This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 69:1–23(24–30)31–38; Isaiah 56:1–8; Galatians 5:16–24; Mark 9:2–13
This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 10 (“The Second Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 55:6–11; BCP, p. 86); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 18 (“A Song to the Lamb,” Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 13, BCP, p. 93)
Transfiguration in Mark. The prelude to today’s reading about Jesus’s Transfiguration is yesterday’s reading about Peter’s confession of Jesus’s Messiahship, and Jesus’s setting Peter straight about Messiah’s mission. It’s a cautionary tale against recreating Christ in our own image, demanding salvation on our own terms, and projecting our expectations onto a Messiah of our own manufacture. Bad idea! The only way to say “Yes!” to Jesus’s Messiahship, is to accept his sufferings, his cross, his resurrection, and our place in his story
With today’s account of Jesus’s Transfiguration, we get a brief glimpse into the glory of his resurrection. Moses’s and Elijah’s appearance with him bears promise that we will share in the likeness of that glory. Jesus did not come to let himself be made over into our image—despite countless attempts throughout history to do precisely that. He came to make us over into his. As early theologians put it, “He became what we are that we might become what he is.”
Whether it’s revolutionaries, reactionaries, therapists, marketers, or self-help gurus, those who assume they know the messianic plan ahead of time get the same rebuke Peter did: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mark 8:33). But for those who are willing to let Jesus be Jesus, and who are ready to find in his cross the way of life and peace, all the promise of a new heaven and a new earth, and of our own transfigured life there, lies ahead. Amen!
Transformation in Galatians. But God doesn’t just promise transfiguration at the end of time. He is interested in transformation right now. Galatian believers had sought transformation through law-obedience. The law will only prompt what Paul calls the “works of the flesh,” of which he provides a compendious list of examples, ranging from sins of the spirit to sins of the body (Galatians 5:19–21). Instead, according to Paul, the Spirit of the age to come has invaded this life, in order to begin the transformation of our lives. A more accurate translation of Galatians 5:16 is this one: “But I say, live by the Spirit and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh (NET).” In the Greek, the second half of that sentence is a very strong promise. The Spirit will empower a life that the law can’t.
God sends the Spirit of his Son into our lives to make us over us in the direction of that transfiguration. That transformation will one day be complete when our glorified Lord returns in victory to glorify us. Jesus’s work in us, by the Spirit, is to change us over into the very image of Jesus himself. Doing so, the Spirit produces all the things the law had pointed to but could never actually put into us: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22). And this list climaxes in the splendid litotes (an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by negating its opposite): “Against such things there is no law” (Galatians 5:32 NET), meaning that this list comprises the very life—the Jesus life—that the deeper reading of the law was supposed to incline us toward in the first place.
Togetherness in Isaiah. For a brief moment, Isaiah looks with a wide-angle lens at Yahweh’s plan for human transformation. Anyone who keeps covenant is welcome into God’s holy temple, including “foreigners” and “eunuchs” whom the law of Moses had explicitly excluded from intimate fellowship with Yahweh and his people (Exodus 12:43; Deuteronomy 23:1). God’s ultimate design is that his place of worship serve as “a house of prayer for all peoples” (Isaiah 56:7). And so all those who “join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants” are welcome in that house.
In Isaiah’s day, joining oneself to Yahweh and loving Yahweh’s name meant keeping sabbath and practicing circumcision. In Paul’s day and ours, keeping covenant means finding sabbath-rest in Christ (Colossians 2:17; Matthew 11:28–30) and in undergoing, not circumcision, but baptism, the new sign of membership in God’s covenant family. “[F]or in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:26–29).
I pray the vision of Christ’s transfiguration makes us long for the day when he returns, and we receive our share in the glory of his resurrection. I pray the Spirit of God fills our lives right now with power to transform us into the likeness of Jesus. I pray that we never outlive our love for Jesus, who puts all who trust him together in the same family, side by side in the waters of baptism and elbow to elbow at the same Table.
Be blessed this day,
Reggie Kidd+
Image: Detail from stained glass, Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, FL