“The Transfiguration of our Lord”
Matthew 17:1-9
2/3/08
In this day and age it’s easy to have
anonymous relationships with others. I’m amazed at how many
acquaintances people claim to have by way of e-mail, internet blogs, or
text-messaging. Kids can spend hours on the computer in chat
rooms talking with any number of “friends”. And yet,
for the most part these relationships are not very personal;
there’s no real face to face contact with others. We
don’t even know whether the ones we’re communicating with
via cyberspace are telling us the truth about themselves or not.
I have a friend who had a bad experience one time on
e-Harmony.com. He met this girl who had posted a picture of
herself and given all kinds of information about herself. But
when he actually met her, she didn’t look much like her picture
in the photo and she was quite a bit older as well.
Fortunately, God does not want to have an anonymous
relationship with us. Another word for “anonymous” is
“nameless.” God doesn’t want to remain nameless
towards us. To not know God’s Name is to not know
Him. God reveals Himself by His Name. We know God by His
Name. But He doesn’t simply tell us His Name; He does His
Name. In this way He does not remain anonymous.
Where God reveals and does His Name for us is in His
Son, Jesus Christ. To be ignorant of Jesus is to be ignorant of
God, because as the author of Hebrews writes, “[Jesus] is the
radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His
nature...” When the Apostle Paul was visiting the city of
Athens in Greece, he found that the people there had set up all kinds
of altars to various idols. They had even built one for what they
had labeled “the unknown god.” And so, in his
preaching Paul proclaimed to them the God that had up to that time been
anonymous to them. This God is the God who has revealed Himself
in His Son, Jesus Christ.
To know Jesus is to know God’s Name, and to
know and trust in God’s Name is to have eternal life. Jesus
makes the Name of God known to us both by what He says and by what He
does. By His Word and the doing of His Name for us, Jesus removes
the veil that the devil has cast over our eyes, so that we might see
the glory of God in the face of Christ. At the beginning of the
Gospel according to St. Matthew we hear the angel telling Joseph that
he was to name the Child born of Mary Jesus, because He would save His
people from their sins. And that is what the name
“Jesus” means: God is salvation. Matthew then
informs us that this was to fulfill what the Lord had spoken by the
prophet Isaiah who wrote, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and
bear a son, and they shall call His name Immanuel” which means
“God with us.” And so, Jesus speaks and does His
Names, and as He does His Names we are given to know God. In
Jesus, through His words and His deeds, we see the glory of God, and
His anonymity is removed.
This brings us to today’s Gospel text and the
transfiguration of our Lord. The text begins with the words
“And after six days...” This suggests that we are
popping in into the middle of a story. We want to ask, “Six
days after what?” Six days after Jesus asked the question
of His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man
is?” There Peter piped in with the answer given to him by
God the Father: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living
God.” Bang on, Peter! A+ for the right answer.
You’ve got the Name of Jesus right; too bad you’ve
misunderstood what Jesus was to do as the Christ, the Son of the living
God, because Jesus then began to tell them that He was going to
Jerusalem to suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and
scribes, be killed, and on the third day be raised. But this is
not the Christ Peter had in mind. He had not listened to
God’s Word, the words of the prophets, like Isaiah, who had
foretold the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Christ.
Even in the O.T. God didn’t want to be anonymous and was
revealing Himself through His Son. But Peter wasn’t
listening. And so, he rebuked Jesus for saying such things.
God was still anonymous to Peter; Peter didn’t
know God. If the Lord had allowed Peter to continue in his
ignorance, God would have remained anonymous to him. And so, it
was out of His love for Peter that Jesus then rebuked him and told him
that he was speaking for Satan, that he wasn’t setting his mind
on the things of God, but on the things of man. In order to
reveal the Father and make His Name known, Jesus had to go to the
cross. In order for us to know God, we must know Him through
Christ crucified. Jesus was to do His Name, saving His people
(us) from their sins, by laying down His life as the ransom for
many. This is what the Father sent Him to do, and this is what
Jesus told His disciples that He must do.
It was six days after these things, then, that Jesus
took with Him Peter, James, and John by themselves up to the top of a
high mountain where He was transfigured before them. As the text
says, “His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became white
as light.” Moses and Elijah even showed up. And then
came the bright cloud from which the voice of God the Father was heard
saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased;
listen to Him.” Well, what was this all about? Why
does Jesus give us this vision of Himself and His glory? Because
here again God is revealing Himself, making Himself known through His
Son, both by what Jesus says and does, so that we might know His Name
and trust in that Name for eternal life.
The events of the transfiguration themselves make
God and His Name known to us. They show us that this Jesus is the
same God who delivered His people Israel from their slavery in Egypt in
the O.T. When you compare what was going on on the Mt. of
Transfiguration with what went on on Mt. Sinai, you see a number of
similarities. Our O.T. reading for today reveals some of
these. There at Mt. Sinai, Moses, Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and
seventy of the elders of Israel went up and they saw the God of
Israel. “There was under His feet as it were a pavement of
sapphire stone, like the very heaven for clearness.” We
also see a cloud covering the mountain and the glory of the LORD, which
was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain. Elsewhere
in the book of Exodus, we hear that God spoke to His people from the
cloud on the mountain. He said, “I am the LORD your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of
slavery,” and He gave them His ten commandments. But the
people were terrified. Now at the transfiguration of Jesus we see
similar things going on as Jesus is glorified on this mountain and the
Father speaks from the cloud again. And here the disciples are
terrified. Not only that, but we have the same Moses who was on
Mt. Sinai, and we even have Elijah there, too. They were talking
with Jesus. What were they talking about, and why were they
there? Well, they weren’t talking about the weather.
Luke tells us that they were talking about the exodus or departure that
Jesus was about to accomplish in Jerusalem, the same departure that He
had just spoken of to His disciples regarding His suffering, death, and
resurrection. The fact that it was Moses and Elijah who were
there talking with Jesus reminds us that both the Law and the Prophets
speak of Christ; God has always made Himself known through His
Son. Jesus Himself confirms this when He says that all Scripture
speaks of Him. Not only this, but Moses and Elijah both wanted to
see God’s glory face to face on Mt. Sinai but were not
allowed. Moses got to see God’s back side, and Elijah hid
his face with his cloak. But now on the Mt. of Transfiguration
they and the disciples are seeing God’s glory face to face in the
person of Jesus and they aren’t destroyed.
But it’s God the Father’s words here
that tell us what this Christ, the Son of the Living God, was going to
do. Similar words were spoken by the Father at Jesus’
Baptism, where we heard Him say, “This is my beloved Son, with
whom I am well pleased.” There with these words the Father
laid the office of the Suffering Servant of the LORD (spoken of by
Isaiah) upon His Son, as Jesus sucked up the world’s sin into
Himself in the waters of the Jordan, in order to take that sin to the
cross to atone for it with His blood. We hear these words again
here at the transfiguration of our Lord to remind us that this Jesus,
God’s beloved Son, Immanuel - God with us, was going to go to the
cross to atone for our sins. Jesus was going to do His Name for
us and thus make God known to us, that we might know Him and have
eternal life through faith in His Name.
In Jesus we come to know that God is our Savior, who
saves us from our slavery to sin, death, and the devil in the exodus He
works for us through the crucifixion of Christ, the sacrifice for our
sins. Only through Christ crucified can we really know God as He
wants to be known, as our Savior. Only through Christ can we know
that God with the blood of His Son has purchased and won us from all
sins, death, and the power of the devil, that we might be His own, live
under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting righteousness,
innocence, and blessedness. This is why the Father also tells
Christ’s disciples to listen to Him. In order to know God
as Savior we must know Jesus crucified for us, and in order to know
Jesus crucified for us we must listen to what He says in His
Word. Unlike Peter, we must not rely on our own words or ideas
about who God is and what He should do, but look to His Son and His
Word. Only by listening to the words of Jesus will God cease to
be anonymous to us. Then we won’t worship Him in ignorance,
but we’ll know His Name, and through faith in His Name
we’ll have life.
And so, the transfiguration of our Lord answers the
question, “Who is Jesus?” as well as the question,
“Who is God?” It makes the anonymous God
“nonymous.” It reveals His Name. It draws us
back to God’s doing of His Name for His people in the O.T., and
it draws us to the doing of His Name for us through His Son on the
cross. The transfiguration of our Lord is the bridge between
Christ’s Baptism, where our sins were laid upon Him, and His
cross, where He atoned for those sins with His blood. By way the
transfiguration we learn that the Immanuel, God with us, who was born
of the virgin Mary and proclaimed Son of God at His Baptism, has taken
away our sins as He laid down His life as a ransom for us, so that
through faith in His Name we might know God and have eternal life in
His Name. He is the Savior promised by Moses and the Prophets,
and witnessed to by the Apostles. He is the God of our salvation,
our crucified and risen Lord. Listen to Him! Amen.