Transfiguration: God in the Cloud

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Last Sunday After Epiphany, February 23, 2020 by Ms. Holly Huff

WHO DO YOU SAY THAT I AM?

So asks Jesus in the passages preceding today’s gospel reading from the gospel of Matthew. This discussion with his disciples follows on the heels of a dispute with the Pharisees and Sadducees, who came asking Jesus to prove himself: Show us a sign from heaven, they demand. Jesus won’t be compelled, and so he walks away, later holding his own conversation about who he is and what’s he’s doing.

When Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” it is, predictably, Peter who speaks up. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God,” he answers. God’s chosen one, the one Israel has waited for. Jesus explains that his mission as God’s Chosen is a difficult one. It means he will suffer and be rejected and put to death—but, he tells them, he will be raised on the third day. The disciples aren’t happy about this—they say “This must never happen to you!”—but Jesus won’t be dissuaded. To follow Jesus will be difficult, too, he says—one must take up their own cross and be willing to lose their life for Jesus’s sake. But he also promises that this will in fact save their lives, and that some of those who are with him will not taste death before they have seen the kingdom of God.

So this is what’s in the background, before our reading today. Questions about who Jesus is and what it means to follow him, and the promise of a glimpse of the kingdom.

GOD IN THE CLOUD

The Transfiguration speaks into this context as a definitive answer to this question of Jesus’s identity, one that dramatically confirms what Peter has said, as God’s voice resounds from the cloud: “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him!”

Let’s take some time with this strange and marvelous story. A week after Jesus’s teaching about renouncing oneself and the vision of the kingdom, he takes Peter, James, and John up to a mountain. This is not just a hiking trip, though I’m sure Jesus appreciated a mountain view at least as much as we do here. It’s a deliberate choice of scene. Matthew’s gospel parallels Jesus with Moses at every turn, because Matthew’s Jesus is the living embodiment of Torah. As Moses received the law and gave it to Israel, Jesus now fulfills it as he walks the way of love.

So taking Peter, James, and John up the mountain recalls the giving of the Law to the children of Israel at Mt. Sinai and the revelation of the Lord to Moses on that mountain: first a cloud for 7 days, and then the glory of the Lord like a consuming fire.

Here on this mountain, Peter, James, and John see something remarkable, a vision of biblical proportion. Jesus’s appearance is transfigured: his face shines like the sun, his clothes become brilliant and dazzling white. Suddenly there are two others present, talking to him: Moses and Elijah, who have appeared in glory themselves. Moses, the giver of the law, and Elijah, the quintessential prophet. Their presence with Jesus on the holy mountain confers the blessing of Israel’s past: yes, this is the one they have been waiting for, the fulfillment of the law as foretold by the prophets.

In this moment on this mountain, the disciples realize they are witnessing something marvellous. Peter, in his earnest way, speaks his good intentions despite his confusion about exactly what is happening here. Peter offers to make three dwellings, three tents—one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah—but he’s still speaking when the scene shifts suddenly, cutting him off: a bright cloud rolls in, overshadowing the mountaintop and obscuring the dazzling vision. 

This is powerful biblical imagery: this is the cloud that covered Moses at Mt. Sinai when he asked for and received his own glimpse of God. After speaking with God, Moses’s face shone, to the point that he regularly wore a veil to cover it. This is the cloud that dwelt in the tabernacle during the wilderness years and led the children of Israel through the desert. The cloud indicated the divine presence in the tabernacle, the mobile temple, which was itself a grand complex of tents. When the cloud was there, the glory of the Lord was with them. When the cloud moved, they packed up and followed that presence until the cloud again rested on the tabernacle.

(Perhaps this makes sense of Peter’s earnest offer to make tents or tabernacles. Peter sees the radiant figures, he feels the hair standing up on his arms, and he recognizes that something is happening here, something powerful and holy. His impulse is that this holiness should have a proper dwelling place, a sanctuary.)

Peter, James, and John watch this bright cloud descend and obscure their sight, and then they hear the voice that can only be the voice of God, speaking not just to Jesus but to the three of them! “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” The disciples fall to the ground, in awe of what they are witnessing. When the cloud lifts, the radiant figures are gone; they see no one except Jesus, himself, alone. I imagine it from their perspective, fallen to the ground, looking up at the face of love, containing the Law and the Prophets. He touches them, reaches down to pull them up, says “Get up; do not be afraid,” and tells them to keep their silence. 

SANCTUARY

Silence may be a more complete response to revelation than sermonizing. Before going up the mountain, Jesus had just said that some of his disciples would see the kingdom of heaven before tasting death. In that remote place, they’ve experienced a flash of the kingdom. 

There are moments when the kingdom of heaven comes near; when a glimmer of that kingdom cracks open our vision and shines onto creation, transfiguring the world as we’ve always known it. In times like these, we reach the limits of language. Our words aren’t adequate to a pure experience of God. The accounts of the Transfiguration are records of a mystical experience, of divinity unveiled. Our language can’t hold and grasp all that we want it to hold onto and grasp so tightly. God passes by in the cloud. 

But love gets a glimpse. Like Peter, when we don’t understand, we can still love God. When God cannot be grasped by thought—which seems to be much of the time—we can reach God through the cloud of our unknowing by love and trust. 

In his devotion, Peter wanted to build a sanctuary for the divine presence he witnessed. 

God’s presence in the overshadowing cloud came to Mary, too. She wondered unknowing how it was that she would bear the Christ child. The angel Gabriel announced that she would be the mother of Jesus, saying, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.” 

Mary made herself a sanctuary. She pondered the mystery in her heart, and then she made space in her soul and her body for the indwelling presence of God. In our hymnal, we have the words of Dutch mystical theologian Gerhardt Tersteegen as Hymn 475, “God himself is with us,” which contains this prayer: 

Come, abide within me; let my soul, like Mary, be thine earthly sanctuary.

Come indwelling Spirit, with transfiguring splendor; love and honor will I render.

Mary and Peter model for us a response to God’s revelation, with an impulse to make our own sanctuary for the presence of God to dwell with us. 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 grace perfects nature. (“Those who lose their life for my sake will find it.”) 

Paul puts it this way: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” 

In the gospel account, the Transfiguration is poised structurally as a hinge. It is a turning point. This bright cloud on the mountain points back to baptism and points forward to crucifixion, both the beginning and end of Jesus’s earthly ministry. At Jesus’s baptism, there was another voice heard from heaven, saying “This is my Son, the Beloved; with whom I am well pleased.” 

The Transfiguration comes after Jesus tells his disciples that he must suffer and die before he is raised. Soon after this experience, Jesus leaves Galilee. In Luke, immediately after the Transfiguration, Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem. That final journey moves inevitably, purposefully toward the crucifixion—and three days later, the empty tomb. 

On our church calendar, we are about to make the same turn Jesus makes after the Transfiguration, walking through to Holy Week. Lent begins this week, if you can believe it, and on Ash Wednesday we remember our mortality and begin a time of preparation and purification moving toward that mystery of Easter, which ends in new life, God’s life. Transfiguration is the midpoint between the rebirth of baptism and the promised new creation. We are accustomed to seeing ourselves in baptism, I think: we are baptized into the death and resurrection of Christ; proclaimed as beloved and marked as Christ’s own. Transfiguration is no more trapped in the past than baptism or resurrection; there is something here for us, too. The Transfiguration gives us a glimpse of the glory to be revealed, in Christ and in each of us.

The purpose of Christian life is to be transformed, transfigured: not just to believe things, but to become something, to become Someone; Christ who is already the core of our being and our truest nature, the morning star rising in our hearts. Sanctification is not another thing you have to do, not another task to take up. This is the Holy Spirit’s work in you, and it requires only that you surrender to God who constantly returns to you, calling you Beloved. Allow Christ to live his life in you, let his light shine through you, and marvel at how Christ is being revealed in each unique face, shining through your own features and through the face of your neighbor.