One of the things I love most about Stillwater are the hills. I find much of the Midwest unnervingly flat, but being nestled in the St. Croix Valley feels like home—reminiscent of West Virginia, where I grew up among the hills and valleys of the Appalachian Mountains. I’m not an outdoorsy person by any stretch of the imagination, nor have I ever been, really. I resented the weekend family hikes in the state and regional parks around our home. And I’m sure I was insufferable, with my bad attitude and melodramatic comparisons to forced marches in history. But even as a grumpy kid, I had to begrudgingly admit that mountaintop views are usually worth the sweat and mosquito bites.
You trudge along on the trail, trying not to trip on roots and stones. And then suddenly you emerge from the trees onto an outcropping looking out over a beautiful vista. The dense closeness of trees and underbrush opens up and suddenly you can see—really see—the beauty of Creation laid out before you. This sudden view of majesty beauty often felt like a kind of exodus or deliverance for me growing up, and it still does on the (admittedly rare) occasions that my husband and I go hiking.
A moment ago, in the prayer just before the readings, we ask God for the gift of “deliverance from the disquietude of this world.” It’s an appropriate prayer for today, the Feast of the Transfiguration, because the vision Peter, James, and John receive unexpectedly at the top of Mount Tabor is its own sort of deliverance experience—a kind of opening up, like suddenly arriving at a mountain lookout in the middle of a hike.
In the chapters leading up to this story, Jesus and the disciples have been putting one foot in front of the other as they travel throughout the region, proclaiming the kingdom of heaven. There have been some moments of miraculous elation, but you can also sense a deep exhaustion and a whole lot of stress, as the consequences of their message start to stir up strife in the society around them. So they’re trudging along, when suddenly, on the mountain with Jesus, these three disciples get a radical new perspective on what they’ve been doing. As Peter later says in our epistle reading, they become “eyewitnesses of Christ’s majesty.”
On the top of the mountain, Peter, James & John exit the thicket of the disquietude of this world and come to see this remarkable Jesus guy they’ve been following in a new light. He’s not just an earthly hero or Messianic rebel-king sent with an army to bring political liberation. He’s not just a holy prophet like Moses and Elijah, blessed with particular insight into God’s will. Jesus is revealed as God’s Chosen—the only Son of God—God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God. Standing between Moses and Elijah Jesus is revealed as the summation of the Law & the Prophets—the culmination of God’s entire relationship with the world that has been unfolding since the beginning of time. He is revealed as a kind of capstone on the story of Creation—a living, breathing Sabbath.
I make this Sabbath connection because in Matthew and Mark’s versions of the story, the Transfiguration takes place on the “seventh” day in a sequence of events. The point here is not to get a precise timeline of events. That’s not really how the Gospels function as stories. Regardless of what day things “actually” happened, setting the Transfiguration on the “seventh” day is primarily a symbolic statement. And it’s an important one, because it links Jesus’ glory to the Sabbath—the seventh day of the week, when God completed the work of Creation and rested. By linking Jesus’ transfiguration to the Sabbath, Matthew and Mark subtly suggest that we ought to see Jesus not just as a man, but as a kind of embodiment of God’s Sabbath rest—the perfection of God’s Creation.
Notice, though, that Luke goes a step farther and changes the number seven to eight. Again, the point isn’t to chart the disciples’ itinerary precisely. The Gospels don’t function as historical records in that sense. Luke is trying to convey a spiritual reality by connecting the revelation of Jesus’ majesty, not to the seventh, but to the “eighth” day of the week—both the first day and the last day of a seven-day week. It’s the day that Christians would come to know as the Lord’s Day—Sunday. It’s the day of Resurrection—when all that is old and broken is restored and the New Creation is revealed. In this version of the story, God reveals to the disciples (and reminds each of us) that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the embodiment of that New Creation—God’s disquieted world, now delivered, set at ease, and remade.
Luke is suggesting that the Transfiguration is a foretaste both of Easter and of Christ’s second coming—a sudden and delightfully catastrophic encounter with the ultimate restoration of all things, when humanity and all that God has made will be delivered from disquietude and death. Like hikers emerging onto a glorious mountaintop vista, the disciples suddenly see the beautiful destiny that God has laid out for Creation. For a moment, they leave the thicket of concerns that come with the work of proclaiming the Gospel. They step out from the thicket of this disquietude and see Jesus in all of his beauty: the New Creation, in whom heaven and earth—God and humanity—are joined and all our wounds are healed.
As it is, we—you and I—do not yet see Jesus with unveiled faces like this. But we do still see Jesus by faith. We do still get glimpses of the New Creation—reminders that God is setting all things right and making all things new. Because Christ is still in our midst, and we encounter him whenever we gather in his name. Jesus speaks to us in the Words of Scripture, proclaimed and preached in the assembly of God’s people. He stands among us in the Sacrament of the Altar, the food and drink of new and unending life in him. And he is embodied by us—his mystical Body, the Church—as we chew and swallow his Body and Blood and are transfigured, little by little, into his likeness. We might not see Jesus Christ—our King in his beauty—transfigured in glittering light on the mountaintop. But he is always present with us in Word, Sacrament, and Neighbor.
These gifts are always on offer. And through them we, too, can see the glory that the disciples glimpsed on the mountain. As often as we are engulfed by anxiety and pain, Christ offers us deliverance from the disquietude of this world. As often as we forget that God shall make all things well (and Lord knows I’ve got the memory span of a goldfish on that front), Christ refreshes our memory of the truth which we know but which fades so quickly amidst life’s concerns. Day after day, week after week, year after year, Christ invites us to behold him by faith in his beauty as we proclaim and hear his Word, as we offer and receive his Body and Blood, and as we gaze on him in the face of your Neighbor. Christ is in our midst. He is and ever shall be. And he will never cease inviting us—he will never tire of inviting us—to be delivered from disquietude and reminded of God’s promise as we behold again God’s New Creation in him.