2/23/20
(Exodus 24:12-18; Ps. 2; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9)
The confirmation class that I’m teaching this year at St. John’s is organized into eight sessions, each of which focuses on a major area in the Christian life: the Bible; church; prayer; that kind of thing. I do it this way, for one thing, because in a confirmation class there’s a certain amount of factual information that confirmands need to know.
But I also do it this way because confirmands are almost always adolescents – these guys are in their mid-teens. And that means, among other things, that they’ve at an age at which learned enough about the world to start making their own decisions about what’s important in life, and not just accept at face value what their parents and their culture have presented to them about that. So in each of these classes I try to give them something about Christian faith which they can feel is real, is meaningful, has to do with life as we live it; and is not just the product of a closed system, which any church, unfortunately, can be.
The subject of last Sunday’s class was Jesus; and in the course of preparing for it I came across a quote from a man named Dwight L. Moody, who was one of the great evangelists of the 19thcentury in America. This is what he said: “A rule I have had for years is: to treat the Lord Jesus Christ as a personal friend. He is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but He Himself that we have.”
Now, this is probably not an unfamiliar idea, many of us know the famous hymn, “What A Friend We Have In Jesus”; but I doubt that very many people are actually in the habit of thinking of Jesus in that way. The truth of God’s presence among us – that God not only cares about us,, but loves us, all the time – is the basis of our faith, it’s what gives us life. And in thinking of Jesus Christ as our personal friend, we open ourselves to that truth in a uniquely immediate, and joyful, way.
But the idea has to be handled with care. It’s not right to think of Jesus as a friend, in the sense of someone we goof around with; or as a casual friend. Rather, Jesus is the kind of friend we seek out in those times in life when we need a friend, high times and low times: when we celebrate, when we mourn; when we’re uncertain about the future, whether that uncertainty makes us anxious and fearful, or excited and eager to explore. At such times we want, and need, a friend whom we know knows us, and who we know will be our friend no matter what; a friend with whom we can be – and must be – completely honest; and a friend whom we know we can trust to tell us the truth, whether we’ll like it or not.
Dwight Moody says he “has it as a rule” to treat Jesus Christ as a personal friend. It’s good to think of it that way; because it is through regular, intentional behavior that we live in the truth, that Christ is alive. Jesus Christ – in our Christian understanding, the second Person of the Trinity – God, the eternal God, beyond time – that God, in Jesus Christ, is alive, now, with us, here on earth. Impossible. But true. That’s what we Christians say. And I think the gospel story we heard today – the story of the Transfiguration – is both an illustration of this truth, and a lesson about how we are to live with our friend, the Lord Jesus Christ.
There’s something about why we’re hearing this story today that I think helps us understand all this. In our church calendar, today is the Last Sunday After the Epiphany. The lectionary readings for this particular Sunday are on a rotating three-year cycle, like almost all of the lectionary; the selections from the Old Testament, the Psalms, and the New Testament are all different each of those three years. But the gospel reading for this day is always the story of the Transfiguration; but told in one of the three different versions we find in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. So our church wants us to hear this story on this particular day. And I think that’s because, as we stand here on this day of the church year, on the threshold of Lent, we look ahead of us, across a valley – the hard, gritty, this-world reality of Lent – to a pinnacle – the eternal life of the Resurrection, at Easter. We stand here and see, in Christian faith, that both are part of God’s creation; and understand that Jesus Christ stands with us in both places: in this broken world, and in eternal life. On one level, that’s the story of the Transfiguration. And the story it tells is how Jesus Christ is our friend.
This year we hear Matthew’s version. He tells us, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves.” There are a couple of things to note about this. One is that Jesus had his own personal friends among the twelve apostles. Peter – and the brothers James and John, the sons of Zebedee – are these friends. He takes these three apart with him one other time: in the garden of Gethsemane, at a time of deep anguish in his life, when he’s facing death – a time when – like anybody – he needs a friend, to just be there with him. On this occasion he takes them “by themselves” – just the friends – “up on a high mountain” – a place presented throughout the Bible as the setting for a close encounter with God. Jesus takes them up there because he wants them to experience something – something big, and important – and, as their friend, he wants to be there to live through it with them.
And suddenly, “before them” (Matthew tells us) – right before their eyes – something happens to Jesus: “…he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white.” Mathew’s description is as hard for us to understand as we hear it as it must have been hard for the disciples to understand as they saw it, because it was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before: their friend Jesus was still recognizably himself, but also somehow – plainly -an entirely different kind of being. They are seeing Jesus Christ.
And then: “Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him.” The language suggests that this is a conversation between Jesus, Moses, and Elijah which has already been going on, and of which the disciples have all of a sudden become aware. So out of the blue, they find themselves in a completely different world.
And Peter – good old Peter – tries to show that he’s not thrown by this, tries to show that he’s on top of the situation, by pronouncing that it’s good they’re all there, and he’ll make three dwellings, for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; and it feels like he could keep on babbling until someone stops hm..
And someone does. Suddenly they all hear the voice of God, coming from a cloud; and Matthew tells us that this happens before Peter has finished speaking. God is saying: Peter: stop. Just stop. There’s something completely new going on here, and don’t try to pretend that you’ve seen it before. Just behold. This is my Son; listen to him!
This is the lesson in this story. There are plenty of things about God that, in this life, we don’t understand. But Jesus Christ does; and Jesus Christ is our friend – and we listen to him. We can trust him. Because we can trust God.
All this is too much for the disciples – as it’s too much for us, the reality of God’s presence in our lives is way too much for most of us most of the time – and the disciples fall to the ground, paralyzed with fear. (Think about how much of the time we shut God out.) And Jesus comes over, and touches them – reminding them, I’m still me; and I’m still your friend – and says, Get up and do not be afraid.
Get up: do not be afraid: trust God. Live life as the unique human being God created you to be. As we listen to Jesus Christ – who is not a creed, a mere doctrine, but he himself, that we have, our personal friend – we live in the truth; to the glory of God. Thanks be to God.