we fear the most? As the Letter to the Hebrews says, Jesus comes to set us free from our captivity to the fear of death. In setting his face to go to Jerusalem, Jesus is obedient to the call of the strong and indissoluble love of God for all creation. He pours himself out for us. He humbles himself to take on our weakness and dependence. His life and especially his death are a pure expression of fidelity, of God’s faithfulness to each of us, which never wavers even as we waver. The arms of the Father are open wide to receive all of us prodigals, even before we think to return. That’s unshakable love, and Jesus’s willingness to go to the cross for our sake, his face set toward Jerusalem, is an emblem of God’s merciful arms outstretched to us always, calling us toward life and wholeness and joy.

“You will show me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy,” the Psalmist prays. The path of life that Jesus shows us is the way of the cross. Still trying to help the disciples understand this death and resurrection business, he tells them, “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” (Luke 9:23-24). It’s with this message ringing in their ears that Peter, James and John go up the mountain and see the glory of the Lord.

The glory seen at the Transfiguration is inseparable from the anticipation of Christ’s Passion. Before they go up the mountain, he’s telling his friends that he must suffer and die and rise again. When Moses and Elijah appear, they speak to him of the great crossing over. And, coming down from the mountaintop, Jesus heads to Jerusalem where it will all play out. The Transfiguration is so bound up with Jesus’ death, underscoring over and over that connection between dying and rising, a truth we like Peter resist and yet it asserts itself, by grace, over and over. God’s power is made perfect in weakness, and Jesus is glorified as he is lifted up upon the cross. This mountaintop is meant to give us the faith to see in death the gate to eternal life.

How would our lives change, this week, let’s say, if we lived by this faith? The barest shred of honest assessment discovers our lives marked repeatedly by death in ways great and small. Addiction, loneliness, broken relationships, illness, financial struggle, social oppression, the degradation of the earth, the erosion of mutual trust, the failures of our expected hopes. There is no shortage of suffering, weakness, and cause for grief. What might happen if we took each occasion of death as an occasion to emulate Jesus’s dependence on his Father? “Give us the faith to see in death the gate to eternal life.” Could it be that each affliction can open up as a door to new life? Our trust is that Jesus has gone ahead of us, making a way where there was no way, and that he goes with us still, making love and fidelity possible whatever we face.

Real life is on the other side of death. Remember those words from last week’s Epistle to the Colossians? “You have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” We find our life through sharing in Jesus’s death and his rising. We save our life not by anything we do but by allowing ourselves to be lost and little and last, buried in Christ’s death and therefore raised to walk in newness of life. 

Dying and rising is the continual underlying rhythm of Christian life, and its purpose, the end for which we were made, is to be transfigured ourselves. We do not yet know the full glory that will be revealed, but in Christ we have an image of a human life seamlessly joined to the divine life. As the Spirit dwells in us it will transform us in the likeness of that image, not erasing who we are but restoring us to ourselves. As Thomas Aquinas put it: “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” Our lives are hidden in God with Christ, and his life is already our truest nature: the morning star that wants to rise in our hearts, bringing light into the darkness and life out of death. 

As we follow our dying and rising Lord, may the face of Christ shine more steadily through our own, and may the way of the cross show itself to be none other than the way of life and peace. Amen.