Sermon from April 29, 2001
Hope is the honey that sweetens life. Hope is the promise of something good in the future that makes the present bearable. Hope comes in many forms. "Only one more exam, and school will be out." "Only 30 more payments, and I can burn my mortgage." "Vacation begins in two weeks." Such temporal forms of hope undergird our lives. They belong among God's natural gifts to every human being.

They are not enough for us. God has fashioned in us this hunger for hope in such a way that when temporal hopes are satisfied, we are not satisfied. As Ecclesiastes 3:11 beautifully says of God: He has also set eternity in the hearts of men. The human spirit opens out not only to the natural world but also to something beyond the natural world. The Apostle Paul put it this way: If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pited more than all men (1 Cor. 15:19). The Gospel speaks to our yearning for immortality. It gives eternal forms of hope to undergird our lives. Our text today in the Gospel of Mark presents us with an eternal form of hope. The original disciples of Jesus needed such hope after what they had just been through.

As we have made our way through the Gospel of Mark, an almost imperceptible shift has taken place. Jesus' ministry has gradually turned more and more to His twelve disciples. It became central when He posed to them point blank the crucial question that shapes Mark's Gospel throughout chapters 5-10.

You remember at the end of chapter four that as the disciples huddled in fear after Jesus had calmed the storm, they asked one another, "Who is this that even wind and wave obey him?" After four chapters built up an answer to that question, Jesus asked those disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" In other words did they at the end of chapter eight have an answer to their question at the end of chapter four?

Peter answered, "You are the Christ." Peter got it right at last. What Jesus said next stunned him. Verse 30 says, Jesus warned them not to tell anyone about him. Mark explains Jesus' call for silence about His identity in verse 31. He then began  to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. To call Him the Messiah was right, as far as it went, but that did not fully identify Him.

Verse 32 says, He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. Peter was not pleased. "After all it has taken to get us to recognize your true identity, how can there be in the very next breath talk of death! You are the Messiah, who is supposed to liberate Israel from her oppressors. You are going to take care of the Roman problem. What is this talk about death?"

Verse 33 pulls no punches. But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. "Get behind me, Satan!" he said. "You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of men." Nothing about that rebuke falls on our souls with such mystery as the unmistakable implication of Jesus' last statement to Peter. "You do not have in mind the things of God." If it seems confusing for Jesus to style Himself as a Messiah who is doomed to die, how are people going to understand when He says that His suffering is God's idea? What is going on in the mind of God?

Whatever it was, it was something He had in mind for the disciples as well. According to verse 35, Jesus went on to say, "For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it." Jesus is saying, "If you really want to follow me, then know that I am calling you to a life of self-giving, and strange as it seems, when you sacrifice your preferences and privileges for me and the Gospel, then you will actually discover and preserve your true life." Sacrificial living is real living.

This brutal exchange between Jesus and His disciples means two things. First, it means the question of chapters 5-8 is still on the table: "Who is this?" Peter got it right, but he did not get it all right, when he said, "You are the Messiah." Jesus' demand that they tell no one about that and His further prediction of His coming suffering and death means that they have more to learn about His true identity.

Second, the brutal exchange between Jesus and His disciples meant confusion, frustration and anger for the disciples. Peter expressed it when he rebuked Jesus for such negative talk. We can imagine their confusion, if we can imagine how it would feel for someone we deeply trusted to call us the devil and say we did not understand the first thing about him.

Hope at that moment began to die in the disciples. Perhaps it needed to. The hopes we hold on to are not always worthy of the greatness God has in mind for us as human beings. But when one form of hope dies, another, better one, needs to be born. That is what happens in the next event that begins Mark 9.

And he said to them, "I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God come with power." Three of the disciples are about to see the kingdom come with power in verses 2-7. In this episode the kingdom of God puts in a cameo appearance in order to rebuild hope in the heart of Jesus' disciples – hope that is proper to the true identity of Jesus.

Verse 2 says, After six days Jesus took Peter, James and John with him and led him up a high mountain, where they were all alone. You might remember back in Mark 5, when they visited the home of the synagogue ruler whose little girl had died. Jesus allowed only three of His disciples to go with Him and the parents into the room where He raised the little girl from death – Peter, James and John. Here they are again in a privileged position. You will see this many more times before the Gospel of Mark comes to an end. Clearly, Jesus saw them as leaders among the twelve disciples.

There on the mountaintop, verse two goes on to say, he was transfigured before them. Verse three helps us to visualize what transfiguration looked like. His clothes became dazzling white, whiter than anyone in the world could bleach them. No one speaks yet to interpret its meaning. No music plays to tell the disciples how to feel. The experience is still only visual. The unexpected whitening, the finally dazzling spectacle awakens questions, stirs emotions. The emotions are left to fend for themselves, but what happened next gave the disciples' minds something to work with.

Verse 4 says, And there appeared before them Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Jesus. Why these two? Well, think first about who they were. Moses led Israel out of Egypt at the Exodus. He mediated the covenant between God and Israel. He gave Israel God's law. Elijah was the first great prophet during the age of the kings of Israel. He defied the royal house of Ahab, when it introduced idolatry into the heart of Israel's life. He stood at the beginning of the great tradition of such Jewish prophets.

That put Jesus in elite company. Dazzling clothing sat well in dazzling company. It appears to have dazzled Peter into nonsense. Verse 5: Peter said to Jesus, "Rabbi, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters – one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah." It is difficult to know exactly what Peter had in mind. After Jesus' talk about death, this splendor was more like it, (Taylor, Mark, 391). Maybe he thought that shelters would prolong this unique moment in time. Maybe Peter was suggesting that they build three shrines to these three great ones, although I doubt it. Maybe what Peter proposed seems confusing to us, because it was confusing to him.

Verse 6 offers another crushing bit of realism about the terribly ordinary humanity of Jesus' disciples, especially Peter. (He did not know what to say, they were so frightened.) It was a classic example: If you don't know what to say, talk nonsense. Peter's nonsense serves as a perfect foil to what happens next in verses seven and eight.

Then a cloud appeared and enveloped them, and a voice came from the cloud: "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!" Whose voice would you say came from the clouds? Sure, it was God's voice. And what did the voice say? "This is my Son, whom I love." And where have we heard that before in the Gospel of Mark? We heard it at Jesus' baptism in Mark 1:11. There the voice spoke directly to Jesus. Here the voice speaks to Peter, James and John. And here the voice adds one more thing for their benefit. "This is my Son, whom I love. Listen to him!"

Then, in verse eight another visual experience reinforces what the voice had said. Suddenly, when they looked around, they no longer saw anyone with them except Jesus. Try to feel the impact of this on the disciples. "Yes, Peter, Moses is great, and Elijah is great, but you have become followers of one who is greater than Moses and Elijah. Listen to Him. Let Him teach you a new way to be Israel, a new way to be human."

"But, Lord, what about all this talk about suffering and death?"

"Listen to Him! That too belongs to the new way of being my people. And allow what you have seen here on the mountain top to heal your heart and renew your hope."

Jesus' prediction of His suffering and death stands. The splendor of the transfiguration stands. Peter, James and John and their peers had to learn to hold those mutually contradictory realities together in their souls. You and I have to do the same. Both belong to the mystery of the Messiah. Both belong to the mystery of Christianity.

Mark's story of Jesus continues with another minor mystery that we have encountered all along the way in the first eight chapters of the Gospel.

Verse 9: As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus gave them orders not to tell anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead. Actually, Jesus' commands to secrecy lose their mystery, when we remember the question of Jesus' identity that underlies Mark 5-10. "Who is this?" Jesus did not want people, especially the men closest to Him, to misinterpret who He really was.

As you and I saw in chapters 5-8, the unfolding of His true identity took place gradually. Clearly, Jesus of Nazareth was a prophet of Israel, standing in the tradition of the great prophets of Israel. But He was more than a prophet, and at last Peter and the others recognized in Him the truth. "You are the Messiah."

No sooner had that confession fallen from Peter's lips than Jesus told them not to tell anyone about it. The reason became clear at once, when Jesus proceeded to define Himself further. He was to be a suffering Messiah. It was a self-definition that shattered the hopes of the disciples.

Then had come the Transfiguration – dazzling appearance and dazzling company, and in that dazzling company the voice from heaven places Jesus in a class by Himself. It rekindled their Hope. The danger was that they might forget the prediction of suffering and death, and by telling the others about the Transfiguration they might cause them to diminish the importance of the prediction of suffering and death they had heard. In any case, says verse 10, they kept the matter to themselves, discussing what "rising from the dead" meant. But they did have a question about a Jewish tradition. Seeing Elijah no doubt triggered this question.

Verse 11: And they asked him, "Why do the teachers of the law say that Elijah must come first?" I can tell you where the teachers of the law got the idea. Listen to the first two verses of the Old Testament, Malachi 4:5-6. "See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the LORD comes. He will turn the hearts of the father to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers; or else I will come and strike the land with a curse."

Jesus agreed with that Jewish tradition. Jesus replied, "To be sure, Elijah does come first, and restores all things." And then He brought the disciples' wandering attention back to the central issue of His true identity. Why then is it written that the Son of Man must suffer much and be rejected? "Don't lose hold of the sufferings that lie before me. You may not understand. Maybe you had rather forget about it. But hold on to it. It is central to who I am."

Then, Jesus returned to the subject of Elijah, and as so often happened, He gave a stunning interpretation to this Jewish tradition. But I tell you, Elijah has come, and they have done to him everything they wished, just as it is written about him." The Elijah Jesus had in mind was John the Baptist whom Herod had beheaded. It was as if Jesus was saying to those perplexed men, "Don't forget what happened to John the Baptist. If the king killed him, there are no guarantees that some king will not try to kill me.

Like it or not, the disciples were not going to be able to escape Jesus' unpleasant and confusing prediction of His suffering and death. After the Mount of Transfiguration, their confusion and disappointment could be tempered with hope. So can ours.

The public world in which we have grown up is unrelentingly secular. The personal side of people who have admitted me to their inner world is unrelentingly religious and supernatural. The impression this leaves on me is that of a thin veneer of secularity that is papered over the volcanic rumblings of humanity's hunger for God.

Scripture, properly interpreted, encourages and guides this inner world of faith and hope. It could do the same for the public square. But the "ideologically hardened secularism," (George Weigel, Witness to Hope, 503) of our time seems terribly reluctant to have a conversation with people of faith about public affairs.

Meanwhile, people of faith find in the Transfiguration of Jesus a reaffirmation of something very deep. The invisible world of God and the angels is not infinite light years beyond the margins of our universe. It is more like another world waiting unexpectedly in the next room. It is as if we should open the door into that room, only to find it no longer there. Instead, sitting round in splendor, we find Jesus, Moses and Elijah discussing with brilliance and compassion the kingdom of God.

In other words the Transfiguration fuels hope. It speaks directly to the deepest longings of the human soul. It says to us in its unforgettable, understated way that this world with all its evil and for all its beauty and goodness, does not have the final word. The glorious, eternal holiday of the sons of God is waiting to burst through the door into our world and bring about the restoration of all things. Such hope is our abiding heritage and, abiding, sustains mankind even in the darkest days of the old creation.