Epiphany 7 (Year C)
And in their presence he was transfigured.
I have never seen Mt Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, the highest mountain in the continent of Africa altho’ I have heard of it in both song and literature. Nor have I seen Mt Fuji in Japan altho’ I am aware of the practice of going up in pilgrimage by millions of Japanese each year. I have seen countless images of Table Mountain in Sth. Africa & even made it up the mountain that is Hong Kong & looked at the colony thru’ the cloud down below. I saw the television pictures of Mt St. Helen in Nth. America when she blew her top & of course everyone knows of Mt Vesuvius from seeing the many recent programmes about its most famous eruption which destroyed Pompeii & Herculaneum. Mountains, for one reason or another draw people. I remember it was Sir Chris Bonnington who stated that he climbed mountains because they were there; you just had to get to the top & everyone who has a sense of British history will remember that Sir Edmund Hillary & Sherpa Tenzing conquered the highest mountain in the world, Everest, in 1953 in time for it to be announced to the world on the same day as the coronation of the present Queen. Going up the mountain is almost part of our spiritual soul. We are drawn up it- it is part of our being particularly for us Scots with our history enveloped in the mist of mountains & lochs. I was a teenager at the Proms in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall when I first heard the Scottish composer Hamish McCunn’s symphonic piece The Land of the Mountain & the Flood - a piece evoking that sense of the spiritual which is nature & the soul. We in Scotland should understand the spiritual level of the journey up the mountain.
Mountain tops in Jewish theology were very important features. Moses met God at mount Sinai; the Law was given at the mountain; Jerusalem was built on Mt. Zion, Elijah saw off the opposition at Mt. Carmel. Yes mountains were where God resided. Other cultures had much the same belief. Greek mythology in particular tells us of the gods residing on Mt Athos & surveying the world & their rather capricious involvement in it. To go to the mountain was to visit God & in the episode from the gospel this morning we are presented with not only one of the great signs of God, the mountain top but the cloud so the significance of the story to the early church would be very, very evident. We have to place the passage in context with what had gone before.
Remember Luke’s gospel is clearly stating everything it can about this healing transforming ministry of Jesus. The preceeding chapters starting with his miraculous birth & go on to tell of his ministry of healing & God’s bias toward the poor. He was having such an enormous effect on the local community that by the time we get to this passage his fame is very well known. He is followed everywhere & people are expecting all sorts of things from him. With these demands there must come the possibility that his ministry was not truly recognised for what it was. People will always use the good person. And he was used. So at the point we start our readings today he has withdrawn from the crowd. What is interesting for us is the words “eight days after” which begin our reading. Eight days after what & in what way does it connect to the mountaintop & the clouds, the traditional metaphors for God’s presence? It was eight days after the conversation at Caesera Philippi where Jesus again wondering about how his ministry is perceived asks the disciples, “Who do the people say that I am?” People were calling him all sorts of great names, they thought he was a re-incarnation of one of the great prophets, they recognised by this time, his uniqueness as a very different kind of preacher & healer but still there was this uncertainty about who he was.
Peter called him the messiah, the Christ, at that first conversation because he believed in him. On the mountain top he is to experience the reality of that statement of faith. The three followers are taken to the mountain, the place where the Israelite would encounter God a little like one of us going into a great cathedral to church to pray would also encounter God. They went up the mountain & they came back changed men. They went up with Jesus, they knew him, shared his ministry, travelled with him; heard him teach & saw him heal others. They were bound up with this man in every way & he was asking them for time, a small amount of time out of their troubled lifestyle & in that time they were given a glimpse into the real Jesus. Yes, they knew everything there was to know but at this event they were given an insight which went beyond the frustrations of the man who had to constantly remind his followers of the truth, who had travelled far & wide & put up with insults, rejection & all sorts of things. They saw behind the mask & recognised that Peter’s declaration eight days previously, based on faith, was the reality - this man was the Christ.
At that moment they recognised that Christ’s ministry was the fulfilling of the great teaching of the leaders of ancient Israel. In him the teaching of Moses & the ministry of Elijah were complete. It was the decisive moment for those three men who believed in him & from that moment knew their faith was not misplaced. They had been given a glimpse of the glory of God & they were themselves transformed. If you remember correctly the season of Epiphany started off with the baptism of Jesus at which there was cloud & the voice of God declaring, “this is my Son, with whom I am well pleased” & here we are at the end of Epiphany with again the cloud & this time the voice saying “This is my Son, my chosen listen to him”. They were to listen to him, to take his teaching on board & make it a reality in the world. They couldn’t continue on the mountain top as none of us can, they had to come down & get on with life. The lofty places, with their rarified atmosphere do not sustain us in our daily living, for we live among the lowly things of this world, the grottiness & the dirt, the poverty the wickedness, the injustice, but the experience of the mountain top allows us not to sink into all the filth around us but rather keep our head above it all.
So those men came down from the mountain & began the task of living with this experience. You might never have been to the top of the mountain. Your mountains might be too great for you ever to get there & see the beauty all around. The tiredness of living, the worries of your job or bringing up a family, the pain of those nearest to you who are very ill might weigh you down but if you do not climb to the top you might never know there is a world out there beyond the immediate pain or anxiety of your moment. Great men have been to the mountain top: the most notable in our time being Martin Luther King Jnr. He told his people to keep going when they thought they should give up. He told them he had seen the glory of the Lord. Our mountains, never mind Kilimanjaro, Fuji, Everest, whatever they might be can appear unassailable just plain too big but if we keep going we can reach the summit & in reaching the summit we see the world differently, it comes into perspective & it is not so frightening, so fearsome or intimidating. It is manageable because we have been to its summit, conquered all there is & we can come down safely on the other side.
Sherbrooke-St Gilbert's Home