Sunday Last Before Lent

This last Sunday before Lent completes a cycle of readings in which we experience God’s engagement in the world in many forms.  From the Shepherds who were the first to witness the birth of Christ, to the arrival of the magi with their gifts to mark him as the Messiah, the Son of God, from the prophetic voice of Simeon, and the warning to Mary that her heart would be broken, to Jesus’ Baptism, the calling of the disciples, his teachings in the synagogue, the healing of the widow's son and the raising of Peter’s mother-in-law.

God is manifest in the here and now and calls us all to participate in the world and with one another. As we follow these familiar readings during the different seasons of the Church’s year, it might seem that God’s presence was self evident, but what we learn and relearn year after year, is the doubt, the indecision and the time it took those disciples to really understand who Jesus was. 

It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, at the start it’s very difficult to see where the pieces fit together.  If I’m doing a jigsaw I always try to find the pieces with straight edges, the border of the puzzle, and fit those together, and work inwards, and gradually as the pieces fit together we can begin to see the whole picture unfold.  But it still takes time for that to happen; even when we have the lid with the actual picture on, it takes time for our minds eye our brain to adjust to the growing picture. How people can do difficult jigsaws without the picture to work from is beyond me.  I was very pleased with myself last week, because I was able to do a jigsaw with my grandson which said “Up to 3 years” on the box, and we did it in half an hour!!

All these readings, these stories about Jesus, we have followed since Christmas, have all been fitting the pieces together for us to prove he is the Son of God, the long expected Messiah.  The disciples didn’t have all the evidence we have 2000 years later, they didn’t, if you like, have the full picture to work from, no wonder really they weren’t sure despite the evidence they saw with their own eyes. So perhaps they could be forgiven for doubting until Jesus came and stood among them after his resurrection.

We do have all the evidence and know how the pieces of the jigsaw fit together, and yet we still have doubts, we can still have a very shaky faith in the truth that Jesus is the Son of God, the Messiah.  We profess to believe, just as we will all say the Creed in a few minutes, ‘We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God’, and then something happens in our lives and we stop believing, we turn away from God and reject him.  How often do we say, ‘If there is a God, why has he allowed this to happen?’

Peter, James and John, the three disciples Jesus took with him up the mountain in today’s Gospel reading, were just ordinary people, like you and me. Yes, they had been called by Jesus to follow him, just as Jesus calls you and me, but they didn’t understand too much of what was happening around them. They couldn’t see the whole picture. How could they, devout Jewish men, understand that the long expected Messiah, was actually standing there among them, it didn’t make sense.  The Messiah would surely come down from heaven in great clouds and with an army to defeat the Roman occupying force and restore the Kingdom of Israel and Judah, that’s what God had promised, wasn’t it?  Not the son of a carpenter from Nazareth, no matter how clever he was at healing people and saying the right things. But now Jesus was standing before them transfigured, with his clothes dazzling white. And even though Jesus singled them out to be with him on very important occasions, like this mountain experience they were about to witness, and to accompany him into the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper, they were fallible humans who fell asleep, and deserted Christ when the crunch came.  And if we are honest about it, there is more than an echo of our own discipleship in their stories.

The truth is that despite witnessing this amazing transfiguration of Christ, despite seeing with their own eyes Moses and Elijah appearing before them, and hearing God speaking to them from a cloud, nothing much changed for them initially.  It was only after the experience of the Cross and Resurrection, when the Risen Lord came and stood among them, that they believed , they truly believed what God had told them on that mountain top.  And then they came into their own and became the acknowledged leaders of the early church.

It is very significant that God spoke from a cloud.  A cloud was a recognised place to encounter God. Centuries before, God had guided the Israelites who had escaped from bondage in Egypt, by going before them in a cloud. The Jews had always considered those wandering years as special because they felt God was very much present with his people.  It was part of the Jewish tradition that you encountered God in a cloud or on a mountain top.  So Peter, James and John would immediately be aware of the significance of the cloud as a sign of God’s presence. They must have been shocked by the appearance of Moses and Elijah alongside Jesus.  These two Old Testament prophets were considered by Jewish tradition never to have died. God himself took Moses into heaven, and Elijah was carried up to heaven in a chariot of fire. Moses was considered to be the great leader of the Jewish people and the giver of the law to the people.  Elijah represented the Old Testament prophets, that other great strand in Jewish tradition.  The law and the prophets were and still are the foundation of Judaism. According to the Old Testament prophets, Elijah would appear again to mark the coming of the Messiah.  Jesus identified Elijah in the person of John the Baptist, who prepared the way for him. At this moment of transfiguration, Jesus stood between the two greatest figures in Jewish tradition, talking to them, symbolising that they had come back to earth to confirm that Jesus was the Son of God, the expected Messiah. Those three disciples, Peter, James and John, were the living witnesses to this new way of life which was breaking into the world.  They are called to see with their own eyes, and listen to the unmistakeable voice of God that Jesus is not only a continuation of the line of prophets, but also the beloved Son of God.  The powerful voices of old are not denied or diminished but passed on to the new generation, with new ways of being in relationship with God, through Jesus Christ. Of course, those disciples must have been terrified at what they had witnessed, so would we have been I am sure, but when the time came they answered the call to leadership and service among the growing Christian Church.

Today, we too are called to serve God, through Christ, and to seek out those who are suffering, in need, the widows, the orphans, those who are marginalised or excluded from society, and strive for justice and peace among all people. We don’t all have our spiritual experiences on a mountain top, indeed our own spiritual experiences may come at a time when our lives seem in turmoil, and the cloud that is enveloping us are often dark and ominous and threatening. So it’s worth remembering that no matter how glorious the transfiguration experience, God didn’t speak at all during it, but afterwards from the clouds which overshadowed them. And God didn’t give a huge sermon about right or wrong, but simply repeated the words used at Jesus’ baptism, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him!’. Perhaps when we are overshadowed by cloud, and we cannot see where our life is going, we sometimes expect God to tell us exactly what to do, how to do it, and where to go with our lives, when we should be listening for the quiet voice of God simply saying, ‘Listen to him!’

Listening to the teachings of our Saviour Jesus Christ, can transform our lives, especially if we follow the teachings in our daily lives, and in how we look upon, and act towards others in our society. The lessons we learn at the hand of Jesus in the most difficult times of our lives are the lessons which change our lives in the good times.  Amen.