A Sermon for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany
2 Kings 2:1-12; Psalm 50:1-6; 2 Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9
Today, at the threshold between Epiphany and Lent, the Scriptures turn our attention once again toward Jesus, and asks us to look at him and to listen to him as he is transfigured for and before us.
In the OT reading, we hear Elisha quieting the prophets: “Yes, I know the Lord will take my master away from me today. Keep quiet” (2 Kgs. 2:1-12). And we watch him as he watches Elijah ascend into heaven in a chariot of fire.
The Psalm celebrates creation as goodness God has spoken, promising that when God comes to speak again, he will come wrapped in flame (Ps. 50:1-6).
In the NT reading, Paul insists we do not proclaim ourselves, but Christ, whose face shines with God’s indescribable goodness. And he reminds us that we see Christ’s face because God has spoken that seeing into us: “It is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:3-6).
The Gospel, in particular, makes us witnesses of Christ’s transfiguration, assuring us that in seeing and hearing him, we are becoming like him.
In the end, all these readings, understood in the light of the Gospel’s promise, bear witness to the mystery of our salvation: as we behold God in Christ, we begin to hold his likeness, to look and sound like him, to see as we are seen, to hear as we are heard. And this mystery, we believe, this holding in beholding, makes all the difference in the world for us, and all the difference in us for the world.
As Mark tells the story, Peter, James, and John ascend a “high mountain apart” with Jesus—no doubt to pray with him. Suddenly, he is “transfigured before them.” In spite of the ways it’s usually represented to us, this was not a curiosity or a spectacle. As Thomas Aquinas says, the glory of Jesus’ soul suddenly, miraculously, poured out into his body and overflowed it, revealing his divinity. And in the words of St. John of Damascus:
Christ is transfigured, not by putting on some quality he did not possess previously, nor by changing into something he never was before, but by revealing to his disciples what he truly was, in opening their eyes and in giving sight to those who were blind. For while remaining identical to what he had been before, he appeared to the disciples in his splendor; he is indeed the true light, the radiance of glory.
He is the light. He is the light. The glory shining out from Jesus was not light but that which light represents: the invisible, unapproachable, uncreated reality of the divine life. When we confess that Jesus is “God from God, light from light,” we are not, to put it sharply, speaking of electromagnetic waves. We are speaking, instead, of God’s essence—how it is that God is God. As Gregory Palamas put it, “This mysterious light, inaccessible, immaterial, uncreated, deifying, eternal, this radiance of the Divine Nature, this glory of the divinity, this beauty of the heavenly kingdom, is at once accessible to sense perception and yet transcends it.”
Thus, when we say Christ was “transfigured,” we mean there was, for a moment, a perfect clarity to his being for the apostles. Suddenly, they saw him clearly in his fullness. Or, better, they saw what they could see of him in his sheer, unconditional otherness. And in that moment, they also saw his clarity altering their reality around him. The dead and gone—Elijah and Moses—are suddenly, magnificently alive and present, talking with Jesus about the suffering that awaits him. And Jesus’ clothes become as revelatory as his body.
This is why, as the Gospel makes clear, Peter, James, and John are not impressed or curious—they are terrified. They are afraid because, as Maximus the Confessor discerned, the light from the face of Jesus had “conquered” their “blessedness.” Later, the apostles will recall this as the defining experience of their lives (2 Pet. 1:16-18). But in the moment, as it is unfolding, as they are taken into it, Christ’s transfiguration carries them to the very edge of the very edge of their being. And so, James and John are left speechless. And Peter, afraid not only for himself but also for his friends, cannot keep from speaking.
Strikingly, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, three women—Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome—come to Jesus’ tomb to anoint his body. To their surprise, when they arrive, the stone has already been moved, and an angel declares the good news to them: Jesus has risen from the dead and they are to go and tell the disciples—Peter, in particular—that he promises to meet them in Galilee. Like the apostles on the mountain, the women are overcome by their experience in the garden: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (Mk. 16:8).
We should take a moment to feel the weight of these stories. Peter, James, and John see Jesus as he is—and it is too much for them. Mary, Mary, and Salome see not Jesus but the absence his presence has made—and it is too much for them. In each case, what they see alarms them, throws them into panic. They have come to the end of themselves. Peter speaks—because he wants to interrupt what is happening. Mary Magdalene finds she cannot speak—because she cannot handle the interruption that is happening. Of course, our experiences are not the same as theirs. But when all is said and done, we want what they wanted and fear what they feared. After all, we do not know how to live into a future, even one God promises, if it overturns our past completely. We want God to improve our standing—without turning our world entirely upside down. We want change and to be changed. We do not want to die. And that is why we need to move from Epiphany into Lent.
When Peter interrupts, offering to build three tabernacles, neither Jesus nor Elijah nor Moses responds to him. Instead, a cloud—the cloud, the cloud of the presence, which led Israel through the wilderness day by day—appears and covers them. Why? Because he and the other apostles could not take in the uncreated light. God, therefore, embraced them in his creative darkness. In that darkness, seeing nothing, they finally hear the Father’s voice: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” To their surprise, however, they hear—nothing. They see Jesus, now alone, but he does not say a word. So, they are left, at least for a while, with nothing other than the sound of silence.
Jesus does not speak again until they are descending the mountain. And when he speaks, he offers no explanation or comfort. He simply prohibits them from sharing their experience: “Do not tell anyone what you have seen, until after the son of man has been raised from the dead.”
What does this mean for us? Why has the Spirit told us these stories? Because we, like the first disciples, tend to speak up when we should quiet down and quiet down when we should speak up. Life and death, Scripture says, are in the tongue. But only the Spirit can teach us to speak life and death—as God speaks them, as they have been spoken over us and into us.
In his Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer argues that we cannot speak the Gospel to others until we have learned to hold our tongues. This is especially true, he says, when what occurs to us to say seems obviously right (as it must have seemed to the prophets around Elisha and the friends around Job). We have been taught that feeling strongly about something gives us all the permission we need to say whatever, whenever, and however we like. But the Spirit of life teaches us otherwise: if the truth is not known in love, if it is not held in intercession and compassion, if it is not offered in courage and humility, then what we know is not the truth at all. So, we have to learn to reign in our thoughts, to hold our tongues. As Bonhoeffer says, it is only out of that discipline and the meekness it forms in us that all true ministry comes—listening, bearing, helping, and proclaiming.
Of course, God wants for us more than the silence of negation. He sometimes embraces us, as he embraced the apostles on Mt Tabor, in the cloud of unknowing. He does this because we, like Peter and Mary and the other first witnesses, need time to take in what we have seen and heard, to comprehend what has happened to us. Lent affords us this time, preparing us for the unbearable darkness of Good Friday and the unapproachable light of Easter. If Epiphany “conquers our blessedness,” then Lent teaches us how that defeat was a blessing. As we learn to accept our limits as graced, we find ourselves opened wider and wider to the uncreated light, the glory of God’s own inner life.
In her book, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer (which, alas, landed her in prison as a suspected heretic), the French mystic, Jeanne Guyon, says that “inner silence” is necessary for receiving the fullness of God. And this becomes possible only through the long-term practice of “outer silence.” Over time, thanks to the Spirit, we learn “recollection” and “retirement,” developing the skills and disposition necessary to unbusy ourselves, to quit thinking about what our “flesh” feels as pressing, and to gather our attention, scattered in all directions by the cares of the day, toward God.
As we do this, Guyon promises, God is granted access to the roots of our being, to the heart of our heart, working in us far below the level of our awareness, always closer to us than we are to ourselves, doing what only he can do—healing what we did not even know had been wounded, filling us up with eternally abundant life.
It is the practice of silence that teaches us how to suspend our judgments, how to hold them with open hands, releasing our grip on our own thoughts and feelings. As Maggie Ross says, “Entering the silence means relinquishing tightly-held, fixed ideas.” And, as we acclimate to the silence, we begin to live with a healthy caution born of deep respect for “the mystery of creation.”
This respect for mystery, sustained by the holiness of God, attunes us to reality. And the more attuned we are to reality, the more capable we are of loving as we have been loved. Thanks to the Spirit, we begin to notice what had before had always escaped our attention. And more and more we find we are able to give our attention to others, rather than having it captivated (or not). Lent calls us to simplicity and penitence precisely so we can sense these movements of grace within us, the aftereffects of Epiphany.
For God, both silence and speech are Word. As we learn to listen, more and more fully, both to what God is saying and is not saying, we not only come to know God as he is and others as they are, but also to know ourselves as we are. Most mysteriously of all, we come to be known exactly as we need to be known.
Recently, Julie and I had lunch together, and while we ate we could not help but overhear a conversation between two young women seated across the room from us. Well, it was not quite a conversation: one of the two was allowed to speak only twice; she asked exactly two one-line questions, and each time her friend interrupted before she could finish the line.
Afterward, on our way home, I said something about how desperate she had been to be heard, to be known. But Julie recognized what I had overlooked: it was precisely her talking that kept her from being known. Like all of us at one time or another, she could not be quiet long enough to be heard.
That touches the nerve of the mystery, doesn’t it? We are most fully known not when we say everything we think, but when we listen most attentively. Not when we bare our souls, but when we bear others’ burdens. As Ross says, “There is a hidden glory radiating from each person which will reveal itself only to those who have been able to focus outward and wait in generosity, thus allowing their own hidden glory—hidden especially from themselves—to pour forth.”
All that said, we do need to speak. When we speak, however, we need to proclaim not ourselves, but Christ.
Peter, fearing that the uncreated light will reduce him and his world to nothing, wants to make—to build familiar structures, to establish frameworks he knows how to use. And he tries to use his words to accomplish this making. But God’s word does not make—it creates. And that creativity, as we experience it, threatens to unmake so much we have been made to think we need. So, like Peter, James, and John’ Mary, Mary, and Salome, we need the Spirit to lift the veil from our eyes, to overshadow us with the cloud of divine darkness, so we can begin to discern the difference between “making” something for ourselves—something familiar, useful, and safe—and “creating” something for others, something better than we could have known even to desire.
We need to know this difference. And our neighbors, including our family and our friends, as well as strangers and our enemies—need us to know it. The last thing they need is for us to make tabernacles for them or build shrines to them. They need exactly what we need: to be seen and heard, fully and clearly. In other words, they need us to recognize them in Christ and Christ in them, seeing God’s glory shining on their faces. They need us to know that they are already transfigured with Christ, to respect that God is at work in them in ways beyond our imagination or control, to honor the fact that God already tabernacles in them for us, speaking in their words and drawing near in their presence. And if we can see how this is true of them because it is true of Jesus, then we will also see it is true of us, and for the very same reason.
C.S. Lewis, famously, ended his “Weight of Glory” sermon by reminding his hearers that “next to the Blessed Sacrament, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.” But the truth, believe it or not, is far more mysterious—
