Transfiguration of our Lord – Feb. 19

Pastor Franklin Wilson

2 Kings 2.1–12; Psalm 50; 2 Corinthians 4.3-6; St. Mark 9.2–9

“The company of prophets who were in Bethel came out to Elisha, and said to him, “Do you know that today the Lord will take your master away from you?” And he said, “Yes, I know; keep silent.”

“And [Jesus] was transfigured before them…. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him.’  Suddenly when the looked around, they saw no one with them anymore, but only Jesus.”

“And [Jesus] was transfigured before them.”  Jesus was transfigured.  He was changed, and his clothes shone like the sun, brighter than any earthly light.  “Transfiguration,” a word that derives from a passive verb concerning Jesus on a high mountain—“he was transfigured, changed, transformed, metamorphosed (a single time) before them.”

So Jesus was changed.  And yet, we are told, “Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.”  What does it mean that Jesus was changed and, at the same time, that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever?  How can it be that Jesus was changed before them and that Jesus Christ does not change?

I recently spent three days with my mother and her husband 30 miles north of Portland, Oregon—and then (on the way back home) another three days with our elder son and his family in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.  So last Sunday I was in Denver, and the closest church to our son’s place was the incredibly large and beautiful “Our Lady of Loreto” church on Arapaho in Southeast Denver.

I believe in the necessity of receiving the Holy Eucharist, and I have a commitment to receive the Body and Blood of Christ every Sunday.  It doesn’t much matter the kind of church in which I receive Christ in the Sacrament, so long as that church observes the gathering of the baptized around the Gospel and the Sacraments.  The preaching may be decent or not, but the reading of the scriptures and the proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection in the Holy Supper are absolutely essential.   And Our Lady of Loreto filled the bill.

It was my first time in the Roman Catholic Mass since the revised language of the liturgy had come into use, and I found it fascinating.  Fascinating, for one, that some of the more routine phrases had changed (i.e., “And also with you” had returned to “And with your spirit”).   But fascinating also to see how some of the less routine words in the Creed had changed, for example, “of one being the Father” has become, perhaps more mysteriously, “consubstantial with the Father”.  Since language is surely one of the most profound means by which we participate in God and God participates in us, such verbal changes themselves bespeak the Transfiguration mystery:  the language of the liturgy changes and yet, on account of Christ himself, the liturgy remains the same.

Some years following my mother and father’s divorce, my mom remarried.  Some years after that, she and her second husband built a modern house at the northwest corner of a five acre hayfield in which I had learned to drive while hauling hay in 1964.  The field itself must be 6 or 8 hundred yards up a gradual slope from the old Swedish farm house in which I had grown up on Bachelor Flat Road, three miles outside of St. Helens, Oregon.  From the top of the field where my mother’s house now stands, one could then see four towering mountains in the Cascade Range: Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams, Mt. Hood, and Mt. Jefferson.  When I was learning to drive the hay truck in the summer of ’64, you could also see the Columbia River flowing north toward Astoria and the Pacific—the River some two miles in the distance; Woodland, Washington on the opposite bank.

Today that has all changed. Mt. St. Helens volcanically decapitated itself in 1980, sheering off the top 1300 feet of its elevation—some of which (thanks to Bob Steffen) now abides in a salt shaker in my study.  And, of course, the growth of trees (to say nothing of houses) in the past decades means that now only Mt. Hood remains visible from my mother’s dining room window.

A grove of majestic evergreens stands a few hundred yards to the south of my mother’s kitchen—at the bottom of the old hayfield.  One of them, a massive Douglas Fir—some three or four feet in diameter now—was the site of our main tree fort, the place where my brothers and I entertained honored guests, making them climb blindfolded up a rope ladder for meals of black licorice and berries.  In those days the tree might have been 75 or 80 feet high; during Pacific storms (much to our mother’s chagrin) we would climb to the highest branches and sway back and forth in the gale.

Gazing from my mother’s widow I marveled how those trees have changed.  The fort tree now stands a good 125 feet tall—maybe higher.  The tree has changed, but it is still the same tree—in fact, in some deep sense, it is now more of the tree than it once was.  I walked down through the wet spring grass, ducked beneath overhanging branches, their perimeter dripping with Pacific mist.  I stood beneath the canopy, stood atop decades of fir needles, a fragrant carpet beneath my feet.  I looked up, searching for any sign of our fort, but I saw none—not a single rusty nail, nor even a rotting board remained.  All had vanished leaving only the tree: larger, stronger, more ancient and durable now than it was back then when we trusted our very lives to the strength and durability of the swaying branches.

“Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore, but only Jesus.” In the end, it’s not the change—not the transfiguration itself—that endures, but Jesus: God’s beloved Son.  Listen to him!  What does he say?  He tells them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. It’s the resurrection that matters.

In the end, the tree fort was not the thing, but the tree—and even the tree itself points to something else.  It points to the sky, to that which endures beyond its ancient roots.  The Transfiguration is finally not about the Transfiguration, but about God’s beloved Son—Jesus only.  And even he points to something beyond himself—to the resurrection of the dead.  With the disciples, then, we see Jesus only—the Transfigured One—changed for a moment that he might remain the same forever.  Listening to him, baptized into him, we are changed for all eternity.  He is crucified dead, and raised, that we and all creation, in the fullness of time, might share his risen and eternal life, even as Krista Marian now does, in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.