Transfiguration Sunday falls, appropriately enough, on the last Sunday of the season of Epiphany each year: a season that begins with the revelation to the magi and concludes with this sudden revelation of Jesus' divine glory. We read one of the gospel Transfiguration accounts each year, so the story is doubtless familiar to many, but as my colleague Leanne Pearce Reed points out, the story is not necessarily more comprehensible for its familiarity.[1]
In Mark's account of the Gospel the Transfiguration shows up just after a scene in which Jesus gets angry with Peter for being dismissive after after Jesus had told his disciples that he would suffer and die in Jerusalem. Peter wanted a different path for his teacher, an easier, less demanding path, but Jesus had chastised Peter for trying to thwart his intentions. He then told the disciples and others around him, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me."
The ensuing story about Jesus' transfiguration represents a pause in the action that offers a foretaste of what is coming. Mark sets this narrative just as Jesus is turning his face toward Jerusalem and all that will happen there. In its liturgical setting, this Transfiguration Sunday is also a pause in the action, well-positioned just before the shift in focus that will begin this Wednesday evening, when we impose ashes to set our faces to the Lenten journey.
Because Matthew, Mark and Luke all tell the story of this mountaintop encounter, this story comes around in the lectionary every year about this time. Across the years, therefore, we've heard lots of sermons on this story. Most of the sermons I have read, heard or preached on the transfiguration have taken one of two tacks. One has been a focus on the glory itself, the mysterium tremendum at the heart of the story, as Jesus is transfigured and becomes dazzlingly radiant before Peter, James and John, foreshadowing his eventual glorification as the Son of God. Another approach, also faithful to the text, has had as its focus the valley of need that awaited Jesus and the disciples at the end of this wonderful mountaintop experience.
Today, however, I want to try something different - an approach I've taken before and one that converges with the life experiences of many of us here. What strikes me is a theme that echoes both in our Old Testament reading from Exodus and the final verse of Psalm 99, which we read together as our opening sentences this morning. Each of these texts speaks of a holy mountain of God. Each speaks of experiences at their summits and of what happens upon descent from the mountain. But none of them speak more than a whisper about the ascent. What about the trek up the mountain? Exodus says the Lord summoned Moses to the top of Mount Sinai and Moses simply "went up." (Ex. 19:20) Mark says that Jesus took with him Peter, James and John and led them up a high mountain apart. (Mk. 9:2) Now, I've climbed mountains of varying heights and degrees of difficulty before, and I have to say that there's a bit more to it than these texts suggest.
That's why my attention is drawn on Transfiguration Sunday to the ascent - not to the clouds and the light and the mystery at the summit, as central as they are, nor to the descent at the other end of the experience, as important as it is to Christian discipleship, but to the climb itself as a way of thinking about our approach to God. Robert Morris sees the mountain ascent as
a particularly apt symbol for the challenge of changing vistas, climates, and dangers the psyche is likely to face as our... capacity for God is stretched and strengthened. As in climbing a mountain, the conscious encounter with spiritual reality may begin easily. The unskilled mountain climber setting off into the foothills with naïve excitement at this "wonderful" experience quickly discovers, upon reaching [even] the lower slopes of the mountain, that the body has limits and the soul has fears brought out by the very climbing itself. Both body and soul need to be challenged, stretched, and strengthened for the journey to continue.[2]
Reading Morris' comments, I thought of Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. Bryson's book is the delightfully funny tale of the author's attempt to hike the Appalachian Trail a decade or so ago. I loved particularly his description of his first day of hiking, which began on the gently sloping access trails that lead to the trailhead on Springer Mountain in north Georgia and then on toward an ultimate destination some 2,100 miles away on Mount Katahdin in Maine. Despite all his excitement and all his planning and all his preparation, Bryson said that first day on the trail was simply awful:
First days on hiking trips always are. I was hopelessly out of shape - hopelessly. The pack weighed way too much. Way too much. I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared. Every step was a struggle.
The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what's to come. Between the curtain of trees at every side, the ever-receding contour of rising slope before you, and your own plodding weariness, you gradually lose track of how far you have come. Each time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope there is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible than any hill could run on this long. Eventually you reach a height where you can see the tops of the topmost trees, with nothing but clear sky beyond, and your faltering spirit stirs - nearly there now! - but this is a pitiless deception. The elusive summit continually retreats by whatever distance you press forward, so that each time the canopy parts enough to give a view you are dismayed to see that the topmost trees are as remote, as unattainable, as before. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?[3]
If I hadn't known Bryson was describing a hike on the Appalachian Trail, I might have thought that he was describing metaphorically the journey of human life or of human faith... at least the kinds of life and faith journeys many of us have experienced. When we are young our lives may seem most of the time like level paths, smooth-going with scarcely a tree root or an icy patch to trip us up. But as we grow older, and the treks of our lives get more complex, our lives and our faith are more often defined by the hills we must climb, by the sweeping upslopes, the sometimes steep and rocky mountain paths, fraught with perils and pitfalls. There are times in such hikes when not only reaching our destination, but even our survival is in question. In our advanced years, the climbs may seem relentless, wearying. We may find it easy to ignore God in the flatlands when everything is smooth and we are betrayed by our own progress into illusions of self-sufficiency. When the path gets steep and treacherous, in anxiety or fear we are more likely to cry out to God. Ultimately, in those times when we do reach a summit or at least a plateau or resting place, there... there is where we may catch a glimpse of grace and even glory... there is where we may experience profound gratitude.
It's no wonder that when one does finally reach the high ground, one wants to stay. That was surely the case with Peter in Mark's story this morning. Having reached the summit - not just the top of the mountain, but a deep experience of holiness and mystery and glory - he didn't want to leave. He wanted to freeze the moment in time. And who could blame him?
In his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller describes a trip he took with friends to Peru to hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. He was not a mountain climber or even very athletic, so he trained for months getting ready for the trip. The hike began in the Sacred Valley, along a river that runs through a desert canyon, with the snow-covered peaks of the Andes looming above them. Their guide Carlos explained that if they stayed on the trail that ran along the river, Machu Picchu was about six hours away. In ancient times, the river was used as a commercial route, but if you visited Machu Picchu on a pilgrimage, you had to take the Inca Trail. When he said this, he pointed toward the Andes, up toward the snow, above the thick trees and the rain forest that rest above the desert valley. Then he said they would take four days to get there.
Miller writes:"Why would the Incas make people take the long route?" one of the hikers asked.
"Because the emperor knew," said Carlos, "the more painful the journey to Machu Picchu, the more the traveler would appreciate the city, once he got there."
We stood there appreciating the universal significance of what Carlos had said. There wasn't a person among us who wanted to take the shorter route. Except me, perhaps, but I didn't say anything. I just stood there looking appreciative like the rest of them.
Four days later, after climbing summits of nearly fourteen thousand feet and descending back into the valley, they arrived at Machu Picchu. Miller describes it this way:
We didn't hike to the Sun Gate the next morning; we ran. We ran on blistered feet and sore legs. We got there, and it was fogged in, so we sat along the rock, on the ruins, and waited for the fog to burn off. We sat and sang songs. And it was like Carlos said, because you can take a bus to Machu Picchu; you can take a train and then a bus, and you can hike a mile to the Sun Gate. But the people who took the bus didn't experience the city as we experienced the city. The pain made the city more beautiful. The story made us different characters than we would have been if we had skipped the story and showed up at the ending an easier way.[4]
My friend Leanne Pearce Reed says, "An easier way. Perhaps that's what the disciples wanted, when Peter offered to build tents and stay up on that mountain. They caught a glimpse of Christ's glory, a preview of the fullness that was to come, and perhaps all they wanted was to take the shorter route, just go ahead and get to that glorious ending an easier way. Even Jesus wanted an easier way, at least once, when he prayed for the cup to be taken from him. But it turns out that there is no easier way to get there - not for Jesus, or his disciples, or those of us who follow him today."[5] In the season of Lent, she says,
the church invites us to take the longer route, to follow the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem, to remember the story of his suffering and death. It might be easier just to show up on Easter morning for the trumpets and lilies and alleluias. You can do it that way; a lot of people do. You can do it that way, but it won't mean the same thing. We take the longer route through the season of Lent.
But more than that, we take the longer route our whole lives, for such is the life of faith. A long and often arduous journey, full of grueling climbs and treacherous valleys and sometimes stunning vistas, a journey that we travel in the hopes of encountering God's glory....
Sometimes we'd give anything for a shorter route, to be able to take the bus around the grief, or the radiation treatments, or the couples counseling, or the 12-step meetings, or the unemployment line. We just wish there was a way to skip ahead, to show up at the ending an easier way.
When Jesus appeared in his glory on that mountaintop, he stood with Moses and Elijah, the greatest of the prophets. Tradition says that they did not die, that God raised them up to heaven before they ever tasted death. And yet Jesus, greater than these, the very Son of God, took the longer route, the one that took him through a garden of agony straight to the cross. He went through it, with us and for us.
The disciples stand on that mountaintop hoping for an easier way. What they don't realize at the time is this: That even as they glimpsed God's glory on the mountaintop, God's glory will also be revealed to them in the long and painful journey. For God's glory is evident not only in the shining moment when light pours out of Jesus, but it is also known in the darkness of the cloud. It is revealed on the cross. It comes to us in some of the most desperate moments of our journey.
That is the mystery of God's glory: that God chooses to be revealed not just in shimmering light, but in impenetrable darkness, too. God chooses to be made known not only on mountaintops, but also in the valley of the shadow of death. And for this, thanks be to God.
And so, the journey, the harder path, lies before us....in the Lenten season that begins this week, but also in our own lives. The fourth-century mystic Gregory of Nyssa said, "The knowledge of God is a mountain steep indeed and difficult to climb."[6] Many of us know first-hand the difficulty of climbing at times. We know. How long it will take us to reach level ground, or what kind of effort it will take in the months and years ahead, we don't know and we can't say. We don't know because we're still climbing. And some days the ascent is treacherous and demanding, and we find ourselves more than a bit shaky and frightfully short of breath.
But it is worth the relentless climb; of that we can be absolutely sure, for at the end of the journey, even as we run with blistered feet and sore legs, God's glory awaits us... and all along the way, even through impenetrable darkness, God accompanies us. So, yes! It is worth the climb.
[1] Leanne Pearce Reed, in a paper on this text presented to the January 2012 gathering of the Moveable Feast in Decatur, Georgia.
[2] Robert Morris, "Riding the Wild Mountain Ox," Weavings, XVI: 4, July/August 2001, 7.
[3] Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail, New York: Broadway Books, 1998, 35.
[4]Miller, Donald, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story, New York: Thomas Nelson, Kindle Edition, 2009, 139-143, as cited by Leanne Pearce Reed; cf. note 1.
[5] Reed, cf. note 1. The following quote is from her paper as well.
[6] Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, II, 58, trans, Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1978, 93.
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