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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +

Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.

We have come to the climax of the Epiphany season! Begun six weeks ago with The Baptism of Our Lord and a voice from heaven on that occasion, the Epiphany season (and its focus on the man Jesus revealing Himself as God) essentially ends today, with The Transfiguration of Our Lord and a voice from heaven on this occasion. At Jesus’s Baptism, the Father’s voice identified Jesus as His beloved Son and said that with Him He was well pleased. At Jesus’s Transfiguration, the Father’s voice again identifies Jesus as His beloved Son but this time tells the three disciples to “Listen to Him”. The Father’s words to those disciples apply also to us, and so we this day make the Father’s imperative in our Gospel Reading our theme: “Listen to Jesus”.

For the past six weeks, largely following one verse after another of Saint Mark’s divinely-inspired Gospel account, we have heard how Jesus revealed Himself as God as He was baptized, preached law and Gospel, rebuked an unclean spirit, healed many (including Peter’s mother-in-law), and cleansed a leper. Now we have jumped forward a good bit into St. Mark’s account: six days, in fact, after Peter confessed for all the disciples that Jesus was the Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah; six days after Jesus taught them that the Son of Man must suffer, be rejected, be killed, and rise again; six days after Peter rebuked Jesus and Jesus rebuked Peter; six days after Jesus called the crowd to deny themselves, take up their crosses, and follow Him.

After six days, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John (His inner-circle of disciples) and leads them up an un-identified high mountain by themselves. There, Jesus was transfigured before them. There, Moses and Elijah appeared and were talking with Jesus. Both men had made “mysterious exits” from their earthly lives, as heard today’s Old Testament Reading tell of Elijah. Moses and Elijah represent two of the major divisions of the Old Testament, the Law and the Prophets, and they serve as two witnesses for Jesus being precisely Whom Peter six days earlier had confessed Him to be: the Christ, the Anointed One, the Messiah. The disciples were terrified or filled with awe, and Peter, whom St. Mark more or less excuses by telling us that he did not know what to say, offers to build three tents, or shelters or tabernacles. Instead of such a human shelter, a cloud of God the Father’s presence and power enveloped the three men, and a voice came out of the cloud, giving the true significance of what the disciples were seeing: “This is My beloved Son; listen to Him.” Jesus is the promised Prophet like Moses Whom God raised up, the One to Whom everyone was to listen. So, the voice still says to us in our time: All y’all listen to Him; listen to Him repeatedly, continually. “Listen to Jesus”.

Such a Prophet like Moses was promised in part because the people of Israel were afraid both of hearing the voice of God directly and of seeing the fire of His presence. So, God spoke through Moses, with his glorified face, and then God spoke by His Son, Whom the author of Hebrews says is the radiance of the glory of God. Today, it seems, people either have no sense of God’s presence (and so they ignore His imperative to listen to the Son and instead want to hear from the Father directly) or they have no regard for what God says, period. For example, in the past week alone, three state legislatures advanced bills legalizing same-sex marriage, in direct opposition to both how God defines marriage and what He says about homosexuality. Society’s same-sex marriage debate will likely be settled by the U-S Supreme Court, and we know from experience, like that with abortion, that the standard for its justices is not necessarily what God says about a matter.

While perhaps we should not really expect what God says about a matter to be the Supreme Court’s standard, what God says about a matter should be our standard. Maybe we too often find fault with the unbelievers, whose minds St. Paul in today’s Epistle Reading describes as blinded by the god of this world, and maybe we do not often enough find fault with ourselves, who have our own blind spots when it comes to what God says about our lives. For example, how many of us fail to lead a chaste and decent life in word and deed and, if we have one, fail to love and honor our spouse? And, that is only the Sixth Commandment, what about the other six commandments related to loving our neighbors and the three commandments related to loving God? Jesus’s disciples may have failed to recognize the future glory in Jesus’s prediction of His Passion and Resurrection and so failed to see Jesus as God’s Son, but you and I at times similarly fail to recognize the future glory that God promises us by way of enduring the suffering He permits us to face in this world, followed by our death and resurrection. For example, when He says to us, as He said to St. Paul, that His grace is sufficient for us, for His power is made perfect in our weakness, do we listen to Him, that is to say, do we really believe Him?

Already back in the Old Testament, when promising to raise up a Prophet like Moses, God promised to call to account those who would not listen to the Prophet. Similarly, in the New Testament, there is a call to repent. Truly hearing Jesus includes both turning away in sorrow from sin and trusting God to forgive that sin. God calls us to turn away in sorrow: from our sins against the Sixth Commandment, from our sins against the other six commandments related to loving our neighbor, and from our sins against the three commandments related to loving God, including those sins of not really believing that His grace is sufficient for us. He calls us to turn away in sorrow from all our sin, and He calls us to trust Him to forgive our sin. When we so turn in sorrow from all our sin and trust Him to forgive our sin, He in fact forgives all our sin; He forgives our sin for Jesus’s sake.

At the Kilgore College gym Thursday, my trainer had me do crunches while holding to my chest a metal weight-plate, which then left rust marks on the white t-shirt I was wearing. I doubt that I will be able to get the t-shirt clean again, and, even if I do get it clean, the t-shirt certainly will not be as radiant, or intensely white, as St. Mark says Jesus’s clothes became during His transfiguration. St. Mark’s account is the only one to mention that Jesus’s clothes were “as no one on earth could bleach them”. With that statement, St. Mark not only rules out a natural explanation to Jesus’s appearance, but St. Mark also brings to mind both the psalmist’s statement about God’s wearing light as a garment and the prophet Malachi’s statement about God’ being a fuller’s (or launderer’s) soap. Radiant white garments are characteristic of Epiphany stories, for white is the color of light and life, of the priest, the victor, and heaven. In this case, the clothing radiates the light of the glory of the divine nature in the man Jesus.

The man Jesus had the nature of the Second Person of the Blessed Godhead already from His conception, when the power of the Most High overshadowed the Virgin Mary. But, during His state of humiliation, the man Jesus rarely used the attributes of the divine nature as He did in the case of the Transfiguration. Ordinarily, as Isaiah prophesied of the Suffering Servant, Jesus had no majesty to attract us to Him. As St. Paul wrote to the Philippians, though Jesus was in the form of God, He took the form of a servant and humbled Himself, even to death on a cross. He died on the cross in order to save us from our sins, because He loved you and me so much. Because He was man, He could die; because He was God, His death atoned for the sins of the whole world. In the Gospel Reading, by charging the three disciples not to speak of His transfiguration until He had risen from the dead, Jesus reminds them that He would suffer and die. As the Father’s voice had identified Jesus as His Son, so Jesus identified Himself before the High Priest and received the sentence of death, and the Roman centurion carrying out that death sentence similarly confessed Jesus to be the Son of God. Faith that produces such a confession also seeks and receives the forgiveness of sins. Through the prophet Isaiah, God tells us that though our sins are red like crimson, our sins, whatever they may be, shall become like wool.

The miracle of turning our crimson sins white like wool takes place through the ministry of the Spirit and righteousness that St. Paul, in the verses just before today’s Epistle Reading, tells the Corinthians is even more glorious than Moses’s ministry. The New Testament ministry, with the Word and Sacraments Jesus entrusted to it even surpasses the ministry of Elisha, who we heard in the Old Testament Reading succeeded Elijah with a double-portion of his spirit. There is a laundry-miracle here, too, for, Revelation says that we sinners wash our robes and make them white in the blood of the Lamb. Baptismal water and Lord’s Supper Blood together give us the forgiveness of sins and eternal life. And, one Sacrament begins and the other Sacrament sustains our new life and transformation into the image of the glorified God-Man.

As we daily sin and need forgiveness, we certainly do not always feel that transformation taking place, and much less do we ever see it. Yet, Holy Scripture tells us it is taking place, so we hear of it and believe it. For example, St. Paul in Romans tells us not to be conformed to this world but to be transformed by the renewing of our mind, and there he uses the same word St. Mark uses of Jesus’s transfiguration. Likewise, in verses oddly omitted from the middle of today’s Epistle Reading, St. Paul writes that we all are being transformed into the image of the Lord, from one degree of glory to another. We “Listen to Jesus”, and the Lord Himself, present and active by the Holy Spirit working through His Word and Sacraments, brings about the transformation, a return to our perfect created state that we will finally attain with the resurrection of our glorified bodies. That glory is already ours now by faith, even though we, like Christ, will endure suffering and, in all likelihood, death before we receive it. Our closing hymn today is a prayer of sorts for that transformation, and we pray its opening and closing lines to conclude here:

Amen.

The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.

+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +