Today is the Last Sunday after the Epiphany and, as it is the use, we hear the story of the Transfiguration. There are actually two ways of looking at this story, and the lectionary gives us the option to do either one of them: We can, if you will, read the “theatrical version”, the short one, or the “director’s cut”, the extended one, as we just did. We’ve read the story of what happened up there in the mountain, this beautiful vision the disciples had of Jesus praying and talking with Moses and Elijah, surrounded by incredible light and even hearing the voice of God, and it seems to be the heart of the story, the main event, and then we’ve heard about additional details, that seem indeed like details, what happened when Jesus and the disciples went down the mountain and how Jesus performed again another healing on a boy bound by a spirit. We can see though why Luke would have chosen for us to hear how the story ends: it certainly add some contrast and some depth to the story. Holiness is opposed to evil, beauty to ugliness, joy is opposed to pain, or maybe it’s the other way around, but we certainly go from one opposite to the other. This extended story has sometimes been compared for us Christians to “a Sunday versus every other day of the week”, from worshiping to living in the world, and well, maybe there could be some of that. We also know that in general our lives are made of back and forth between different moments but before we come to that, more simply, in Luke’s mind, as in every other Jews’ mind, going back and forth on the mountain was simply Moses’s job description: From God to the people, and then back to God again which is exactly what our first reading from the book of Exodus is about.
In fact, if we pay attention, there are actually many allusions to Moses in our story that may not or may not strike us at first hearing: the mountain, we’ve just mentioned that, where Moses received the ten commandments, Moses himself of course, talking with Jesus and Elijah, the cloud, that preceded the Israelites in the wilderness, the voice of God quite evidently, and then something we may miss entirely: The mention of Jesus’s departure, which in Luke’s words in Greek (that our translation in English misses entirely) is called literally his “Exodus”. And it’s important to notice because in Luke’s mind it means that not only Jesus is a new Moses, and we knew that since we have heard Jesus’s teaching about the Law in the past two weeks, Jesus has also to do what Moses did by leading a new Exodus, an Exodus that will take place in Jerusalem after Jesus has announced his passion. One could say that Jesus is going to lead the real Exodus on behalf of the people, not from Egypt to the Promised Land this time, but from bondage to sin and death to the freedom found in forgiveness and Resurrection to Eternal life. And this is something we see much better if we have the “director’s cut”, the extended version of the Transfiguration, the healing of the boy, that functions as a mirror to what Jesus has just shown the disciples: He is going to deliver the suffering son who is possessed, an image of the people, and give him back to the Father healed and purified. And so the whole thing is a very spiritual and beautiful story about Jesus’s identity and mission, and it’s not a surprise that we find it right in the middle of Luke’s Gospel, as a climax to Jesus’s progressive revelation to his disciples: Now we finally know who Jesus is, and what he has come to do. Now we finally know.
Or do we, really? We can ponder the power of the story of the Transfiguration but one thing we may miss, or classify as another detail, is the role of the disciples which, as usual, is a message also directed towards us who strive to follow Jesus, and we may have to admit that there is no happy place for us to be in this Gospel when we compare ourselves to the disciples. Maybe we see ourselves with the three on the mountain, the disciples who miss so completely what it’s all about that they almost fall asleep and Luke mentions, speaking of Peter: He was not knowing what he was saying, Peterwho literally cannot sit and stay to rejoice with the vision, or maybe we feel for the nine other disciples left behind in the valley, who although they have been given authority over demons before, are now completely unable to help the man whose son is suffering. One thing is sure in the end though and it’s this crazy outburst of Jesus against all of them which should send us chills through the spine and shake us to the core: “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer should I be with you and bear with you?”. As you may remember from a previous sermon, generation in the Bible is not necessarily about specific people at a specific time, a generation can very well refer to those who have been engendered by women, that is the human race in its entirety, and we have to assume that those very harsh words from Jesus, they’re also for us. And so, I spent much time this week pondering that and trying to understand: Why is Jesus so mad? Is he mad that his disciples cannot make a miracle? But then isn’t it quite unfair? We have talked this week about unanswered prayers and we know we all fail at miracles. A few months ago I was on a pastoral visit with someone who had just had surgery and during my visit, my parishioner’s wife showed up and as she was asking if things were better, he said to her as a joke that now I had prayed everything was going to be all right and all the pain would go away! And I certainly wish I could pray like that but of course we all know that no matter how hard we pray, pain and disease are still there. And so I kept asking the Gospel: Why is Jesus so mad? And then, that happened, at some point I could hear the text asking me back: Well, aren’t you? Aren’t you mad? Aren’t you angry? and I would like this morning to turn back this question to all of us: We don’t like it when Jesus is angry, we want Jesus to be calm and collected at all times, but then what about ourselves? Aren’t we mad? Aren’t we angry? Not only anger is a human emotion, but way beyond that, doesn‘t it feel like it can be quite an appropriate reaction, in some circumstances, isn’t anger the right place to be? The place that demands things to change, the place that demands justice? Doesn’t it feel at times that we indeed belong to a faithless and perverse generation, and aren’t weary and sick to the core with its lies, as a friend of mine confessed to me this week?
Now what does Jesus’s anger mean? Well, to understand it, once again we have to turn back to Exodus because the word Jesus uses are exactly the words used to describe what’s going on with the people in the wilderness. When Moses walks down the mountain after seeing God face to face and receiving the commandments, he finds that the people have made for themselves another god and are worshiping the golden calf. Why is Jesus so angry? Because again the disciples have taken his name in vain, making it empty, they have been given authority against demons and can’t cast them out, that is, not that they fail to make miracles, the issue is that Jesus’s followers talk about Jesus and in Jesus’s name but they fail to address the evil that binds the people, the evil Jesus has come to defeat. Taking God’s name in vain is not about starting a sentence with the J or the G word, it is about making his name empty (of significance) because we don’t act on what we believe: We fail to address evil, and that is faithlessness, or we even cover up our wrongs by using God’s name, trying to make look good and right what is evil, and that is perversity.
Jesus is mad and if we aren’t, maybe we should and then should do something about it because anger is our warning sign that something needs to change, demands to be addressed. The thing is, it’s easy to get mad at others, to feel hateful and bitter or categorize some people as evil, not acknowledging that, like it or not, we belong to the same generation. We are one people. And if we’re not perverse, covering our wrongs claiming it’s God’s will, who can say they’re not, at times, faithless like the disciples? Failing to address what destroys the people, keeps them in bondage, increases their suffering. We also talked this week about how we shouldn’t pray without being ready to act on it. Jesus’s words aren’t meant to condemn the disciples, but to wake them up and to warm them from the danger they’re in, or even the danger they can become to others, if they fall into apathy. Jesus’s anger is not meant to threaten us, but to protect us, to save us, including from ourselves. Jesus was very clear about sin, he also never condemned anyone, always had hope people will turn back from evil and convert, and that was all the sense of his mission. But it is our mission too. Evil can only be defeated in Christ’s Exodus, in his death and Resurrection,but we are asked to participate in the work when we can, as we can, even in little things. Church shouldn’t be our spiritual bubble, our tent on the mountain where we take refuge from all that is wrong with the world. We certainly need church to be fed, encouraged and restored, but we are also called to do the concrete work Jesus has been doing. The story of the Transfiguration is about how Jesus reflects God’s glory but then we are asked in return: How do we reflect Christ in our lives and the work of his new Exodus. That’s I guess a question we will have to ponder during Lent: How do we take the necessary steps to defeat evil?