A Sermon on The Transfiguration

Mark 9:2-9

Preached March 3, 2003

By Donald M. Tuttle

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

Peter finally got it right, but it was not easy.

He had impetuously dropped everything to hop on board Jesus’ bandwagon, leaving kin and career behind.

He had witnessed a couple of years’ worth of healings, exorcisms and resurrections without seeming to understand what was taking place.

He had jumped out of a perfectly good boat to walk on and then sink into the sea.

And he, like the rest, had panicked when the storm began to rock their boat.

But finally he got it right. In Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked his disciples who people thought he was. “John the Baptist,” some said. “Elijah,” said others. “One of the prophets,” still others offered. But when Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” It was Peter who answered. “You are the Messiah!”

After all the mistakes, after all the problems he had had as a disciple, Peter finally got it right. Jesus was the Messiah. He was the one for which Israel had long-awaited. He was the one that was to set God’s people free. And Peter had to have been thrilled. Here he was—a fisherman of no stature, serving as the messiah’s right-hand man. Pretty cool!

But the words were barely out of Peter’s mouth when the mood began to change. Jesus started saying crazy stuff. He told the disciples that he was going to Jerusalem, that there he would be rejected by the religious leaders, that he would suffer and die. And when Peter tried to stop Jesus from saying such things, Jesus rebuked him. He even called him, “Satan!”

And then Jesus went on to tell Peter, the rest, and even the crowds that if they wanted to follow him they had to take up the cross. They had to be willing to die a most horrendous death to remain faithful.

Can you imagine Peter? Here he was, right about Jesus, or so he thought. But now he was not so sure. Was he the messiah or a maniac? Was he the anointed one or a nutty one? Was he going to set the people free or get them all killed? Peter had to have wondered.

I suspect the six days between Peter’s confession and the trip up the mountain with Jesus were some of the longest of his life. They had to have been days filled doubt and uncertainty. He had to have wondered if following Jesus was worth it, if it was really all that he had thought it to be.

Of course, our plight may never have been as severe as Peter’s. Most of us have never had to fear that we would be killed for following Jesus as Lord. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t had our doubts, our uncertainties about the faith. It is, after all, hard to argue that a man who lived and died 2000 years ago in a small, irrelevant part of the world was actually God, the creator of heaven and earth. It is hard to live one’s life much less bet one’s eternal destiny on a historically and scientifically unverifiable resurrection. It is a challenge to articulate just why it is that we believe what we believe without it seems just a matter of opinion.

The questions those who don’t believe in Jesus as Lord ask are some of the same ones that many of us who do believe ask in the stressful, uncertain moments of life.

• Is it true?
• Is Jesus the one?
• How can that be?
• Could it all be a mistake?
• Am I giving up my life to something that is really worth it?

They are tough questions. They are not answered by detailed analysis of the biblical text or carefully defined logical exploration of faith. Ultimately they can only be answered by revelation, by God revealing the truth about his Son. In the end, our confidence in Jesus comes as God allows us to glimpse the reality of who Jesus is.

That is what happened to Peter. Jesus often took Peter, James and John aside. And he did so again. This time he took them up on a mountain. It was to be time away, a time to pray. But as Jesus was praying, he was transfigured. He was transformed. His clothes began to grow whiter and whiter, whiter than any bleach could bleach. And suddenly next to him were the great leaders of Israel, Moses and Elijah, Law and Prophets, side by side. And then came the cloud, the very presence of God overshadowed them, and a voice from heaven declared: “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.”

And before Peter and the others knew it, it was all gone. Moses and Elijah had disappeared. The cloud had rolled away. The voice had ceased. All that was left was Jesus and the knowledge that he was the one. They hadn’t figured it out. God had revealed it to them.

Peter makes that affirmation in his second letter. He writes there that he and others don’t follow Jesus just because of clever stories about him. They follow Jesus because on the sacred mountain they saw his glory and heard his identity revealed by God.

Most of us will probably never experience a revelation like that given to Peter. But that doesn’t mean God doesn’t continue to reveal the truth about his son. David Bartlett tells a story about Frederick Buechner. Buechner is a Presbyterian minister and writer of some note. Yet one day as he was going home to Vermont, he was plagued by worry over his daughter. She was anorexic. She had wrongly concluded that she was overweight, that she needed to diet, that it was the only way for her to be beautiful. Of course the truth was that she was not overweight and that she was beautiful, but she couldn’t move beyond those thoughts. And they were killing her. Amid Buechner’s worries were doubts. Where was Jesus? Where was his love and power? Could he—would he—really help? Was it all just incense and nonsense?

As he was driving toward home, Buechner pulled off the interstate at a roadside rest stop, as all of us have no doubt done. But this stop was different because as Buechner pulled into the parking area, he spied a license plate. It was a vanity plate. You know the type, the kind where people get to set themselves apart or have a little fun with letters and numbers. But this plate was simple. It had only one word on it—“TRUST.”

It turned out to be the plate of a bank employee, the manager of a trust department. But that didn’t matter to Buechner. He knew it wasn’t just coincident. He knew it wasn’t just a bizarre twist of fate. He knew intuitively that it was a revelation from God—an affirmation that Jesus was the Christ and his trust in him was not misplaced. From that moment on, a great calm came over Buechner because he knew that the Jesus he loved was there for him.

Bartlett points out that similar moments occur all the time—many of them in worship. They are the moments in which a phrase from a song speaks to us; when some story told is, in reality, our story; when a passage of Scriptures touches not only our mind but also our heart; when we catch a vision, a vision we may not even be able to explain, and know it is from God. These are the moments when the confidence we expressed in Jesus by faith is confirmed by a revelation from God. These are the moments when we know we got it right.

Of course, you know the rest of the story. Peter had to come down off that mountain. What awaited him was not easy. We would walk along beside Jesus all the way to Jerusalem. He would witness his Lord’s torment in the garden, his arrest at the hands of a mob, and his unjust crucifixion. He would at times flee his Lord, and even denied him three times to save his own skin. Yet despite all his failure, all of his weaknesses, when it came time on Pentecost to testify to Jesus as the Messiah, it was Peter who stood up, Peter who spoke, Peter who could say, “I know Jesus is the Christ, the son of the Living God, because I have seen his glory.”

That is the testimony we have to offer the world today.