The seemingly mysterious story of the Transfiguration of Christ was really a divine effort to help the closest disciples of Jesus understand more fully who Jesus is and how their lives would change as they gave their hearts to him. Yes, the story contains strange elements, but that doesn’t mean God is incomprehensible. Rather, it means that God’s self-giving love is evident in the gift of Christ to humanity.
Are you comfortable with mystery? That question grows out of the gospel story we read today about the Transfiguration of Christ. It’s a story that seems, well, other-worldly.
To think about divine mysteries — and particularly what we are to make of the story of the Transfiguration — let’s do something perhaps a little unexpected. Let’s start with the story of Job.
The book of Job, as you may know, tells the enigmatic but quite purposeful story of a righteous man. Even God declared Job to be righteous, and yet Job’s life fell into catastrophic chaos after God allowed a character called The Satan, or the accuser, to test Job’s faith in God by causing Job to lose almost everything, including his children.
Unlike Job, Job’s wife gave up early in the face of what was happening to her husband. Indeed, at one point she says this to him: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.”1 It’s a good bet that she didn’t learn that approach in premarital counseling.
In his book called God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense, Bible scholar Sigve K. Tonstad calls the book of Job “one of the most startling books in literature,”2 perhaps because it challenged the conventional wisdom that said suffering is always a sign that someone has sinned.
Late in the Job story, a character named Elihu tells Job to be quiet and accept that God is just and has every right to make Job’s life miserable. Surely, suggests Elihu, Job deserved what he was getting. God, says Elihu, “is great, and we do not know him; the number of his years is unsearchable.”3 A few verses later, Elihu adds this: “God thunders wondrously with his voice; he does great things that we cannot comprehend.”4
God is not completely beyond human comprehension
If we were to follow Elihu’s thinking about God, we might give up trying to make any sense of the divine, including in such events as the Transfiguration. As Tonstad writes, Elihu “is a strident proponent for the twin arguments of divine inscrutability and human incomprehension ....”5
But if God is simply beyond understanding, what do we do with transcendent stories like the Transfiguration?
It turns out that Elihu is like Job’s other three friends — or at least alleged friends — who believe they know why Job is suffering when, in fact, they misunderstand almost everything about Job, his suffering and God. What they seem not to get is that sometimes suffering just happens.
Tonstad argues that although God is not fully knowable by the limited human mind, neither is God nonsensical. Indeed, we are invited into the mysteries of God so that we may more fully appreciate who God is and what God wants with us and of us.
And that, it turns out, is exactly what is happening in the story of the Transfiguration that we read today. Jesus is doing his best to teach his disciples who he is and what is about to happen to him — and, as a result, also to them. It’s been a frustrating time for Jesus because his disciples often seem to miss the point, to get things wrong, to major in the minors.
That picture of the disciples, by the way, is one more reason to trust the veracity of the gospels and to be glad that they don’t all agree with each other on every point. If the disciples came across in every gospel as always brilliant and loving, we might be right to suspect that they weren’t telling the whole story. But they often come across as slow-witted, cranky and confused. Which sounds a lot more like the truth — both about them and, sometimes, about us, too.
The question all of us must answer
Earlier in the chapter of Luke from which we read, we see some of the closest followers of Jesus beginning to catch on to his divine identity and his cosmic purpose. Luke writes that Jesus asks them this: “Who do the crowds say that I am?” They answered, “John the Baptist; but others, Elijah; and still others, that one of the ancient prophets has arisen.” Then he said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered, “The Messiah of God.”6
To which Jesus says, “Bingo.” Well, that’s my casual English translation of the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke, a language that comes to us in the New Testament almost always translated into Greek and then into English. But “Bingo” is close to what Jesus meant.
Soon after Peter confesses his belief that Jesus is the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, Jesus takes him, John and James up to a mountain to pray. Jesus’ larger goal, however, goes beyond prayer. He wants to show them how he fits into the larger story of the Jewish people and into the entirety of the human story.
He wants them, in other words, to have a profound ah-ha moment so that, after his crucifixion and resurrection, they will be unshakably committed to telling the good news of Christ to anyone who will listen.
Yes, as in Job’s life, the disciples will experience troubles and mysteries after Jesus departs from them, but he wants them to be confident that God’s ways are not so entirely mysterious that they (and later we) should shake their heads and our heads and give up trying to grasp the essence of who God is.
The word “disciples” means followers of Christ. The word “apostles,” by contrast, refers to the ones whom Christ sends out to tell the world the good news. So the people Jesus chooses as disciples eventually become apostles, save for Judas. And the story of the embarrassing betrayal of Jesus by Judas is yet another sign of the truth of the gospels. Beyond that, it allows Christians worried today about church growth to remember and be comforted by the reality that Jesus started with 12 but ended with 11.
The most important point, however, is that — despite our limited capacity for grasping everything about the divine — God is knowable enough for us to say yes to God’s gracious invitation to live as God’s beloved children. It’s as simple — and as complex — as these words from the New Testament book of I John: “God is love.”
As Professor Tonstad concludes, it may require some puzzling on our part to work our way through divine mysteries, but, in the end, God is not completely incomprehensible. We can understand enough about who God is and what God wants to be able to respond to God’s grace with thanksgiving and with a commitment to share love and grace with others.
Yes, there’s no doubt that the Transfiguration experience for Peter, John and James was astonishing and unprecedented. But the point was to get their attention so they wouldn’t misunderstand who Jesus is and what they will be required to do once they understand that.
Notice that the Transfiguration happened during prayer. There are times in the Bible when the person praying, like John of Patmos in the book of Revelation, seems to be transported beyond normal existence into a new realm.
Is that what happened in this case? Whether it did or didn’t, the meaning of the story doesn’t depend on whether the Transfiguration and the appearance of Moses and Elijah are scientifically verifiable happenings. Instead, what matters is that for the disciples who experienced them and for us today the events tell us something crucial about who Jesus is and who we are in relationship to him.
Understanding Jesus in his Jewish context
Notice, too, the story’s continuity with Jewish history. Both Moses, who led the captive Hebrew people out of slavery in Egypt, and Elijah, a prophet from the northern kingdom of Israel, are linchpins in Jewish history. Their presence at the Transfiguration centers Jesus of Nazareth in that very history — and it’s impossible to understand the historical Jesus without placing him in his original Jewish context.
In fact, when Moses and Elijah show up in this story with Jesus, the updated edition of the New Revised Standard Version translation says they “were speaking about his (meaning Jesus’) exodus, which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem.” The word “exodus,” of course, immediately takes us to the story of God rescuing the people of Israel from Egypt. But in this case, the reference is specifically to Jesus’ own exodus, meaning first his death, then his ascension after his resurrection.
Some other translations, by the way, lose that connection to Jewish history by avoiding the word “exodus” and using instead such words as “journey,” as in David Bentley Hart’s translation, or “decease,” as in the old King James Version.
In any case, Moses and Elijah had personal experiences with the glory of the presence of God, and they are here in this story to testify to that glory, which God’s voice confirms in these words, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
So, yes, the story of the Transfiguration is mystical and strange. But it’s not incomprehensible. Its message is clear: Jesus is who he said he is, the living Christ, the one who wants to lead us into a full, healthy and redemptive relationship with God and with each other.
If we allow that to happen, the good news is that we ourselves can be transformed. In turn, we can be dedicated to helping transform this wounded world, which so desperately needs the love of God, a love that we can share with others. Friends, Christ was transfigured so that we ourselves, his followers — serving as his hands and feet and heart on Earth — may help to transfigure the world. May it be so.
1 Job 2:9.
2 Sigve K. Tonstad, God of Sense and Traditions of Non-Sense (Wipf & Stock, 2016), p. 3.
3 Job 36:26.
4 Job 37:5.
5 Tonstad, p. 6.
6 Luke 9:18-20.