I.

The last Sunday before Lent, in the Western Church, is dedicated to the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor, an event witnessed by Peter, James, and John. This story constitutes the fulcrum of the gospel because from now on Jesus is heading inexorably towards Jerusalem, and his death and Resurrection. The Transfiguration is a sort of foreshadowing or anticipation or preview of the Resurrection. For here, on the mountain, Jesus appears in his essential, resurrected, divine form.

Thus the whole subsequent narrative, culminating in the Passion story, is bracketed by two appearances of Jesus in his heavenly glory: the Transfiguration occurs on one end as a prelude, and the Resurrection happens on the other as a fulfillment.

But in the meantime there is this journey to the Holy City, where Jesus and his disciples arrive only two chapters later. In this passage from glory to glory, however, between the Transfiguration and the Resurrection, Jesus must pass through a time of intense trial, where he experiences challenge, betrayal, abandonment, suffering, and death.

He knows this is his destiny. He warns the disciples repeatedly about what to expect when they get to Jerusalem, but in this gospel they never get it. And I suspect that they don’t get it because they don’t particularly want to get it. They only want to hear positive things about what’s going to happen in Jerusalem. They don’t want to know about the difficulties they will face when they get there.

But whatever is to happen, Peter, James, and John share a memory of this extraordinary experience on the mountain. In remembering this event, the bright shining light, the voice from heaven, the appearance of Moses and Elijah, they are given strength to deal with the trials ahead. And they also have a sense of what to expect at the end. When they do experience Jesus in resurrected form, they will not be totally without precedent.

But of course, they remain in the dark about it. If anything they misinterpret the Transfiguration as a view of Jesus’ glory as having to do with earthly, secular power. They appear still to think that Jesus is going to declare himself King and take over the throne of his ancestor, David.

Yet, even if the disciples didn’t understand, this story is included here in the gospel so that we might understand. We have the benefit of hindsight: we know about the Resurrection, as did the apostles when they finally got around to writing this story down. We know the nature of the glory Jesus will receive in Jerusalem; and we know the kind of suffering he will have to endure in the process. So, when we hear this story, we are given the opportunity to avoid the mistakes of the clueless disciples, and follow Jesus on this journey with full knowledge about what to expect. We know to anticipate suffering and death... and we also know that this will find its resolution in the Resurrection.

II.

In other words, as we follow this story, we know it is going to get worse before it gets better. We know Jesus is not going to be an earthly, political king, and that he will be executed on a Roman cross for both blasphemy and sedition, even though he was guilty of neither offense.

But we also know that ultimately Jesus will triumph, and his victory will far outshine and obliterate the darkness that envelopes him. In the end we know that Jesus defeats death by death, and so liberates us all from death’s power.

And we know, as the disciples apparently did not, that the Transfiguration is our pledge, our guarantee, our assurance of this truth. No matter how bad it gets, death really has no power over the man who was Transfigured on the mountain in uncreated, holy Light, and who was blessed by the Voice of God from heaven.

The pattern of this story, then, is Jesus’ movement from glory to glory. He travels from the glory on the mountain, to the glory of the empty tomb. And in doing so Jesus is telling us something very important about our earthly existence. In a manner analogous to Jesus’ movement from Transfiguration to Resurrection, we also move from glory to glory. That is, our sojourn on the Earth is not the endless spiral into oblivion that it often seems to be. We have come from God; and we are returning to God. God is both our source and our destiny. Our true and final life is not of this world, caught in sin and decay, violence and corruption. Our true life, as Paul says, is hidden with Christ in God. Our true life is elsewhere and we are moving towards it all the time, even though it appears that we are doomed.

In the meantime, we receive the power to live according to Christ’s Way because we know the truth. We know something about how the story comes out in the end. We know that in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ we see the ultimate destiny of life, history, creation, and our own selves. In the Resurrection and the Transfiguration, we are informed about the end of the story.

When I was a kid we lived in Wayne and my dad was a big New York Giants football fan. Every Sunday in the fall we would come home from church and put the game on the radio and listen to it, sometimes during dinner. In those days, Giants’ home games were blacked out from TV, so radio was our only option. So we listened intently to the play-by-play delivered by the immortal Marty Glickman. For many years thereafter whenever I heard Glickman’s voice I could smell pot-roast and taste warmed, buttered dinner rolls.

But then, on Sunday nights at like 11 o’clock, they would finally show the taped version of that afternoon’s game. I personally never saw the point to this since we already knew how the game turned out, but my dad was a big enough fan that this interested him, so he would stay up late and watch it.

The times when I joined him I realized that knowing in advance who would win changed the way we watched the game. If we already knew the Giants were going to triumph, we didn’t take it as seriously when Tarkenton got sacked. When Ron Johnson fumbled or was thrown for a loss, we shrugged it off. We could enjoy the game with the confidence born of a higher, deeper knowledge. In a sense we felt like we knew the future. And that gave us strength to accept whatever befell us in the meantime.

It is this kind of confidence that the Transfiguration, and the Resurrection give us. In the Transfiguration, we know in advance how the story of Jesus’ life will turn out. In the Resurrection we know how the story of life itself, and all creation, will end. Thus the misfortunes and even the horrors that happen to us in this life are made bearable by the knowledge that in the end God will triumph and bring us back to God.

III.

In one of the small group meetings early in your Mission Study process, you looked at the tension between the already and the not-yet, between what they called the Now and the Then, between what-is and what-should-be. And many of you who participated probably realized how hard it is to talk in real terms about the future, which should not be surprising. The future, at least in its details, is largely a mystery to us.

But I think the point of the study was in part that the future is, for Christians, not as huge a mystery as we might think. Because by faith we understand that the Transfiguration and Resurrection of Jesus Christ are glimpses into our future. And part of the Mission Study process is to get the church on board with God’s future and with what God is already doing in our midst to bring it about.

In these events we see not just something that happened to Jesus, but what is also going to happen to each one of us. In these events, as they are given to us in Scripture, we get a brief look through the veil of our mortality and temporality, to what truly is. We call it the not-yet, or the what-should-be, or the Then, but in the larger scheme of things it is simply the One Reality in which we live but which we comprehend and perceive only partially and dimly. In these events — the Transfiguration and the Resurrection — we see the end of the story.

It is easy to think that this destiny is removed from us by a nearly endless expanse of time, and is relegated so far into our future that it has little practical relevance for us. But don’t be fooled. Jesus says, "The kingdom of God is within you." The Kingdom of God is "at hand," it is very near, it is right beside you, indeed, you are already in it but don’t know it.

The truth is that the game in which we are playing is one that God has already won for us. This victory is a done deal. You can bank on it. You can bet your life on it, and in a sense, that’s what faith is. It is betting your life on the truth of God’s ultimate victory, and our knowledge of it.

So, as we follow Jesus in these next few weeks to the cross, and as we make our own way through the period of introspection and self-denial which is Lent, let’s remember that, in the Transfiguration, we know the end of the story. We know further that nothing that happens to us in this life is strong enough to defeat us, if we know that God is for us. For we have seen the future. And the future is the final triumph of love, goodness, blessing, light, and joy in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In this knowledge we can endure anything, bear anything, forgive anything, renounce anything except our faith, and accept anything, even death. Because we know that death is not the end, but the beginning of eternal life.

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