Rev. Dr. Joel D. Biermann
Matthew 17:8
Transfiguration Sunday
February 26, 2017
Thomas Aquinas lived 750 years ago, yet he remains one of the most influential philosophers and theologians of the western world. His most significant work, The Summa Theologiae covers nine volumes and 3,500 pages. Not only is it comprehensive, but it’s exceedingly well written and its arguments are lucid and compelling. This is not to say that you and I would agree with all that Thomas has to say, and it’s certainly not often that a Lutheran sermon would consider Thomas Aquinas other than to criticize or dismiss a teaching attributed to him. But, there’s something about Thomas which is altogether remarkable no matter what your confession. You see, his greatest work, the nine-volume Summa, is incomplete. It has three parts: theology, ethics, and Christ. The third part on Christ was never finished. And while it’s true that he died before he reached fifty, it wasn’t death that stopped the scholar from his work. No, sometime in the year before his death something happened to Thomas that changed everything. During a regular celebration of the Lord’s Supper, the great author had some sort of ecstatic, incredible, experience which dramatically impacted him. He refused, or perhaps was unable, to describe or explain it to anyone. The most amazing thing, though, is that after the experience, he wrote nothing more of his Summa. When urged to work on it, he could only say: “all that I have written seems like straw to me.” Thomas, it appears, had come face-to-face with some glimpse of some great reality that left him stunned into silence. What did he see? We don’t know.
What is clear, is that the glimpse of reality that filled Thomas’s vision overwhelmed him, undid him, and changed him. Getting a straight dose of reality can be hard on a person. Reality can be tough. But, you know that. Maybe you’ve never had some sort of inexplicable, ecstatic experience during a worship service. Maybe you’ve never had anything that even comes close to what could be called an intense vision or an encounter with the hyper-reality of the numinous. But, with or without penetrating visions into the deeper and greater realities that surround and cover us all the time, you’ve had plenty of experience with the impact that mundane reality can have on a person. One good shot of reality is like a brutal slap in the face or a punch in the gut. A hard dose of everyday reality can upend your life and ruin your future outlook forever. Reality can be brutal.
Longtime Christians look around on any given Sunday morning and compare what is with what once was, and it makes their hearts ache. The heyday of bustling facilities, insufficient parking spaces, and Sunday School rooms spilling over into every odd nook and corner seems distant and dreamlike. And the societal and cultural clout that the church once enjoyed has been all but spent long ago. Now, the church is looked at as little more than a source of therapy to help with life’s hard knocks, or worse is considered as basically an irrelevant relic with outdated, disproven ideas, or worse yet a factory for hate. The reality is that these are not great days for the institutional church. It’s a hard reality to face.
Reality’s hard truth, does more, though, than mock our memories and make our hearts ache for what the church has lost. Reality in the wider culture and world around us is, in all likelihood, even more devastating. We look at the situation in America, today, and there is so much to cause concern. Cultural divides, indeed cultural fractures, alarm many and generate a great deal of angst in the media and among ordinary citizens. Polarizations over issues ranging from sexuality to immigration to foreign relations leave many feeling anxious. People worry about what the future might hold. Then there’s the nightmare threat of radical Islam and the terrorism that is fomented by radical groups hoping to inflict suffering. Urban violence, stagnant wages, a shrinking middle class; wars in the middle east that grind on without any real sign of resolution: the world’s reality is altogether disturbing.
Yet worse than all of the things that confront us when we look out at the world around us, are the hard realities we find within our own homes and our own lives. A marriage that started with such promise and optimism has deteriorated into a grudge match in which everyone loses. Parents struggle to maintain a productive and congenial relationship with children who resist every overture. Employment is not satisfying, and going home is the opposite of the respite that it’s supposed to be. Addictions of every variety invade the lives of ordinary people and drive them into a reality that is overrun with desperation and despair—but no joy. Disease grinds down the healthy and withers the very personalities of once vibrant people leaving only hard, abrasive shells obsessed with trivialities—hardly recognizable to themselves let alone to those who love them the most. And always, inevitably, death intrudes, strikes down, and destroys, leaving behind nothing but aching grief that will not heal. Reality is hard. You know it. You see it. You live it. The reality that you encounter can leave you numb and wondering where you fit and why anything at all matters.
And it is in the context of hard, crippling, incapacitating reality that we arrive, today, at the Sunday we call Transfiguration. Perhaps here, in this story, we’ll find some respite from the relentless reality that weighs on us and that threatens to pull us under altogether. The story of Jesus’ remarkable mountaintop transformation is often billed as the great pick-me-up glimpse-of-glory-event that is supposed to give us a charge to get us through the pending Lenten fast. We’ve been told that on the mountain the disciples were given a taste of Jesus’ true being, a bit of heavenly reality, to help steel them for the arduous and devastating days that would soon unfold. This day is supposed to be the bright ray of sunshine before the descending gloom.
But, I wonder if that view of Transfiguration is missing the whole point. How can this event on the side of a mountain be such a great jolt of joy and promise of brilliant prospects when it leaves Peter, James, and John face down in the dirt, totally undone, and beside themselves in abject terror? Maybe we too easily miss that part…and why not? With so much great and exciting stuff going on in this story, why linger on the reaction of the disciples? Why not focus on the radiance of Jesus, the conversation with Moses and Elijah, the glowing cloud, and the voice of God himself? That’s the sort of reality that we don’t usually see or experience; and we could use something truly amazing and wonderful to console and inspire us in the midst of our reality on this Sunday before Lent, couldn’t we? But, it won’t do. We can’t impose our needs and our opinions on the reality recorded in the text.
For Jesus’ inner circle, the day on the mountain side was not a pleasant one. Think of the story from their perspective. First, Jesus, their teacher, their friend, their trusted and familiar leader, was changed. He was literally glowing with a radiance they had never ever seen. This was more than a little unnerving. The scene intensified when the two greatest patriarchs of Old Testament faith arrived to converse with Jesus. The sight of Moses and Elijah, the very embodiment of the law and the prophets, was incredible. The three disciples were seeing things that went beyond the realm of possibility, things that would blow the mind of any Israelite. It was right at this stage of the story that Peter spoke up and made his gambit to build some shelters. Clearly, Peter’s adrenalin was doing the talking. His offer was nonsense, the babbling of a man who’s coming apart, but talking itself can provide some semblance of normalcy and so it was reassuring and comforting. Mercifully, Peter’s offer was ignored. Yet, the progression toward terror only increased and Peter was soon pushed well past the talking stage. First, it was the shining, dazzling cloud. The disciples needed no explanation. They knew it when they saw it: they had been enveloped by the shekinah-glory, the presence of God himself. The divine voice confirmed what they knew. They were standing before the face of God. There was only one thing to do: squeeze their eyes shut, dive into the dust, and wait for annihilation. God’s reality left the three men powerless and helpless. It’s what always happens when humans see the reality of God.
Most people think that this was the reality that so overwhelmed Thomas Aquinas that he could no longer write: in the light of God’s glory, all his work was nothing but straw. Unsettling as the story of Thomas may be, there is a profound and beautiful truth embedded here: next to God’s glory, man’s greatest achievements and most wonderful works are nothing but trash. This is what Peter, James, and John saw vividly on the mountain. They were worthless. They had nothing to offer. They were done-for. Reality destroyed them. So, they lay there, hugging the dirt on the mountain waiting for the bolt of holy and just wrath to finish them. But what they next felt was not the hellfire of God, but the touch of Jesus. And when, at last, they were persuaded to look up and open their eyes that had been welded shut against the glory of God, what they saw was Jesus. Just Jesus—ordinary, plain, non-glowing, earth-bound Jesus. And that, of course, was the most wonderful sight they could ever have seen. That was the only thing they ever wanted to see: Jesus only. For Peter, James, and John, Jesus was their rabbi, their friend. He was with them like any other man was with them. It was that ordinariness that was the comfort; and it was reassuring and encouraging ordinariness that was the power of the Transfiguration. They didn’t need heaven’s glory—they couldn’t handle that glory. They just needed Jesus.
This is the extreme wonder and the real glory of the Sunday of Transfiguration. When reality drives you into the dirt, when the heavy monotony of life grinds you into dust, when the unraveling fabric of the culture and the horror of sin and disease and death all crash into your life and conspire against you and push you into subdued silence and inability, you do not need a bit of heavenly glory or a flash of divine majesty to lift you up and make things right. What you need is Jesus, just Jesus: plain, ordinary, in-the-flesh Jesus. Jesus is the only reality you need. And Jesus only is exactly what you get. For the disciples, it was Jesus in the flesh—ordinary, routine, and reassuringly real. For you, it is Jesus cloaked in a bit of bread and a swallow of wine—both plain and unremarkable. The bread does not glow and the wine does not radiate. It’s common, routine and reassuringly real. Week after week after week, here in his church, you meet Jesus. And week after week after week, Jesus is all that you need: only Jesus.
Learn what the disciples learned. Jesus is enough. He’s all you need. Reality is not going to let up or melt away. It is, after all, real. But the hard, shocking reality that steals your joy, saps your energy, and depletes your life, is more than matched, indeed is tamed and conquered, by the far greater reality of Jesus here for you. Don’t yearn for something more. Don’t venture off on a search for something else to give meaning to life. Don’t fall into the trap of seeking what is more scintillating, attractive, or incredible. Glimpses of heaven’s glory and divine reality aren’t all that they are cracked up to be—they can be altogether devastating—just ask Peter, James, and John, or Thomas. What you need is the ordinary; the ordinary is the most real and the most powerful. What you need is just plain Jesus and nothing else. And, that’s what you get: Jesus only. Amen.