Zeal For Your House

Zeal For Your House

3rd Sunday of Lent: March 11, 2012

Psalm 69

John 2:13-22

Zeal for your house will consume me.

Zeal. Zealous. Zealot. The words that derive from the little term zeal, have fallen on hard times. They have become synonyms for words like “fanatic” or stand next to unsavory adjectives, as in “crazed zealot.” The primary word – zeal – generally receives mixed reactions, and while the second term – zealous – doesn’t fare quite as well, the noun, zealot, now that has come to have an almost entirely negative modern connotation. A zealot has come to be used to identify a mindless, fanatical commitment to some portion of the truth as if it were able to stand for the whole thing. In a 1913 poem called “Absolute and Abitofhell,” – a title that has to be seen written and understood in literary context[1] to be fully appreciated – poet Ronald Knox wrote,

When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal,

Corrected I believe to One does feel.

Interesting that the poet felt the need to add that adjective to the word zeal, rendering it “bigot zeal.” My desktop dictionary[2] goes about defining the term zeal and terms related to zeal in this way:

· “zeal: eagerness and ardent interest in pursuit of something.”

Fairly tame, that definition. But how about the related terms also listed there in my dictionary? They do not fare as well in popular understanding, I’m afraid:

· “zealot: A zealous person, especially a fanatical partisan.”

· “zealotry: Excess of zeal; fanatical devotion.”

· “zealous: filled with or characterized by zeal: missionaries.”

Missionaries? The overworked doctor in the missionary compound dispensing medicine for the suffering villagers gathered outside his door? The committed missionary teacher in the thatched hut, instructing rooms full of children how to read and write? Zealots related to those consumed by fanatical devotion? That little addition in the definition surprised me. It hardly seems fair, I have to say. Missionaries I have known are committed, faithful, self-sacrificing, yes, but if they are to be called zealous, then we may need to review any word association we make that connects zealotry with fanaticism.

Have you ever met a zealot? Who was it? How did you know he or she was a zealot? How was that experience for you? Annoying? Frightening? Disturbing? I suspect that usually we think of a zealot as someone who will not be deterred from his or her cause, no matter what, I think we may probably agree on that. And we tend to carry among us the notion that this is almost uniformly a bad thing. Yet, on the other hand, is an equivocating or constantly rationalizing faith always a good thing? Aren’t there aspects of our faith, times in our lives of faith, which call for a complete commitment? Even a measure of – I don’t know, dare we say it? – zeal?

Here is a difficult thing for most of us: If you ever were confronted by an uncompromising zealot who would not back down and who made you uncomfortable and perhaps even a little frightened, then you know how many of those felt who encountered Jesus. This is what makes our passage for today difficult for me. Jesus as zealot. That’s not the Jesus I want. I want sweet Jesus meek and mild, I am attracted to Jesus the lover of my soul, Jesus the wise and wonderful, Jesus the pure expression of the loving and forgiving grace of God, all these characteristics attract me to Jesus. But Jesus as zealot? These days we are likely to think of a zealot as someone who would cut out the heart of a child if it would advance a cause they believed in, as marauding Taliban laying waste to obstinate Pakistani villages, as wild-eyed fanatics who cannot see beyond their own blind loyalties to their tribe or faction. Yet it is not fair to leave it at that. Not if we read in scripture that Jesus is associated with a term like “zeal.”

The disciples, seeing Jesus in action in the temple, thought of a psalm, which makes use of the word “zeal.” “His disciples remembered,” John said, “that it was written, ‘Zeal for your house will consume me.’” Verses from the Old Testament, when quoted in the New Testament, are meant to call to mind an entire passage, not just a random line: as when Jesus uttered from the cross the chilling opening words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We are meant to think of that entire psalm, which speaks of the suffering of a righteous one, and a prayer that righteous one makes that God will come near, that God will save, the sort of prayer any of us would, and likely have made, at some time.

Here, seeing the teacher, whom they have only just begun to follow, chasing the animals from the temple precincts and turning over the money tables, the disciples recall a half-verse from Psalm 69. But they surely recalled the entire psalm, and we are meant to recall it too. It goes like this:

Save me, O God,

for the waters have come up to my neck.

I sink in deep mire,

where there is no foothold;

I have come into deep waters,

and the flood sweeps over me.

I am weary with my crying;

my throat is parched.

My eyes grow dim

with waiting for my God.

More in number than the hairs of my head

are those who hate me without cause;

many are those who would destroy me,

my enemies who accuse me falsely.

What I did not steal

must I now restore?

O God, you know my folly;

the wrongs I have done are not hidden from you.

Do not let those who hope in you be put to shame because of me,

O Lord GOD of hosts;

do not let those who seek you be dishonored because of me,

O God of Israel.

It is for your sake that I have borne reproach,

that shame has covered my face.

I have become a stranger to my kindred,

an alien to my mother’s children.

It is zeal for your house that has consumed me;

the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.

When I humbled my soul with fasting,

they insulted me for doing so.

When I made sackcloth my clothing,

I became a byword to them.

I am the subject of gossip for those who sit in the gate,

and the drunkards make songs about me.

But as for me, my prayer is to you, O LORD.

At an acceptable time, O God,

in the abundance of your steadfast love, answer me.

With your faithful help

rescue me from sinking in the mire;

let me be delivered from my enemies

and from the deep waters.

Do not let the flood sweep over me,

or the deep swallow me up,

or the Pit close its mouth over me.

I hope you hear in this fuller quotation from Psalm 69[3] echoes of the cross and Jesus’ suffering on it. Part of what these words foreshadow in our minds, and the minds of the disciples, is the cross to come. It is Jesus’ uncompromising zeal that has done it. His zeal for the truth brings condemnation on him in the end. John quotes the phrase about zeal for the house of the Lord, as Paul quotes the second half of that verse in Romans 15:3, “For Christ did not please himself; but, as it is written, ‘The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.’” Jesus stands in for God himself, to receive the insults that humanity daily heaps upon him.

A new and perfect sacrifice for the sake of the sins of all people had arrived at the temple. There would be no further need for sacrificial animals. The foreshadowing of Psalm 69 shows that in the sacrifice of Jesus, the need for other ritual sacrifices came to an end. Matthew, Mark and Luke all place the temple cleansing at the end of Jesus’ ministry, while John places it here in the beginning. So scholarly debate has continued on and on over the years as to which placement is right. Was the temple cleansing a precipitating event for Jesus’ arrest and execution as Matthew, Mark and Luke have it, or was it just the second in a long list of acts of ministry, as John seems to have it?

It is the recollection from Psalm 69 of the zeal for the house of God that ties all four gospels together in seeing this as connected with the ultimate sacrifice of the Messiah on the cross. For John, the chronological timing is not so important as the self-sacrificing Messianic implications that are wrapped up in each event of Jesus’ ministry. So, though it is reported early here, Jesus’ actions in the temple foreshadow the cross coming at the end as surely as zeal for the house of God will bring suffering at the hands of those who despise God and all who seek him.

It is interesting that among most Presbyterians, any time we begin to talk of zeal for our faith, or even the zeal of Christ, we will soon hear someone begin to say that it is the zealots that have caused all the trouble in the world, the fanatics who have so much commitment to their faith that they fail to take into account the rest of the world, the crazed tyrants, the Osama bin Ladens, all the cults of darkness that have consumed so many people over the years.

About this I have two thoughts. One is that there is little danger among the Presbyterians I have had the pleasure of knowing that our zeal for our faith will carry us off very far from our good sense. Born, as our denomination was, from a tradition of Scots common sense theology, we just don’t seem much in danger of wandering off with some fanatic. Second, though, is this. As frightening as the prospect of a real and significant zeal for our faith might strike us, it is this very sort of commitment which changes limp, moribund faith into faith that lives. Most young people do not despise the idea of giving their lives for something, it is giving their lives for something insignificant that they despise. If our faith is the most significant thing about us, then why can we not follow the Messiah, give our lives to it, body and soul, and hear the call to do something heroic, even zealous for our faith?

So, odd as it may sound, I pray that zeal for God’s house would consume our common thoughts and actions, so that together we may carry forward not the dusty ashes, but the zealous fire of our faith into our future together.

Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, Pastor

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[1] Essays in Satire, by Ronald Knox-1888-1957, (Sheed and Ward, 1928). Knox’s poem was written in ‘heroic couplets’ after the manner of John Dryden’s then-well-known “Absalom and Achitophel,” exactly in the manner of a 17^th century polemic.

[2] Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary, 1984, Merriam-Webster, Inc.

[3] Psalm 69:1-15, NRSV.

Practicing Self-Denial

Practicing Self-Denial

copyright 2012 © Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Psalm 22:23-31 Mark 8:31-9:1

Second Sunday in Lent: March 19, 2012

If any want to become my followers,

let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.

Self-denial. It’s something that would take practice, isn’t it? It’s not the sort of thing that comes naturally to the human species. As Americans we are acquainted vaguely with the concept, though generally not thoroughly, often not on a first-hand basis. For some of us, the concept of self-denial often runs along the lines of deciding to keep our old car a year or two longer than we had planned. We are known the world over as consumers of monstrous portions of the world’s resources. Yet we are taught through our religious faith that the denial of self for the sake of others, when chosen freely, is a virtue. Like the ability to play Chopin on the piano or to swing a bat so as to hit a ball, self-denial is not an in-born characteristic of our species, it requires practice, and plenty of it.

We are taught this ideal, that denial of self and placing others’ needs first is a hallmark of our faith. Yet we live more in the world of Somerset Maugham, who once werote, “From the standpoint of pure reason, there are no grounds to support the claim that one should sacrifice one’s own happiness to that of others.”[1] Even when we seek to be self sacrificing, there are times when we can twist even that into some odd version of self-service. George Bernard Shaw put it more bluntly and cynically: “Self-sacrifice,” he said “enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing.”[2] C.S. Lewis once wrote, “She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.”[3]

Without much effort, then, we observe contesting ideologies: the ideology of Jesus in which the gift of self to others is the greatest gift one can make, and the calculating thinking of the late 20^th and early 21^st century “me-first” generations, in which even self-sacrifice or self-giving is calculated to have its own rewards, to be recommended only because, in the end, it results in profit to self. This turns Jesus’ words on their head.

When Jesus says that those who follow him must be prepared to deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow, we often assume this is a work for the hyper-holy, the super-faithful, mighty monastics. But he certainly doesn’t put it that way. “If you want to become my followers...” That seems surely to refer to all of us who would take the trouble to gather here on a Sunday morning. Father Daniel Berrigan once said, “If you are going to be a follower of Jesus, make sure you look good on wood.” It is the self-denial demanded by being a follower of someone else’s will that we are to understand. We don’t seek it because we want it, we seek to set self aside because he asks it of us.

If we are members of this church, there was for each of us a time when we stood before others and were asked membership questions, the third of which asks, “Do you intend to be his disciple, to obey his word, and show his love?” So this desire to be obedient, to follow, this readiness to deny self and take on the cross, these are not options for believers. They are chapter headings in the basic manual of operations. They describe what being a disciple is about.

With that said, what is there to add? I think there is at least one thing to think about in relation to all this, and that is that such self-denial, such taking up of the cross of Christ is seen in the wrong way if it is consistently understood as solely a dour self-abnegation, a forced-march through a barren life void of all pleasure until we reach the next. I think to be understood correctly, the choice to deny self in favor of the interests of others must carry with it the constant sense that it comes to us as a gift from God. Martin Luther said, “Walk in faith and love. If the Cross comes, accept it. If it does not come, do not seek it.”

This may sound a little kooky – self-denial as a gift of God – but I think it is true for a couple of reasons. First of all, it is mostly something we cannot achieve by ourselves. Somerset Maugham was probably right as far as he went when he wrote those words, “no grounds from the standpoint of pure reason to support self-denial.”[4] The capacity for self-denial is – like most of the best aspects of our faith ­– a gift of God. How often have we heard tired old aphorisms like “money can’t buy happiness?” Yet how often does the world give us examples of those who are trying to prove that it can? Who is freer or happier, a day trader chain-smoking his or her way through an intense day of activities meant to increase their wealth, or someone who works merely in order to be able to have the means to live with and support the family they love?

The late novelist, Walker Percy, faced death as one who survived his own suicide attempt. He once wrote,

The ex-suicide leaves for work at eight o’clock on an ordinary morning.

He opens his front door, sits down on the steps, and laughs.

Since he has the option of being dead,

he has nothing to lose by being alive.

He goes to work because he doesn’t have to.[5]

A second reason that self-denial is a gift of God has to do with the one we are called to follow. It is not self-denial per se that is God’s gift, but denial of self so that we may instead affirm something else. Jesus did not just say, “Get out there and start denying yourselves and you will find happiness.” He said, If you want to become my followers you should do so by denying self, taking up the cross — that is, the tasks or duties to which our faith calls us — and then follow. There is a purpose, then, in denying self, and that is in order to make room to do what is important, to become followers.

Following Jesus’ famous question to the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” to which Peter replied, “You are the Messiah,” Jesus made the predictions concerning his own suffering and death which we heard in our passage today. And Peter rebuked him, and Jesus returned his rebuke, saying “Get behind me...”

When Jesus first called Peter to be a disciple way back in the first chapter of Mark, he used the very same words in the original language that he uses here. He said, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” Though it is translated here as “Get behind me,” the words in the original language are exactly the same. Which makes sense when you think about it. How can you follow unless you get behind the one who is leading? And what had Peter revealed in his rebuke except that he thought for a moment that Jesus stood in need of his instruction? Peter had momentarily left off following Jesus and was trying to take the lead, to tell the Messiah how to be a Messiah. Jesus did not correct his course. The only way to be a follower is to follow, to get behind the one who is leading the way. The only way to be a disciple is to follow the teacher. Thomas à Kempis said, “If you bear the cross gladly, it will bear you.” If we follow the teacher, he will lead us where we need to go, whether we can see the sense of it at the time or not.

Someone once asked if it would make a difference if Jesus had changed the order of his command to those who would follow him. He said, deny self, take up your cross, and follow. What if the order were changed, would it make a difference? If he had said, “Follow me, then deny yourself, and eventually take up your cross,” wouldn’t followers fall by the wayside before the end? Or if he had said, “Take up your cross, follow me, and deny yourself,” wouldn’t there be many who would turn aside before they began, struck by the impossibility of finding inner resources to bear the cross unless they first followed the Master?

The first step along the road to faith is the laying aside of self, the setting aside of our own demands for the kind of Lord we think Jesus should be, and preparing to follow the kind of Lord he is by emptying out our selfish demands in order to make room for the demands of a life of faith. Even when Jesus disciplines, as he disciplined Peter with his hard words, he does not say “Get out of my sight,” but rather, reminds us to follow. The chief duty of the disciple is to be emptied enough of self-direction to get behind the Master, and in following him to discover where we most needed to go all along.

Paul said, “Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”[6]

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[1] William Somerset Maugham, A Writer’s Notebook.

[2] Man and the Superman, “Maxims: Self-sacrifice”

[3] The Screwtape Letters.

[4] ibid.

[5] From a Protestant Hour sermon by the Rev. Winifred Collin, February 23, 1997.

[6] I Corinthians 1:26-31

Spirit Driven

Spirit Driven

Communion Meditation

Mark 1: 9-15

© 2012, Robert J. Elder, Pastor

1st Sunday in Lent, February 26, 2012

As we begin our Lenten journey this week, Mark’s gospel starts us off with the beginnings of the ministry of Jesus.

It is true that Mark is the shortest of the gospels, shortest by far. And it is also true that the other gospels contain many details of Jesus’ life and ministry that Mark does not. As Fred Craddock, teacher of preaching to at least three generations of preachers now, once reflected[1], it is difficult to listen to one gospel passage when the other gospels are in the room talking about the same subject, and often with more detail – and for that reason, in ways that are more familiar. Mark, writing with such brevity that we could miss the importance of his words if we weren’t paying attention, relates three major events:

· Jesus’ baptism,

· Jesus’ temptation in the desert,

· Jesus’ first preaching of the good news in Galilee.

The sequence of these three things is significant, not simply because it seems to be the familiar order of things to us, but because - as the subject of a new exodus - Jesus retraces the journey of Israel:

· His baptism is reminiscent of Israel’s walk through the Red Sea, escaping from slavery among the Egyptians by means of water;

· His 40 days of struggle in the desert recall Israel’s 40 years of wandering in the wilderness;

· The good news he proclaims reminds us of God’s fulfilled promise when Israel entered the promised land.

And though his account is supremely brief, sometimes Mark surprises by what he does write. For instance, in the very brief words about his baptism we hear that “as he was coming up out of the water, [Jesus] saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him,” calling to mind, for the discerning among us, the words of the prophet Isaiah, a favorite of the gospel writers, where Isaiah prays earnestly for God’s holy intervention:

64:1 O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,

so that the mountains would quake at your presence —

2 as when fire kindles brushwood

and the fire causes water to boil —

to make your name known to your adversaries,

so that the nations might tremble at your presence! NRSV

This is exactly what happened to Jesus that day at the Jordan river. As he was coming up from the water, Mark says, Jesus “saw the heavens torn apart...” That tearing of the heavens is described using exactly the same word Mark uses at the end of his gospel when Jesus uttered his loud cry from the cross and the curtain of the Temple was also torn in two.

Here also in our gospel passage for today, we have something unique in Mark’s account of the temptation of Christ that intrigues me every time I run across it. While Matthew records “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit,” and Luke writes, “Jesus was led by the Spirit,” in Mark, immediately upon receiving loving words from the heavenly voice, the gospel portrays the action of the Spirit in a much sterner and forceful way: “And the Spirit immediately drove[2] him out into the wilderness.”

That particular turn of phrase strikes me with the difference between going along willingly and being dragged kicking and screaming. In fact, the verb that Mark uses of the Spirit driving Jesus to the wilderness is the same one used to describe driving the money changers from the Temple toward the end of the gospel, and the driving out of demons by Jesus in four other places in the gospel (1:34, 39; 3:15; 6:13).

So why does Jesus go? Because Jesus goes where the news has all been bad to proclaim the news that is good. Mark says “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts.” Mark is again thinking of Isaiah as he proclaims the coming of the Messiah, Isaiah who wrote[3], in a passage that is often read during Advent’s expectation of the coming of the Messiah:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,

the desert shall rejoice and blossom...

like the crocus...

... They shall see the glory of the LORD,

the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands,

and make firm the feeble knees.

Say to those who are of a fearful heart,

“Be strong, do not fear!

Here is your God.

He will come with vengeance,

with terrible recompense.

He will come and save you.”

No lion shall be there,

nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it;

they shall not be found there,

but the redeemed shall walk there. NRSV

In an account of Jesus’ ministry in which only Satan, wild beasts and ministering angels are with him, by reading and listening for understanding, we discover that we, too, are present there in the desert. We know what it is to be dealing with wild beasts out there in the wilderness of our lives. Rising crime rates, desperate striving to make ends meet in a fast-fading economy, grappling with family problems, addictions, the beasts greet us at every turn, and there we are in the wilderness wrestling with them. Then, over the horizon, we see a distant figure coming closer and closer. It is the baptized One, Jesus of Nazareth, driven to our encounters with our own wild beasts by the very Spirit of God: coming to us, to you and me. Being baptized and having the presence and power of the Holy Spirit granted to us is no insulation against real struggles with the forces of evil. Rather, the presence of the risen Christ promises us we are not alone in our struggles. “He was tempted, as we are, yet without sin,” says the author of Hebrews (4:15). His temptation was as real as ours, and just as deceptive. As Professor Fred Craddock once said, “No self-respecting Satan would approach a person with offers of personal, social and professional ruin. That is in the small print at the bottom of the temptation.”[4]

No, here, today we have in this sacrament Jesus laid before us, and in the stories about him, a promise of real help, a real messiah. In the end, baptized and tested, Jesus turns to the world – to us – and says, “the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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[1] “Test Run,” by Fred Craddock, Christian Century, February 22, 2003, p. 21.

[2] ekballei

[3] Isaiah 35:1-9 selected verses.

[4] “Test Run,” by Fred Craddock, Christian Century, February 22, 2003, p. 21.

Looking Up: Looking Out

Looking Up: Looking Out

copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, Pastor

Mark 9:2-9 – Transfiguration Sunday: February 19, 2012

This passage serves as a gift to the church as we prepare to enter into the season of Lent beginning with Ash Wednesday this coming week. At the outset, it is important to realize that this fantastic vision of the transfigured Jesus In Mark’s gospel follows upon the hard prediction Jesus made concerning his own death:

“Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”[1]

Any of us who have walked through the Lenten season in the church over the years knows that even in the often pale observances in the Protestant traditions, it is not a festive time, but rather a reflective one, somber even. It is a season having to do with the darker issues of human life: betrayal, death, a tomb, fear, goodbyes around the table at a final supper. This is not a season for “Be-happy-attitudes” sermons. It is a season for delving into the fears which are so powerful as to all but disable us in our walk of faith.

So today, on the final Sunday before we enter into the somber season of Lent on Ash Wednesday this week, comes this glorious passage recounting the transfiguring experience the disciples had with Jesus on the mountain. It is a preview of the resurrection to come at the end of our Lenten journey, a gracious glimpse into the final destination of this Lenten way, and in this way it is a gift to the church and to us.

I have to tell you, though, preachers find this passage daunting. We are rational creatures, standing in a rational tradition of exposition, accustomed to rendering living experience into words on a page, one thought following logically upon another, reasoned out in order. And here we have something that defies – or at least stands outside – the capacities of reason.

Not long ago I found myself seated on an airplane next to a man who had obviously glanced over my shoulder as I read my book. The book was clearly something religious in nature, so when I spilled a little of my coffee on my tray table during a moment of turbulence, he took that as the opportune moment to pop the inevitable question for ministers riding on airplanes: “Are you a pastor?” In the course of our conversation, I learned that he was what I took to be some sort of statistician with his own business. He had helped develop an internet web site with a unique purpose. It is a site where people can make contributions to good causes that have captured their attention, where all the money they give will go to the cause they indicate, but where the receiving organization will not know the source. So funds can be given freely, yet no cascade of mailed appeals will follow in the return mail, your address will not be sold to other charitable organizations. At the least, it sounded intriguing to me. Then my new friend went on to tell me that as a secondary purpose, he hoped to use the responses of the people making these contributions through his web site to mathematically prove or disprove the Christian concept of grace. He waited for my response. The only thing I could think to say was, “I predict ambiguous results.” It has not been my experience that grace lends itself to the sorts of controls necessary to be proven or disproven. Like our story of the transfiguration, grace stands outside the capacities of reason.

How can we talk about such things as the transfiguration of Jesus? Our much-valued capacity for reason fails us in light of this report of an unearthly, glowing brilliance, of a visitation from figures long-dead, like some story out of Charles Dickens, of a voice speaking from the clouds. When Peter struggled for an appropriate word to blurt out, it didn’t even merit a response from Jesus. Even Jesus didn’t talk about it, in fact, Mark says he ordered the disciples not to talk about it until after Easter; and since they hadn’t the faintest idea then what Easter was or what it would mean, they pretty much, as Mark says, “kept the matter to themselves.” Wouldn’t you? Jesus didn’t talk about it, the disciples were forbidden to talk about it. And here we are today, challenged to talk about it.

So what are we supposed to do with it? Just let it stand there, maybe, that’s one option. It does speak for itself, really, doesn’t it? All the elements of the story speak volumes without any elaboration from us:

· Moses, who stands there as the living embodiment of the law of Israel, the bringer of commandments from Sinai.

· Elijah, the quintessential prophet of Israel, who, as a solitary voice, once confronted a tyrannical monarch and his false prophets.

· In their company stands Jesus, in garments that glowed so brightly it was – to put it bluntly – unearthly: Jesus, in his person, the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.

· And in case anyone missed the point, there was the voice from the clouds, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” Clearly, they were in the presence of the Messiah, the Son of God.

Coming, as it does, on the heels of Jesus’ prediction of his own suffering and death, this passage brings into sharp focus a holy moment, made more holy by the very recognition that it shall not last: “Just when we are safest,” poet Robert Browning once wrote, “there is a sunset touch.”[2]

John Killinger, teacher of a generation of preachers, once reflected upon a transfiguring moment in his own life. “... it hit me one day as I was sitting in the chancel of a church, waiting to deliver the guest sermon. A beautiful woman was playing a violin solo. Her lovely hands worked continuously at the strings and the bow, evoking the most soulful music I thought I had ever heard. There was a rose pinned in her exquisitely coiffed hair. I was transported. Then a dark thought crossed my mind, as if it had been a cloud passing between me and the sun. In a few years the woman would become old. The rose in her hair would die. Her soft hands would be gnarled and wrinkled by age. She would stop playing the instrument. She would be confined to a bed or a wheelchair. Then she, too, would die.”[3]

Morbid-sounding isn’t it, this line of thinking? But we all must surely know the moments in our own lives when for an instant the curtain is drawn back and we see the future, come to know what tomorrow holds. It is always transforming to stand, even for just that flash of a second, in the presence of the future.

I used to run for exercise until a torn bit of cartilage in my knee put me out of the running business. But back in those days, I recall that my little daughters used to like to race their dad. It was fun, and of course, I could beat them running backwards or sideways. But I would always keep the race close to prolong the fun. You know what happened. The day dawned – I don’t even recall precisely when it might have been, but the exact date doesn’t matter – the time came when not only could I no longer play this game, but I could not outrun them if I went at it with all my strength. And in my more honest reflections, I realize this is a trend that will not stop. It is a transfiguring thought to acknowledge the passing of time in such a way, to glimpse a future in which we are no longer the strong ones, the competent ones, the robust and healthy ones, but where we become the dependent ones, the weaker ones.

On the high mountain, apart from the present world that crowded in around them, those three disciples, Peter, James and John, knew something of the future, that death would not be the end, no matter how final it seemed. They glimpsed the future of a world in which Jesus is Lord. But they were only granted this vision after first learning that the Messiah must “suffer many things, and be rejected...and be killed.”

I don’t know if you ever talk to people who tell you they have visions, I suspect not many of you do, though I’m willing to be surprised. In our culture we have grown distrustful of otherwise ordinary people who make visionary claims. But pastors get to hear this from time to time, and while I retain as healthy a skepticism as anyone else, I no longer dismiss these reports out of hand. People see things, they recognize things, things come to them in ways neither they nor we would expect, and they sometimes call them visions. That’s OK with me. The key, I believe, is whether their visions are disabling or enabling.

Peter and James and John had their high-mountain vision, they caught that brief glimpse of what the future was to hold, what one preacher called a cracked door “between this world and some other, brighter place...”[4] but then they knew the future had not yet come. They had to descend the mountain, and along the way Jesus told them to keep this little episode to themselves – who could understand it anyway? They could barely figure out what had happened themselves. Down they went, back to a world not-yet redeemed, where that suffering which Jesus predicted for himself – and for them – was still to come. Yet they knew in a way they had not known before that it was not suffering which would have the final word, but glory. The dazzling glory of the Son, the Beloved, the One to whom – if voices from clouds are to be believed – we would do well to listen.

copyright © 2012 Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved

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[1] Mark 8:31, NRSV

[2] Robert Browning, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”.

[3] John Killinger, Letting God Bless You, (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), p. 75.

[4] Barbara Brown Taylor, Home By Another Way, (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1999), p. 58.