Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Peter 1:16-21; St Matthew 17:1-9
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
The Transfiguration of our Lord follows six days after the first clear revelation of His coming Cross and Passion. Simon Peter had just given his great confession, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus explained what this would mean: that He must be handed over to suffering and death, and that He would be raised again on the third day. At that point Peter rebuked the Lord, insisting that He should by no means suffer and die. The Lord rebuked Peter in return, for His Cross is according to the will of God. Not only that, but those who would be disciples of Jesus must deny themselves, take up the Cross, and follow after Him.
Jesus went on to say that some of those who were standing there with Him would not taste death until they had seen the coming of His Kingdom. And after six days Jesus took with Him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them. They beheld His Glory, but they still did not understand.
The Transfiguration of our Lord is a confirmation of His coming Cross and Passion, which are the way He comes into His Kingdom. As such, His Transfiguration is a visible manifestation of the divine Glory that is otherwise hidden under the Cross in this valley of shadows, sin, and death.
Thus one of those two ancient fathers who appear with Jesus in His Glory on the mountain is the Prophet Elijah. For he was also summoned, in his own day, to the Mountain of the Lord, to receive a revelation of the true divine Glory, contrary to all the wisdom and reason of his man feelings and experience.
Remember that story? It was at the point when Elijah felt as though the whole world were against him. He was suffering for the sake of the Lord’s Word, because of His faithful preaching of that Word. And for all of that, in utter despair, Elijah finally sat down in disgust under a tree and prayed that he could just give up and die.
In response to that miserable prayer, the Lord took Elijah on a journey to Mt Sinai, where the Lord had once met with Moses and established His Covenant with Israel. There, on that holy mountain, the Lord reassured Elijah that he was not alone in his faithfulness and suffering. There were still 7000 people in Israel who had not joined in the worship of pagan gods. Even more, the Lord Himself was with His people, inlacing Elijah, not only in the bombastic power and might of earthquakes and hurricanes and raging fires, but rather, with His Spirit in the simple speaking of His Word. His divine power and glory were manifested in such weakness.
So does Elijah witness, again the power and glory of God now manifested in the weakness of this Man, Jesus Christ, steadfastly set on His way to the Cross. For He is the Voice of the Lord, the Word made Flesh. Listen to Him. Pay close attention to His preaching and teaching. Though His appearance is deceiving, by His suffering and death He will will redeem the world.
The same glory and significance of the Christ who will be crucified is also witnessed and confessed by Moses on the mountain with Jesus this morning. Just as he once beheld the Glory of God on Mt Sinai in the Exodus, a glory which shown reflected upon his face, so does he now behold the unreflected Light of the Revelation of the Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ, the source of Light and Life, on His way to die.
You have heard the Old Testament story. At the foot of the mountain, Moses sealed the Covenant between the Lord and His people by the sacrifice of oxen to the Lord, the blood of which he sprinkled first on the Altar and then on the people. Then Moses and Joshua, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seven of the elders of Israel went up the high mountain where they saw the Lord their God and they ate and drank in His presence.
Then Moses went further up the mountain, with no one else but Joshua, the Old Testament Jesus, and the cloud of the Glory of the Lord covered the mountain. Six days later, on the seventh day, the Lord called Moses into the midst of that cloud, which was the visible manifestation of God’s gracious presence among His people.
It was in that glorious divine cloud on Mt Sinai, for the next forty days and nights, that the Lord revealed to Moses the detailed and precise instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle, for the institution of the Old Testament Priesthood, and for all the Sacrifices, all of which pointed forward to the coming of the Christ, the Word tabernacled among us, and for His Sacrifice for all people as our merciful and great High Priest.
When the Tabernacle was completed and the Ark of the Covenant was placed in the Holy of Holies, the cloud of the Glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. This was the way and the means of God’s gracious and abiding presence with and for His people.
And it is that same bright cloud which covers the Mount of Transfiguration this morning! It identifies the New Testament Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, as the very Tabernacle of God on earth as it is in heaven. He is both the Priest and the Sacrifice. By His Cross, with His own Body and Blood, He becomes the Covenant between the Lord and His people, even to the close of the age.
This all sheds some light on Peter’s well meant, but misguided, proposal to build three tabernacles there on the mountain. One for Jesus and one each for Moses and Elijah. For it was in the cloud on the mountain that Moses had received the Lord’s instructions for the Old Testament Tabernacle. And again, the same cloud filled the Tabernacle when it was finished. Then the Lord even instituted the Festival of Tabernacles, which was celebrated a week after the Day of Atonement each year and lasted for a full festive week.
Throughout that week the people of Israel would live in little tabernacles, little booths, just as the Lord had chosen to dwell among His people in the Tabernacle in the wilderness. Even after the people settled in the Promised Land, the Festival of Tabernacles was an annual remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, of the Covenant at Mt Sinai, and of the wandering of the people in the wilderness.
So, it made a certain kind of sense for Peter to suggest the construction of three tabernacles there on that high mountain. But he did not yet understand that the Tabernacle and the Temple and the cloud of God’s Glory were being fulfilled and superseded by the flesh and blood of Jesus!
Peter was still mid sentence when he Father clarified the point. There was no need for any further tabernacles. The cloud was surrounding Jesus. This Man, Jesus, who is the beloved Son of God, with whom the Father is well-pleased. There is no need to anyone or anything else. He is the true Tabernacle and Voice. The Word made Flesh. Listen to Him. Hear and heed what He says.
This is the Father’s explanation of the First Commandment: “I Am the Lord your God and your shall have no other gods before Me.” What does this mean? “You shall acknowledge and worship and believe in this Man, Jesus Christ, who is My beloved Son in the flesh, and you shall listen only to Him.” We have no Lord, nor Father in heaven, nor Holy Spirit, except in this Man, Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, who is to be crucified, dead, and buried.
There is no other God than this only begotten Son of the Father, who has been made Flesh and tabernacles among us. Who has indeed been crucified for us men and for our salvation. For the Lord our God reveals Himself and gives Himself to you in the flesh of Jesus Christ. And God the Father speaks to you by the Word of His Son, who is Himself the Incarnate Word of God.
It is in His suffering and death, in His Cross and Crucifixion, that He manifests God’s gracious presence and power to save. That is His divine Glory. For it is by His Cross and Passion that He forgives sin, saves sinners, and establishes the New Covenant in His Blood between God and man. And it is from His Cross that He gives Himself, His Body and Blood, His forgiveness, life, and salvation, to His people in the Temple of His Body, the Church, in which you also now live by His grace.
Because you are forgiven by and from His Cross, because your life and salvation are in the flesh of Christ the Crucified, your Christian faith and life are defined and shaped by the Cross of Christ. So do you carry His Cross and live under His Cross in all of your relationships. In all of your love and service to your neighbor in Jesus’ Name. His Cross is your glory as a Christian.
If that seem inside-out and upside-down, consider that the sort of glory you might think you want or need, would bring you to your knees and crush and destroy you. You are a sinner who deserves nothing else than temporal and eternal punishment. But, Christ be praised, that sort of power and glory is not the height of divine Glory. No, the true Glory of God is chiefly made known in His Self-sacrificing love and mercy toward sinners. In His forgiveness of sins. In His gracious gifts of divine life and salvation.
The height of divine Glory is found in Christ Jesus, the Crucified One, in His sacrificial flesh and blood. Not at the top of the high mountain, but first of all lifted up and nailed to the Cross, buried in the tomb, in the dust of the earth, and only then resurrection and ascended to the Right Hand of the Father in heaven. All for the sake of redeeming you, a lost and condemned person, and bringing you with Himself to live under Him in His Kingdom.
There is no short-cut to this divine Glory. Not for Jesus. Nor for His disciples whom He saves. The true divine Glory is found only by way of His Cross. The Cross of Christ the Crucified. You share in this Cross by virtue of your Holy Baptism and the fruits of which you receive in the Holy Communion of His Body and Blood. You share in His sufferings, then, in this life, this side of eternal glory. But so do you also share in His Resurrection and His Life, not only there and then, but here and now.
That’s why Peter was wrong in wanting to remain on the mountain, as though to savor the glory of Christ without the Cross. Just as Peter was quite wrong the week before, when he tried to prevent the Christ, the Son of the living God, from going to His necessary Cross and Passion. You cannot have one without the other. No Cross no Christ. No Cross no Christian.
In contrast to St Peter’s misunderstanding and misguided zeal, Jesus actually forbids the disciples even to mention His glorious Transfiguration until after His Resurrection from the dead. Why? Because the divine Glory of the Transfiguration is accomplished in the Body of Christ Jesus, for you and for all, by His innocent suffering and death. He is transfigured by the Cross for your salvation, as Isaiah says, that you might be conformed to His Image and die and rise with Him in His Glory.
Thus you are called, as a disciple, to see and hear no one by Jesus only. Specifically this Jesus of frail flesh and blood, who goes to the Cross to suffer and die. It is the Glory of His Cross that you are invited to share. It is His Word of the Cross and that you are commanded to hear and heed. It is with the Body and Blood of His Cross that He reaches out to touch you, to raise you up in His Resurrection through the forgiveness of your sins. And it is the Cross of Christ that you are given to bear and carry from the waters of your Baptism through this valley of the shadow of death, unto the death and resurrection of your own body.
It is by this Cross of Christ that your own flesh and blood, your own body and life, are transfigured into the divine image and glorious form of Christ the Crucified. That image and form are utterly despised and hated by the world. And by your own sinful flesh! Precisely because they are the likeness of the Cross and Crucifixion of your Lord. Yet, they are nevertheless an image and likeness that will finally be revealed in all their beautiful Glory at the last, when the Lord shall raise your lowly body of humiliation from the dust of the earth to be glorious like unto His own glorious Body. And then you shall be like Him, shining like the Sun in His righteousness and purity forever.
In the Name of the Father + and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
In the Name + of JESUS. Amen.
The Transfiguration of our Lord follows six days after the first clear revelation of His coming Cross and Passion. Simon Peter had just given his great confession, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. Jesus explained what this would mean: that He must be handed over to suffering and death, and that He would be raised again on the third day. At that point Peter rebuked the Lord, insisting that He should by no means suffer and die. The Lord rebuked Peter in return, for His Cross is according to the will of God. Not only that, but those who would be disciples of Jesus must deny themselves, take up the Cross, and follow after Him.
Jesus went on to say that some of those who were standing there with Him would not taste death until they had seen the coming of His Kingdom. And after six days Jesus took with Him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And He was transfigured before them. They beheld His Glory, but they still did not understand.
The Transfiguration of our Lord is a confirmation of His coming Cross and Passion, which are the way He comes into His Kingdom. As such, His Transfiguration is a visible manifestation of the divine Glory that is otherwise hidden under the Cross in this valley of shadows, sin, and death.
Thus one of those two ancient fathers who appear with Jesus in His Glory on the mountain is the Prophet Elijah. For he was also summoned, in his own day, to the Mountain of the Lord, to receive a revelation of the true divine Glory, contrary to all the wisdom and reason of his man feelings and experience.
Remember that story? It was at the point when Elijah felt as though the whole world were against him. He was suffering for the sake of the Lord’s Word, because of His faithful preaching of that Word. And for all of that, in utter despair, Elijah finally sat down in disgust under a tree and prayed that he could just give up and die.
In response to that miserable prayer, the Lord took Elijah on a journey to Mt Sinai, where the Lord had once met with Moses and established His Covenant with Israel. There, on that holy mountain, the Lord reassured Elijah that he was not alone in his faithfulness and suffering. There were still 7000 people in Israel who had not joined in the worship of pagan gods. Even more, the Lord Himself was with His people, inlacing Elijah, not only in the bombastic power and might of earthquakes and hurricanes and raging fires, but rather, with His Spirit in the simple speaking of His Word. His divine power and glory were manifested in such weakness.
So does Elijah witness, again the power and glory of God now manifested in the weakness of this Man, Jesus Christ, steadfastly set on His way to the Cross. For He is the Voice of the Lord, the Word made Flesh. Listen to Him. Pay close attention to His preaching and teaching. Though His appearance is deceiving, by His suffering and death He will will redeem the world.
The same glory and significance of the Christ who will be crucified is also witnessed and confessed by Moses on the mountain with Jesus this morning. Just as he once beheld the Glory of God on Mt Sinai in the Exodus, a glory which shown reflected upon his face, so does he now behold the unreflected Light of the Revelation of the Glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ, the source of Light and Life, on His way to die.
You have heard the Old Testament story. At the foot of the mountain, Moses sealed the Covenant between the Lord and His people by the sacrifice of oxen to the Lord, the blood of which he sprinkled first on the Altar and then on the people. Then Moses and Joshua, Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seven of the elders of Israel went up the high mountain where they saw the Lord their God and they ate and drank in His presence.
Then Moses went further up the mountain, with no one else but Joshua, the Old Testament Jesus, and the cloud of the Glory of the Lord covered the mountain. Six days later, on the seventh day, the Lord called Moses into the midst of that cloud, which was the visible manifestation of God’s gracious presence among His people.
It was in that glorious divine cloud on Mt Sinai, for the next forty days and nights, that the Lord revealed to Moses the detailed and precise instructions for the construction of the Tabernacle, for the institution of the Old Testament Priesthood, and for all the Sacrifices, all of which pointed forward to the coming of the Christ, the Word tabernacled among us, and for His Sacrifice for all people as our merciful and great High Priest.
When the Tabernacle was completed and the Ark of the Covenant was placed in the Holy of Holies, the cloud of the Glory of the Lord filled the Tabernacle. This was the way and the means of God’s gracious and abiding presence with and for His people.
And it is that same bright cloud which covers the Mount of Transfiguration this morning! It identifies the New Testament Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, as the very Tabernacle of God on earth as it is in heaven. He is both the Priest and the Sacrifice. By His Cross, with His own Body and Blood, He becomes the Covenant between the Lord and His people, even to the close of the age.
This all sheds some light on Peter’s well meant, but misguided, proposal to build three tabernacles there on the mountain. One for Jesus and one each for Moses and Elijah. For it was in the cloud on the mountain that Moses had received the Lord’s instructions for the Old Testament Tabernacle. And again, the same cloud filled the Tabernacle when it was finished. Then the Lord even instituted the Festival of Tabernacles, which was celebrated a week after the Day of Atonement each year and lasted for a full festive week.
Throughout that week the people of Israel would live in little tabernacles, little booths, just as the Lord had chosen to dwell among His people in the Tabernacle in the wilderness. Even after the people settled in the Promised Land, the Festival of Tabernacles was an annual remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt, of the Covenant at Mt Sinai, and of the wandering of the people in the wilderness.
So, it made a certain kind of sense for Peter to suggest the construction of three tabernacles there on that high mountain. But he did not yet understand that the Tabernacle and the Temple and the cloud of God’s Glory were being fulfilled and superseded by the flesh and blood of Jesus!
Peter was still mid sentence when he Father clarified the point. There was no need for any further tabernacles. The cloud was surrounding Jesus. This Man, Jesus, who is the beloved Son of God, with whom the Father is well-pleased. There is no need to anyone or anything else. He is the true Tabernacle and Voice. The Word made Flesh. Listen to Him. Hear and heed what He says.
This is the Father’s explanation of the First Commandment: “I Am the Lord your God and your shall have no other gods before Me.” What does this mean? “You shall acknowledge and worship and believe in this Man, Jesus Christ, who is My beloved Son in the flesh, and you shall listen only to Him.” We have no Lord, nor Father in heaven, nor Holy Spirit, except in this Man, Jesus, the incarnate Son of God, who is to be crucified, dead, and buried.
There is no other God than this only begotten Son of the Father, who has been made Flesh and tabernacles among us. Who has indeed been crucified for us men and for our salvation. For the Lord our God reveals Himself and gives Himself to you in the flesh of Jesus Christ. And God the Father speaks to you by the Word of His Son, who is Himself the Incarnate Word of God.
It is in His suffering and death, in His Cross and Crucifixion, that He manifests God’s gracious presence and power to save. That is His divine Glory. For it is by His Cross and Passion that He forgives sin, saves sinners, and establishes the New Covenant in His Blood between God and man. And it is from His Cross that He gives Himself, His Body and Blood, His forgiveness, life, and salvation, to His people in the Temple of His Body, the Church, in which you also now live by His grace.
Because you are forgiven by and from His Cross, because your life and salvation are in the flesh of Christ the Crucified, your Christian faith and life are defined and shaped by the Cross of Christ. So do you carry His Cross and live under His Cross in all of your relationships. In all of your love and service to your neighbor in Jesus’ Name. His Cross is your glory as a Christian.
If that seem inside-out and upside-down, consider that the sort of glory you might think you want or need, would bring you to your knees and crush and destroy you. You are a sinner who deserves nothing else than temporal and eternal punishment. But, Christ be praised, that sort of power and glory is not the height of divine Glory. No, the true Glory of God is chiefly made known in His Self-sacrificing love and mercy toward sinners. In His forgiveness of sins. In His gracious gifts of divine life and salvation.
The height of divine Glory is found in Christ Jesus, the Crucified One, in His sacrificial flesh and blood. Not at the top of the high mountain, but first of all lifted up and nailed to the Cross, buried in the tomb, in the dust of the earth, and only then resurrection and ascended to the Right Hand of the Father in heaven. All for the sake of redeeming you, a lost and condemned person, and bringing you with Himself to live under Him in His Kingdom.
There is no short-cut to this divine Glory. Not for Jesus. Nor for His disciples whom He saves. The true divine Glory is found only by way of His Cross. The Cross of Christ the Crucified. You share in this Cross by virtue of your Holy Baptism and the fruits of which you receive in the Holy Communion of His Body and Blood. You share in His sufferings, then, in this life, this side of eternal glory. But so do you also share in His Resurrection and His Life, not only there and then, but here and now.
That’s why Peter was wrong in wanting to remain on the mountain, as though to savor the glory of Christ without the Cross. Just as Peter was quite wrong the week before, when he tried to prevent the Christ, the Son of the living God, from going to His necessary Cross and Passion. You cannot have one without the other. No Cross no Christ. No Cross no Christian.
In contrast to St Peter’s misunderstanding and misguided zeal, Jesus actually forbids the disciples even to mention His glorious Transfiguration until after His Resurrection from the dead. Why? Because the divine Glory of the Transfiguration is accomplished in the Body of Christ Jesus, for you and for all, by His innocent suffering and death. He is transfigured by the Cross for your salvation, as Isaiah says, that you might be conformed to His Image and die and rise with Him in His Glory.
Thus you are called, as a disciple, to see and hear no one by Jesus only. Specifically this Jesus of frail flesh and blood, who goes to the Cross to suffer and die. It is the Glory of His Cross that you are invited to share. It is His Word of the Cross and that you are commanded to hear and heed. It is with the Body and Blood of His Cross that He reaches out to touch you, to raise you up in His Resurrection through the forgiveness of your sins. And it is the Cross of Christ that you are given to bear and carry from the waters of your Baptism through this valley of the shadow of death, unto the death and resurrection of your own body.
It is by this Cross of Christ that your own flesh and blood, your own body and life, are transfigured into the divine image and glorious form of Christ the Crucified. That image and form are utterly despised and hated by the world. And by your own sinful flesh! Precisely because they are the likeness of the Cross and Crucifixion of your Lord. Yet, they are nevertheless an image and likeness that will finally be revealed in all their beautiful Glory at the last, when the Lord shall raise your lowly body of humiliation from the dust of the earth to be glorious like unto His own glorious Body. And then you shall be like Him, shining like the Sun in His righteousness and purity forever.
In the Name of the Father + and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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