The Transfiguration: Jesus's Enlightenment Experience

Have you ever been to a mountaintop? Have you ever had a mountaintop experience where you reached some important peak and in the process things become clearer and lighter and brighter?

Jesus’s mountaintop experience has its own Sunday. It comes just before Lent every year. Of course, I’m talking about the Transfiguration which I just shared from in Luke 9.

It’s quite a moment!

We might call it Jesus’s enlightenment experience.

As is often the case, for Jesus, this enlightenment begins with prayer and, I’d like to think, some kind of meditation.

The transfiguration happens eight days after Jesus lets his disciples know how all of this will end – with him on a cross. He will deny himself, take up a cross, and lose his life to save. He says follow me in doing that in your own way. The disciples have 8 days to mull this over.

Jesus takes Peter and the brothers of thunder, James and John to the top of a mountain. Mount Tabor, scholars believe.

As Jesus was praying, something spectacular, other-worldly happened. Jesus’s face somehow changed in appearance. His clothes began to glow as bright as lightning, Luke notes. James and John, the sons of thunder, are there to witness Jesus transform into lightning, a lightning that will take their thunder and use it for good.

Then, Moses and Elijah appear. Moses, the superman of the Jewish people then and now, the one who led the Exodus, Israel’s liberation out of Egypt, he’s there. Elijah, the batman of the Jewish people who in Jesus’s day was as popular and venerated as Moses. Everyone was waiting for Elijah to return in the way he left this world. Elijah’s personal exodus via a chariot bound for heaven, the people waited for him to return in that chariot and bring fire down from heaven. His return will initiate Israel’s exodus, another exodus, their freedom from Roman occupation.

Moses and Elijah represent enlightened, sainted figures who know the meaning of liberation. They return as enlightened witnesses to Jesus’ enlightenment moment.

Verse 31 states, “They appeared in glory and were speaking about [Jesus’s] exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.”

Everything points to the cross.

This liberation talk is key to understanding what’s going on. Moses and Elijah are not just witnesses of Jesus’s enlightenment moment and God’s declaration to follow, but they are witnesses to the work ahead. They are witnesses to Jesus’s chosen-ness as the new liberator. Liberation will come to Jerusalem and the world via a Roman cross.

Everything points to the cross!

Don’t forget Peter, James, and John. They’re still there. James and John, sons of thunder, their spirits are struck to the core by the lightning strike that is Christ. Their thunder is silent.

Peter, on the other hand, instead of staying silent and awe-struck, Peter needs to talk then do something. Peter arrives at the majesty of the mountaintop, and instead of just taking the moment in, he has to talk and take out his cell phone, saying we need to capture this moment! Let’s make shrines, three of them, he says. We need to cement the moment and have our heroes establish residence here on this mountain, and we all can stay here.

Like it is with people who resort to their phones instead of their hearts, Peter covers over the poignancy and power of the moment.

And so, clouds roll in and overshadow not just him but also James and John, blocking out the Christ-light that once enveloped them. Peter breaks the awe-inspired silence of the moment, and he ruins it not just for himself, but for his comrades too. That’s usually the way it works.

Enveloped by clouds instead of light, the disciples hear an inescapable voice coming from those clouds. God’s words cannot be clouded over or cloud covered.

The words that boom out of heaven are what the Eastern Orthodox traditions calls the words of deification.

The God of the universe speaks, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” 

Father God wants none of this talk of enshrining the moment. Just listen! Stop talking. Stop trying to capture things. And just listen. And then, follow. There’s more work to be done.

God stops speaking. The silence is golden. Jesus is now alone. He must remain on earth, his comrades Moses and Elijah gone back to God’s realm. He must leave the mountain and go down to the valley below.

Christ’s uniqueness is affirmed by the fact that he alone remains to do the work of liberation that awaits him, a complete, universe-in-scope liberation that will restore all of creation back to God. Only he can fix it!

Jesus tells his disciples, Put this behind you for now. We’ve got to leave this mountain. The mission is down below and is not yet complete.

We go from this mountaintop experience to a valley-bottom one rather quickly.

 

The next day, a crowd awaits them. Loud and boisterous, this crowd. What happens next can best be described as the anti-transfiguration. It’s amazing how the story which follows is the reverse of the Transfiguration narrative we just heard.

The heavenly father and his heavenly son experiencing an enlightenment moment on Mount Tabor, this is followed by an earthly father and his earthly son experiencing an endarkenment moment in the valley below.

A father presents his only son to Jesus. The boy is in desperate need of help, healing, liberation, an exodus. His father is desperate for the same.

This son is transfigured by darkness.

Father God declared Jesus, his only son, and divinely chosen. The father here declares his only son to be chosen by evil.

Only Christ can fix it! Christ is liberator, after all. He said it himself just a few chapters ago! Jesus is the exodus for those oppressed and victimized!

Enlightenment will confront this endarkenment. The chosen one will liberate the one seized by evil.  

The disciples tried. But they’re not “there” yet. Only light in full shine can wipe away such darkness.

Jesus healing and liberating people is a common narrative in the gospels. But there’s a phrase in our story that is uncommon. It sticks out like a sore thumb. Jesus is, well, sore. He’s exasperated.

Verse 41 says, “Jesus answered, “You faithless and perverse generation, how much longer must I be with you and put up with you?”

Jesus has gone from the mountaintop to this. And Jesus is done! He is done with this world and its valley-bottom ways. He is done with the waywardness and callousness all around. I can’t wait to get the hell out of this hell. I can’t wait for the time I don’t have to put up with such foolishness.

Jesus, in verse 41, also seems to connect the collective ills of his generation to the boy’s ills. The boy’s condition is a product of his society’s condition. The evil-seized boy is a symptom of the culture’s waywardness. If this generation weren’t so unfaithful to God’s ways, if the surrounding culture didn’t corrupt, pervert, and distort the good and God’s law of love, there’d be no breeding ground for evil and this boy wouldn’t be suffering so.

Yet Jesus can’t turn away. He must face what faces him. He must do what he does – envelop the world in his light!

He fights the evil-spiritedness seeking to destroy all in its path, beginning with this child. It’s a hard battle. Violence confronts him, as it will in the coming days. But his healing power, his liberative way, his compassion cannot be outdone.

As done as Jesus is, in his presence, evil and harm and death is outdone once again.

The story ends with verse 42. Jesus returns the son to his father. Imagine the gratitude of that father! His boy lost but now found given back to him! Jesus returns the prodigal son back to the father who runs to embrace him.

The son returned to the father. This is what Jesus wants! But it is some way off.

We must go through the trials and tribulations first. But that return will come. As sure as Spring will make its way to us, that return to the father will dawn. Easter is coming.