Mark 9.2-9

Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them. And there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." He did not know what to say, for they were terrified. Then a cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud there came a voice, "This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!" Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

2 Corinthians 4.3-6

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake. 6 For 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.

Of all the questions this astonishing text raises, this is the real question, the question that must have confronted Peter, James and John as they stood there on that mountaintop, afraid and confused, beholding a scene utterly out of this world. And, I think, it is the question the text forces us to confront today as we read it. Who is Jesus? There are many who believe Jesus to have been a good man, a great man, a prophet, a wise teacher, perhaps even a healer or miracle-worker, and nothing more. Certainly he was these things. But the Christian witness wants to claim something more, something else, something entirely different. Christians also claim that Jesus is God: and here we touch on the very core of the gospel proclamation, the heart of Christian belief, the mystery at the center of the Christian promise of salvation—that God would become flesh, and dwell among us, and this is who Jesus is.

It’s not as easy as it sounds, to believe this. It’s not easy for us. There’s a lot we don’t understand about it, and in some ways, we have the advantage over those who walked and talked and sat and ate with Jesus. We’re the lucky ones; we have a testimony which we can pore over, memorize, read again and again until it sinks into our very bones and forms the structure of our life so deeply that we become unconscious of the startling impossibilities embedded in it, the impossibilities that consistently tripped up the disciples. We see Jesus truly from the very beginning, aided by the story of the virgin birth and the shepherds and the angels and the wise kings from the East. We see Jesus in the temple as a boy, and later, teaching with authority. We see the miracles and the healings and the penetrating insights of Jesus’ ministry, and we understand them from the start in the context of Jesus as the Christ, Jesus as the Son of God, Jesus, the Word made flesh which has come and dwelt among us. We have a chance to see Jesus truly from beginning to end, in a way that those who traveled alongside him could not; they could only piece together the clues as they came, not understanding them at all, really, until they understood the resurrection.

Imagine, then, how hard it must have been for Peter, James and John as they stood on that mountaintop. They ascended the mountain with their friend and teacher, expecting, perhaps, an intense small-group tutoring session, or special instructions, or perhaps just a quiet day to hang out and rest from the frenetic activity so often pressed on them all by the demands of the crowds that follow Jesus around. They expect the familiar. And instead, they receive the completely unfamiliar; they witness an incomprehensible transformation.

Mark 9 describes a break into routine, humdrum reality with a metamorphosis, a transformation, a moment for Peter and James and John when their friend, Jesus, is transfigured from the familiar buddy they’ve traveled around with into an exalted figure, at his ease with other exalted figures of Israel’s past. Peter responds wildly, a little stupidly, in an attempt to somehow make this out-of-the-world experience fit within his idea of reality. “Wow, it’s great to be here. Let’s, ah, make you guys a little more comfortable…”

But their fear and confusion is evident. Nothing about this experience squares with “reality.” And it’s not over yet! Even more, Jesus is elevated beyond the status of the exalted figures of Elijah and Moses, identified by a voice from a cloud: “this is my son whom I love.” How do they reconcile the friend they know with the Lord they see transfigured before them? How can the fellow human being they know and love also be, as the voice from the cloud tells them, God’s own beloved Son? Gone is their friend, with whom they have walked and talked and eaten in easy familiarity; and in his place is…who? Or even, what?

And then suddenly, this swift, passing glimpse into a truth that surpasses the mundane has vanished. They look around and everything is “back to normal.” No more Moses, no more Elijah. No more cloud, no more voice. Surely they must have staggered a bit at the abrupt transition, and wondered if anything had really happened at all. Maybe they even hoped nothing had happened. Maybe they didn’t look at each other or mention it for fear that they were the only crazy one there. Maybe being crazy by oneself would be preferable to the kind of reality-shaking alternative! But as they come down from the mountain, Jesus tells them, “don’t tell anyone what you saw.” Confirmation: so they really did truly see it, they think.

It’s interesting, from a literary point of view, to note the rich number of allusions in this short text from Mark 9. Echoes of the story of Moses’ shining face as he descended from the mountain with the stone tablets; the presence of Elijah, who was swept up to heaven in a fiery chariot; the voice from heaven identifying Jesus as God’s beloved son, in much the same way as the account of Jesus’ baptism in the first chapter of Mark. All of these echoes are echoes of earlier signs, earlier actions of God in the lives of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus which functioned to set them apart, mark them as special, specially favored and specially called. Throughout the season of Epiphany, which concludes with this Sunday, Transfiguration Sunday, the lectionary texts describe sign after sign of Jesus’ specialness, Jesus’ uniqueness. The miracle at the wedding at Cana; stories of special knowledge and authority; stories of miraculous healing, all culminating in this moment on the mountaintop with Peter, James, and John.

Today we see the climactic moment in this slow process of figuring out who Jesus really is. Mark 9: 2-9 describes for us a moment, a brief, still, shining moment in which three clueless human beings are given a glimpse into something beyond the mundane, quotidian, routine process of seeing their way through daily life.

They must have asked themselves: am I seeing truly? Who is the real Jesus—the friend with dusty feet who gets tired and hungry, the Jesus we thought we knew—or this shining Jesus, conversing easily with the great prophets, Elijah and Moses, and of whom God says, “this is my beloved son?” What does it mean to see Jesus truly in this moment of transfiguration? What does it mean to see truly?

This is not really an easy question. Seeing isn’t always believing; or at least, in my opinion, it shouldn’t be. Like Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, I’m apt to take the skeptical view that the senses cannot always be trusted: why? Because a blob of mustard or an undigested piece of beef or bad gruel can affect them. “There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge tells the ghost of Jacob Marley. (I’m a sucker for puns.) How do we know when we’re seeing truly? It’s not that easy.

Human beings have a great capacity for self-deception, for seeing falsely. Sometimes we see falsely because it’s easy, or comfortable. We imagine the world to be as we would like it to be, and in the process, convince ourselves that that’s how it “really” is. This happens all the time. Although some people may lose perspective altogether, I don’t think that this tendency is “crazy”—rather, I think it’s universal. Here’s an example of what I mean. In one of my favorite Kurt Vonnegut novels, he coins the term “granfalloon.” A granfalloon is an illusory sense of camaraderie or belonging to a group based on some superficial connection, some casual evaluation of external characteristics. Vonnegut’s example in the novel is “Hoosiers.” One character meets another, quite randomly, on a plane. They find out through some small talk that both of them are from Indiana. “Call me MOM!” one character gushes to the other. “He’s a HOOSIER!” she excitedly announces to her husband.

I’m a part of the great granfalloon, the “Class of ’94.” We celebrate that particular granfalloon with regularly scheduled high school class reunions. We imagine some lasting connection between us—despite more and more intervening years, total lack of contact and the fact that the only thing we really shared with each other when we were together was complete indifference to each other. There’s nothing real there. There’s nothing about who I am that is represented or touched by the concept of “Class of ’94.” There’s simply the bare fact that I am a certain age, graduated a certain year, lived in a certain place, went to a particular high school, with about 400 other people. There’s nothing about who I truly am captured in any of that. But somehow, it’s comforting to rewrite history, to imagine a connection to these people I barely know from a past that gets, thankfully, dimmer and dimmer.

Maybe this seems harmless. But seeing falsely can take more pernicious forms. Convincing oneself to stay in an abusive relationship, for example, by claiming it’s not that bad, or that he’s really trying this time, he’s really sorry, surely this is the last time... This kind of seeing falsely leads to dire consequences. It’s my suspicion that this capacity, more than anything else, describes theologically what “original sin” or general “fallenness” might mean: this human tendency to see ourselves, others, and the world around us falsely, to our own harm and others’.

There’s another way to miss the boat on “seeing truly,” and it’s not necessarily seeing falsely. It’s simply seeing routinely or mundanely, seeing habitually. This isn’t necessarily sinful, in my opinion. It’s a matter of navigating the world we’re in efficiently. We train ourselves, or others train us, in how to “see” as a way of coping. Recently in the “Film and Theology” class I am TA for this semester, we were put to the test in this matter. We were shown several film clips which were exercises to make us more aware of how techniques in film use our habits of seeing. In one clip, we were shown a man at a desk working, and hearing a telephone out of sight ring, in one frame; in the next frame, a man answered the telephone out in the hall. It took the class—60 people—three viewings and a clue from the professor (“watch the shirt” he said) to realize that the man in the second frame was a completely different man from the man at the desk. Different hair. Different shirt. Different glasses. Different facial features. Completely different person! We were seeing habitually; because it made sense to assume that it would be the same man, we simply didn’t see any different.

As I said, I don’t think this is “sinful,” or even stupid or dim-witted, really. I have to say this, right, because it took me three tries and a clue before I could see the film clip “truly.” I think it’s simply how the human mind works as it processes information.

There’s a sense, however, in which seeing routinely slides very easily into seeing falsely, in how we view each other and the people we encounter day to day as we go about the business of our lives. We don’t know everyone we encounter during the course of a day. And so we size people up on the basis of those external characteristics that are most obvious to us. Sometimes, we do so and end up making a granfalloon-ish connection; sometimes we do so to draw conclusions about how to best interact, how to best avoid, how to best protect ourselves from the others we encounter. In doing so we see other people not as who they truly are—this is invisible to us. We see them as obstacles or annoyances or even dangers; but we do not see them for who they truly are.

It takes something breaking in from outside, something startling and undeniable, to shake us out of the routine, the habitual mode of seeing only what we already know and expect to see. Sometimes it takes more than one try and more than one clue to get us to see truly. Once we do, though, we wonder how we could ever have been so blind…

This is, in a sense, what I think the season of Epiphany is all about. Multiple tries and multiple clues, to show us how to see the person of Jesus truly. To show us that Jesus is special. To show us that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, or in Mark’s phrase, the Son of Man. The transfiguration is the Big Clue for Peter, James and John. It is the Big Clue that pushes them to finally see Jesus truly.

But in the end, after things are “back to normal,” descending from the mountain, we see that they don’t really fully get it. They understand that something has happened, but not what it really means. They know they witnessed something miraculous, but they haven’t yet grasped the fullness of who Jesus has been revealed to be. Jesus tells them, as they come down from the mountain, not to tell anyone what they saw until “the son of man has risen from the dead.” Maybe Peter, James and John were relieved at this instruction from Jesus. Maybe not to tell would have been their first instinct anyhow. But why would Jesus ask them not to tell?

I think Jesus knew that even this clue was not fully understood, and wouldn’t be, until the time of his resurrection. Peter, James and John get a sneak peek at the true identity of Jesus in this moment of transfiguration, an identity which is declared openly to all the disciples, and indeed, to all people, in the event of the resurrection. It is at this point that Peter and James and John’s witness of this startling transformation will, perhaps, make sense to people. Perhaps by itself it remains unbelievable, and incomprehensible, even to those three who saw it; but in the light of the resurrection, the transfiguration of Jesus on the mountaintop in front of astonished human eyes takes on its real significance, as one moment among many in which Jesus’ identity as Christ, Son of man, Son of God, even God Himself, is revealed.

Of course, the disciples don’t understand all this, not now, not at this point. The gospel of Mark is unrelentingly honest in its portrayal of Jesus’ disciples, even these closest to him, as completely clueless. As they descend the mountain they ask themselves, “what does he mean, ‘rise from the dead?’ And they ask Jesus, “what’s all this about Elijah anyway?” Even Peter, James, and John, the three disciples closest to Jesus, don’t really understand what they just saw and who Jesus truly is; and perhaps, this is the reason for Jesus’ instruction to keep quiet about it. Like their potential audience, Peter and James and John need the resurrection in order to understand the transfiguration; but they don’t comprehend the possibility of resurrection, not yet. The difficulty of seeing beyond the ordinary, seeing beyond the expected, the everyday, the normal is so great that even this revelatory moment of transfiguration on the mountaintop goes only partially comprehended, by Jesus’ closest friends and disciples.

In 2 Corinthians 4:3-6, the epistle text for today, Paul, too, acknowledges the difficulty of seeing truly: for some, he says, the gospel is “veiled.” It is veiled to those “who are perishing.” This image or metaphor of the veil is introduced in chapter 3, where Paul alludes to the veil over Moses’ face when Moses descends from the mountain with the stone tablets, a veil which Moses wears because of the unbearable brightness of his face, a reflection of having seen God’s own glory. This veil becomes an image, for Paul, of the inability to comprehend God’s message, or, in other words, the inability to see truly.

In acknowledging that the gospel can be “veiled,” Paul is acknowledging the difficulty of seeing truly. “The god of this world,” Paul says in 4:4, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light.” I think what Paul is talking about here is the inability to break out of our habitual, routine ways of seeing the world, an inability that closes us off to the new, novel, redeeming message of the gospel, which is, as always for Paul, the simple declaration that “Jesus Christ is Lord.” Those mired in the world, stuck in the rut, have no eyes to see this; it is veiled. It’s not impossible to see it. But it requires something huge and startling, and the openness to consider the seemingly incomprehensible. It is not something we can produce ourselves, from our own resources or our own habits of seeing. It comes to us from outside; as a grace, from God: “For 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 Christ.”

A little further on in 2 Corinthians, Paul goes on to pen a verse which has intrigued me for years: 5:16. “From now on, therefore we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once regarded Christ from a human point of view, we regard him thus no longer.” It’s a strange verse, in some ways. What does it mean to “regard Christ from a human point of view?” What does Paul mean by that? It is easy enough to guess that Paul is referring to his way of seeing Jesus prior to his Damascus road experience: an inadequate, partial view of Jesus based only on externals and completely missing the reality of who Jesus truly was, and is. And it is clear enough that now Paul understands that this “human point of view” completely misses the point. Seeing Jesus from a “human” point of view means not understanding who he truly is: Jesus Christ as Lord.

What do we do with this knowledge, given to us by God, testified to through the witness of Peter, James and John on the mountain beholding the transfigured Jesus, through the witness of the women at the empty tomb, through the witness of Paul, who beheld an ascended Christ on the road to Damascus? Is it enough to give our assent, and go home? To stand up and acknowledge Christ as Lord as a truth in which we believe and sit back down again? Is this something we can “get right” simply by saying it is so, or “get wrong” by denying it? What difference does this make for us, this belief in Jesus Christ as Lord?

For Paul, this revelation of who Jesus Christ truly is is bound up intimately with the revelation of who and what human beings truly are. Just as Paul tell us that he once regarded Christ from “a human point of view” but no longer, so, he says, we no longer regard anyone from this inadequate, partial, external “human point of view.” Seeing Jesus truly means that we understand the necessity of seeing all other human beings “truly” in this sense as well. Seeing truly means being prepared to see beyond the immediately visible, the surface obvious. It means seeing the true holiness inherent in what we behold: the divinity of Christ; the sharing of that divinity of all who are in Christ, and the sharing of that divinity which is common to all human beings, having been created in the image of God. Past the appearances, the trappings and the stations, the signals we send out consciously and unconsciously in dress, hair, mannerisms, patterns of speech—beyond all of that, to a true vision of the Other as both Christ-to-us and in-need-of-Christ. Seeing truly means being prepared to be, ourselves, the startling, unexpected sign from outside to others, to be the transfiguring event in their lives, as astonishing and unexpected as Jesus' transformation on the mountaintop was to Peter, James, and John, and just as reality-changing, changing how others see themselves, each other, the world. May we all be granted this transfiguring vision, vision that enables us to see, and serve, each other truly.