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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.
As you hopefully know by now, we Lutherans observe the last Sunday after the Epiphany as The Transfiguration of Our Lord. This particular timing of the observance, at the close of the Epiphany Season and on the eve, as it were, of Lent, goes back to the Reformers Johannes Bugenhagen and Veit Dietrich; to some extent, they saw the structure of the Gospel accounts in relation to the chronology of the Church Year. The Baptism of our Lord is the first Sunday of the Epiphany Season, and The Transfiguration of Our Lord is the last; both, in part by God the Father’s voice from heaven, show forth Jesus “as He is and as He will be” (Pfatteicher, Commentary, 221) and “bookend” a number of revelations of God’s glory from the Man Jesus through miracles of various sorts. This side of heaven, there arguably is no greater revelation of God’s glory from the Man Jesus than that of His Transfiguration, and so each of the three years of our series of Readings we hear one of the accounts of the Transfiguration from the Holy Gospel according to Saints Matthew, Mark (as this year), or Luke. St. Mark’s Divinely‑inspired account uniquely refers to the whiteness of the Transfigured Jesus’s clothing “as no one on earth could bleach them”, and so this morning we consider the Gospel Reading under the theme, “What is it about the clothing?”
To get to St. Mark’s account of The Transfiguration of Our Lord, we have jumped forward significantly in his Gospel account from where we were last week, when everyone was looking for Jesus after He healed Peter’s mother‑in‑law and countless others in her Capernaum home (Mark 1:29-39). As we will hear in two Sundays, on the way to the villages of Caesarea Philippi, Jesus asked His disciples Who people and they themselves said He was, and Peter answered for the disciples that Jesus was “The Christ”. Then Jesus began to teach them about His, the Son of Man’s, need to suffer many things, be rejected by the Jewish leaders, be killed, and, after three, days rise again. Jesus called all those who would follow Him likewise to deny themselves and take up their crosses, and He said some standing there would not die before they saw the Kingdom of God come with power (Mark 8:31-9:1). After six days had intervened, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John, and He led them up a high mountain by themselves alone, and there, as St. Mark puts it simply, Jesus was transfigured before them. In front of their eyes, the appearance of Jesus, Who normally “had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him” (Isaiah 53:2), changed, to reveal the glory of God that was in Him according to His divine nature. His appearance changed temporarily, and the beauty of His true nature, normally veiled, showed forth. Now, we do not know exactly what Jesus usually wore for clothing, but that day, because of His natural glory, whatever He had on became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them—whether at that time using so‑called “fuller’s earth”, nitrium laden clean clay pasted over the cloth and left on to dry in the sun, or whether today using Clorox Bleach or some other product. The Transfigured Jesus’s clothing was, we might say, super‑earthly white, or, in other words, heavenly white, the color appropriate to heavenly beings and Jesus’s true nature as the holy God in human flesh.
Although St. Mark does not specifically say, presumably at least a little of what terrified Peter, James, and John was that holiness, radiating from Jesus and, apparently also, from Elijah and Moses, who were talking with Him (see Luke 9:31). Three times today’s Introit mentions God’s holiness (Psalm 99:1-5; antiphon Psalm 99:9), and believers know they are likewise to be holy (for example, Leviticus 11:44; 1 Peter 1:15-16). Peter, James, and John perhaps were well aware of how sinful they were, that, as God says through Isaiah (64:6), all of what they might consider their righteous deeds were before God like a polluted (or filthy) garment (or rag). The same is true for all of us, by nature. We all are like those who are unclean. And, we cannot just recognize part of God’s law that shows us our sin, and ignore the parts of the law that condemn the sins we like to commit. By nature we are completely and utterly sinful and corrupt, as if we were wearing the filthiest clothes imaginable, and, apart from God, we ourselves are completely and utterly incapable of doing anything to change our condition—the strongest bleach in the world would not make a difference.
Yet, God wants us to be different. God’s law shows us all of our sin, and His Gospel shows us our Savior from sin. God’s call for us to repent enables us to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin for Jesus’s sake, and to want to do better than keep on sinning. As we heard in the Epistle Reading, we who believe are ourselves being transformed (2 Corinthians 3:12-13 [14-18]; 4:1-6)—St. Paul by Divine‑inspiration uses the same Greek word of our transformation that St. Mark uses of Jesus’s transfiguration. When we repent and believe, then God forgives all our sin, whatever it might be. God transforms us, He changes us, so that we are righteous in His sight and become holy, a process of sanctification completed at our deaths or the Lord’s return, whichever comes first.
Although I did not see the fourth “Transformers” movie last year, perhaps some of you did. Regardless, we all probably have seen one or more Hollywood blockbusters with their special effects. As Rev. Rienstra of Centerville said Thursday in his sermon on this text at our Pastors’ Conference, Hollywood no doubt could do a great job depicting Jesus’s Transfiguration. And yet, even the greatest depiction of the Transfiguration would still fall short of what it was actually like. As heated iron glows with fire, the face of Jesus Christ showed forth the glory of God. The same human body conceived when the power of the Most High overshadowed the Virgin Mary (Luke 1:35) was identified by the Father’s Voice out of the overshadowing cloud as His beloved Son, giving the significance of what was seen. Moses and Elijah, representatives of the law and the prophets, who mysteriously exited from the Old Testament, mysteriously returned in the New Testament and, in the words of today’s Collect, their testimony confirmed “the mysteries of the faith”, the heart of Jesus’s and the Bible’s teaching: God was in human flesh, humbly not always using His divine attributes in order to die on the cross and rise from the grave to save sinners—sinners like you and me. The cross is not dismissed by His glory, but the cross was His path to His true and full glory, of which the Transfiguration gave the greatest glimpse. That true and full glory the resurrected and ascended Jesus has now, and He will come in that same glory to judge both the living and the dead. St. John was given a revelation of that same “white” glory from the Son of Man (Revelation 1:13-15), and St. John was given a revelation of a great multitude that no one could number, clothed in white robes that were washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb (Revelation 7:9, 14)—the only other place the New Testament uses the word St. Mark uses for the “bleaching” of Jesus’s clothes. As hard as that imagery may be to imagine for those of us who do laundry and have tried to get blood stains out of our clothing, Jesus’s shedding His blood leads to our having white robes.
What is it about the clothing? Already in the Old Testament, through the prophet Malachi (3:2), God spoke of His making people white with holiness for them to come into His presence and make offerings in righteousness. And so it is good that we who believe are here today in the Lord’s dwelling, His Sanctuary or Tabernacle or Tent, in order to, as our Gradual put it, “Ascribe to the Lord the glory due His Name” and to “bring an offering, and come into His courts” (Psalm 96:8). As Elijah was succeeded by Elisha in today’s Old Testament Reading (2 Kings 2:1-12), so apostles have been succeeded by pastors today (Ephesians 4:11), wearing robes suggestive of heavenly messengers and Christ’s righteousness. That righteousness is given to all who, as the Father’s voice commanded, listen to Jesus, to His Word, law and Gospel, in all its forms, including that form with water in Holy Baptism, from the lips of the pastor in individual Holy Absolution, and with bread and wine that is His body and blood in Holy Communion. There, in the Sacrament of the Altar, the same beautiful Savior, Who was transfigured before the disciples, is truly present and gives all who believe the forgiveness of sins, and so also life and salvation. What the disciples had seen they narrated for us once the Son of Man had risen from the dead, and we who believe and are cleansed in Baptism (Psalm 51:7) know that we, too, will so rise. God has so graciously adopted us as His beloved children and given us our value and purpose in life, as we with daily repentance and faith, through the coming season of Lent and always, live in the forgiveness of sins. Like the disciples at The Transfiguration of Our Lord, we, in the words of today’s Proper Preface, are “strengthened to proclaim His cross and resurrection and with all the faithful look forward to the glory of life everlasting”.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +