A Sermon on Matthew 17:1-9

Preached February 10, 2002

By Donald M. Tuttle

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

Have you seen CSI yet? It is a new television show that revolves around Crime Scene Investigators in Las Vegas. They are a group of coroners, scientists and detectives who gather up the most infinitesimal bits of evidence, put it all together and solve the latest Las Vegas murder. It is sort of "Quincy" with an ensemble cast and without the humor.

I have to tell you, it is one of my favorite new shows. And I am not alone. Last week it finished sixth in the Nielsen ratings—and two of the shows that beat it were the Super Bowl and the Super Bowl Post-Game Show. That’s not bad for a show about people who spend their days and nights hovering over dead bodies.

But why do so many of us find the show appealing? Soon after it appeared, one critic said that what makes CSI attractive is that it appeals to our desire for certainty. In an age where legal proceedings have include watching Rodney King beaten but those who beat him acquitted, debates over the meaning of the word "is," and a having a jury convinced that if the gloves don’t fit, they must acquit, the idea that justice can be assured through objectivity and rationality, science and technology is appealing. It appeals to the notion that objective analysis, rational thought, scientific capabilities can solve any problem and unravel any mystery.

I am not sure that his analysis is correct, but it wouldn’t surprise me. After all, for the last three centuries we have been told that the thoroughly modern mind rejects instincts and emotions, superstitions and myths, and trusts only logic, rationality, objectivity and science. Here is a show that affirms the mindset into which we have been indoctrinated.

Of course, it is just that mindset that makes the story of the Transfiguration hard to swallow. Our modern minds are comfortable with the teachings of Jesus. They make sense. The healing stories cause us a few problems, but we can always conclude they were psychological—the mind healing the body. We can even come up with some rational explanation for Jesus’ other miracles. "He didn’t multiply the loaves, people shared." "He didn’t really walk on the water, the disciples just didn’t realize that they were close to the shore." "Jesus didn’t raise Lazarus from the dead, he was just in a coma and awoke." Our modern minds can demythologize most of what we read about Jesus.

But then there is the story of the Transfiguration. It doesn’t fit within the confines of our modern minds. We just can’t seem to explain what happened on the mountain. It’s not something we have in our experience. Most of us have never known anyone who glowed like Jesus reportedly glowed. Most of us have never seen people who have been dead for centuries. Most of us have never heard God speaking from out of a cloud. This kind of story doesn’t make a lot of sense to us.

Yet here it is—the Transfiguration. It is part of Holy Scripture—such an important part in fact that Matthew, Mark and Luke all included it. It is so important that for centuries the church has directed that it be read every year on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. That means it demands our attention—but what do we do with it? What do we do with a story that defies all that we have been taught to think?

Let me suggest that the story of the Transfiguration reminds us that for all our intellectualizing about Jesus, for all our pretense about "deciding to follow him as Lord and Savior, we are incapable of understanding who Jesus is and what he has done without God telling us. We simply can’t understand it until God reveals it too us. In reality, our declaration of faith is not the rational conclusion we reach after studying the life and ministry of Jesus. It is saying "yes" to that moment of revelation God provides.

The Gospel of Matthew makes this clear. Six days before the Transfiguration, Jesus and his disciples were in Caesarea Philippi. While they were there, Jesus asked them who people thought that he was. They told him that some thought he was John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. Then he asked them who they thought he was. And Simon Peter answered: "You are the Christ, the son of the Living God." Peter rightly identified Jesus. But what follows is significant. Jesus says to Peter: "Blessed are you, Simon, son of Jonah. For flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven."

What does that mean? It means that Peter didn’t weigh the evidence and conclude that Jesus was the Christ. He didn’t make a through analysis and reach a dispassionate conclusion. He recognized Jesus for who Jesus really was only because some how, some way, God granted him that insight, God revealed it to him.

The story of the Transfiguration confirms that revelation. Peter, James and John are on the mountain with Jesus. Before their very eyes, Jesus is transfigured; he glows with the divine presence. Moses and Elijah appear and converse with Jesus. Then a bright cloud overtakes them, and a voice, the voice of God, thunders forth: "This is my Son, the beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!"

What ever the disciples might have thought about Jesus before--that he was a great teacher or healer or miracle worker—they now knew he was the one sent from God. They reached that conclusion not because they had figured it out, not because they were wise, not because they had decided he was the messiah, but because God revealed it.

The revelatory action of God continues. As an intellectual, poet and critic—not to mention an atheist—Joy Davidman had ridiculed the Francis Thompson poem "Hound of Heaven." She had called it a "piece of phony rhetoric." But after an experience of the mysterious divine presence one night, Joy began to search for understanding. She wanted to know more, to grasp the God she felt had come in to her lonely existence. And so she picked up Thompson’s poem and began once more to read it:

Suddenly, it all made sense. Suddenly, she understood the one from whom she had tried to flee. Suddenly, she knew that it was Jesus that was the one sent from God. It was not some rational, objective, dispassionate conclusion. It was revelation, pure and simple.

Of course, such moments need not be so dramatic. Most of God’s revelations probably aren’t. Yet they are revealing nonetheless. She had been away from the church for quite some time, but then one Sunday she returned. She was there again the next Sunday and the Sunday after that. And the pastor asked here why she had returned.

She told him she had been drawn there by "a feeling¼ a feeling of being drawn toward something, someone," a feeling she wasn’t even aware of until one recent Sunday morning. She said that that morning, toward the end of the service, as the congregation was standing and the choir was singing, suddenly she was, in her words, "taken up." She said it was as if she had lost consciousness or maybe gained it. It was as if she were alone, standing in the chapel, a soft, warm, wonderful light bathing her. She said that when she came to, the choir was finishing. The congregation was still standing. Nothing seemed to have changed—except her. In that moment, a moment so powerful that she was left trembling, she was changed. "Now," she told the pastor, "I believe." What had happened? Christ had been revealed.

I am a person who imagines himself to have a thoroughly modern mind. I value the objective, the rational, the scientific. I want to understand everything that I can. I watch CSI, and I love it.

But faith that has no place for the mysterious and revelatory work of God soon becomes as dead as the corpses they autopsy on TV.

It is my hope that we might be open to those moments when God pulls back the curtain, those moments when something inexplicable yet amazing happens, those moments when suddenly we see Jesus for who he really is—God’s beloved Son. If we can be open to such moments, then we too can be transfigured, empowered to listen to and obey our Lord.