Transfiguration

Matthew 17:1-9 - Transfiguration - January 29, 2012

We Find God’s Glory by Listening to Jesus

You can’t talk and listen at the same time.  It’s not possible.  Being raised with eleven siblings, I learned this lesson pretty well.  And now, with kids of my own, I’m trying to teach it: you can’t listen to what someone else is saying if you’re doing all the talking.  Peter was talking.  God interrupted.  What God the Father had to say was much more important than what Peter had to say.  In fact, Peter didn’t even know what he was saying.  “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.”

Now, the first thing that Peter said was true.  It was good that he and James and John were there with Moses and Elijah, witnessing Jesus with their own eyes as He revealed the radiance of His divine glory shining forth from His own person.  It was very good.  Jesus gave to these three Apostles certain and definite proof that He was true God as well as true Man.  The same One, who would give up His life on the cross, was the very source of life Himself.  They needed to know this, and they saw it.  And it strengthened their faith in Him. 

What a privilege these three men shared.  Certainly John had this moment in mind when he wrote at the beginning of his Gospel, “And we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (Jn. 1:14).  Peter, too, assures us in our Epistle lesson that what he teaches about Jesus is the truth by appealing to the same thing that James and John had witnessed:  “For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty” (2 Pt. 1:16).  What confidence this affords us who rely on the testimony of the Apostles!  Yes, Peter was right in what he said.  It was very good that they were there. 

But then Peter kept talking, and that’s where he went wrong.  He thought that he could hold onto the glory he saw by coming up with a way to contain it.  But, of course, he couldn’t.  Jesus could not stay on the mountain showing His heavenly glory.  He had to go to the cross where He would hide His glory in order to bear the sin of the world. 

Now, this wasn’t the first time that Peter was talking when he should have kept silent.  Just six days earlier, as recorded in the previous chapter of Matthew, Peter put his foot in his mouth in a very similar way.  He had made a good confession – one with which we are familiar – the confession upon which Jesus promised to build His Church: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  Well said, Peter – against this the gates of hell shall not prevail.  But then when Jesus began to explain how He must go to Jerusalem, and suffer, and be killed, and be raised from the dead on the third day, ah, but then Peter had the audacity to rebuke his Lord for talking like that.  Here, too, Peter needed to be interrupted, and that’s what Jesus did.  “Get behind Me, Satan!” He said, “For you are not mindful of the things of God, but the things of men.” 

Peter knew that Jesus was God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God.  He had been taught it.  And when Jesus was transfigured, he could see it too.  But just as much as Peter needed to know who Jesus was, he also needed to know the reason why the eternal God had become Man.  He needed to know Jesus in His sufferings.  And so do we.  Because Jesus does not bring us to glory by shining brighter than the sun on the Mount of Transfiguration.  No, He brings us to glory by dying in shame on Mt. Calvary when the sun turned black in His hour of darkness. 

To look for Jesus apart from His suffering and death for us, is to be mindful of the things of men.  That is what made Peter’s idea such a very bad idea – to build three tents of all things.  Peter wasn’t mindful of the things of God.  He thought he was.  He saw God’s glory, after all.  He saw what was good and pleasing and impressive – and if there was ever anything that was good and pleasing and impressive, this was it!  “Then surely,” Peter reasoned, “this must be what I need.  This must be what my faith must hold onto and cherish.  These are not the things of men; these are the things of God.  Just look at how brightly they shine!  It is good to be here.”  

“It is good to be here.”  That’s what we say too when things go well for us.  “It is bad to be here.”  That’s what we say when things go badly.  We judge what is good and bad, what is important and unimportant based upon what we see and feel.  That’s natural.  But we know perfectly well that what comes naturally is not always best.  A few hard knocks in life will teach you that lesson pretty quickly.  And it’s the same with spiritual matters.  St. Paul tells us, “the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).  But we need very much to receive and know the things that only the Spirit of God can teach us.  We need very much what only God can give. 

And that is why God the Father interrupted Peter to tell us all to listen to Jesus.  What God said is meant for us as much as it was meant for Peter.  “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”   When we listen to what Jesus says to us in the sure prophetic word of Scripture, we learn about what Jesus does for us.  What Jesus says and does always go together.  Jesus did the work that the Father gave Him to do.  The Father was well pleased with what Jesus accomplished. 

And what was His work?  His work was to live a life of obedience to God.  Every requirement that the law made on us – to fear, love, and trust God, Jesus obeyed perfectly.  Jesus loved His neighbor as Himself exactly as we ought to have done.  This perfect obedience that Jesus rendered to the Father in our place is called the active obedience of Christ.  It is called active because Jesus actively did what we actively failed to do.  God the Father accepted the righteous obedience that Jesus our brother rendered in our place.  For this reason the Father announces that He is well pleased with His Son. 

But the work that the Father gave to His beloved Son continued – all the way to the cross.  And Jesus obeyed this as well.  The great Lutheran hymnist Paul Gerhardt depicts Jesus’ response of obedience in these words:

Yea, Father, yea, most willingly
I'll bear what Thou commandest;
My will conforms to Thy decree,
I do what Thou demandest.

In doing what the Father demanded, Jesus suffered.  He did this because He loves us.  We call this obedience the passive obedience of Christ.  It is called passive because Jesus passively received in His body and soul the due punishment for the sin of the whole world.  Jesus suffered.  What the natural man despises, Jesus patiently endured.  What the sinner would complain about, and does complain about – often, Jesus suffered without complaint.  What we regard as that which must be avoided at nearly any cost, Jesus willingly took upon Himself; indeed, it was for this very reason that the Son of God became Man.  It is to this suffering that God directs us when He tells us to listen to Jesus.  Listen to what He says; look at what He does for you.  It is in this suffering of the Son of God that we are guaranteed to share in His glory. 

St. Paul tells us in Galatians 3, “you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ” (3:26-27).   Paul tells us also in Romans 6, “If we have been united with Him in a death like His, we shall certainly be united with Him in a resurrection like His” (6:5). 

When we are baptized into Christ’s death and resurrection, we are given all the glory and righteousness that shone from Jesus’ face on that Mountain so long ago when Moses and Elijah talked with Him about what He would soon do for them and for us on the cross.  That glory is ours.  It is comprehended and grasped in the words of the prophets and Apostles that we gather here to listen to.  And that declaration from heaven is ours as well that announces that through Christ God is well pleased with us.  God promises it to us when He forgives us our sin.  In our Baptism, in the Supper prepared right here, God gives us tastes of heaven and all its glories here on earth.  But it is ours by faith.  We do not always feel it; and we never see it.  On the contrary, we often see and feel the very opposite.  Because when we are baptized into Christ, we are also baptized into His sufferings.  This is not to say of course that we somehow must suffer what needs to be paid for our redemption.  Jesus has made full satisfaction.  But we will suffer.  Jesus has assured us of this. 

God sends us crosses to bear of His own choosing because our sinful flesh still wants to make an idol out of all the glory it can possibly lay its eyes on.  Consider the Disciples in our Gospel reading.  These were the same three Apostles who accompanied Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus sweat blood as He prayed to His Father that He might take the cup of His wrath away.  These same three Apostles – Peter, James and John – could not stay awake. 

Isn’t that how it goes?  When there is something glorious to see and hear, our sleepiness is whisked away and we, like Peter, become fully alert and will do anything to keep that glory with us.  But when we see pain, when we see the agony and misery that sin causes, when we see things that look bad and make us feel bad, we grow tired and weary and it becomes hard to even pay attention to what God wants to teach us.  It is especially at times like this when we, like Peter, are tempted to determine what is good by how much glory we see. 

But it is at times like this that God graciously interrupts us – often with suffering that we cannot make sense out of – but He tells us to stop talking and grasping for whatever glitters and glistens, and listen to Jesus.  It is only by listening to Him that we can learn what He wants to teach us.  And what does Jesus teach us?  He shows us on His cross that there is nothing that we ought to suffer that He did not suffer for us.  There is nothing that we do suffer or will suffer that He does not suffer with us.  We live our lives under the shelter of the cross on which our Savior died.  Trusting in His blood shed for us we also trust that His cross sweetens every cross that God places upon us to endure.  But God sends these crosses to us not to punish us or forsake us but to drive us ever closer to Him and His word. 

Sometimes we go without what we think we need.  We lose money, health, friends, sometimes even our good name.  And with such loss, we also suffer.  We suffer pain, anxiety, heartbreak, and, of course, the feeling of guilt over our sins.  We talk to God and God is always willing to listen to us.  But there are times when He must interrupt us for our own good because we don’t know what we are talking about.  When things are going just the way we want and we tell God that it is good to be here, He just might have a different idea of what is good for us.  Our glory – our treasure – is laid up for us in heaven.  Christ’s suffering for us on earth guarantees it and we put our confidence in that suffering.  For now, God knows whether to give us glory to taste or a cross to bear.  We don’t decide.  God does.  Meanwhile we listen to His Son and we continue to receive from Him forgiveness of sins, peace with God, and everything we need for life here and in heaven. 

In Jesus’ name, Amen