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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.
People can idealize what it might be like for them to be with Jesus alone. You might imagine that you would worship Jesus exactly as you should. You might imagine that you and Jesus could hang out as best buds. Or, you might imagine that Jesus would cater to your every want. In the Gospel Reading for today, the Transfiguration of Our Lord, Peter and James and John got to be with Jesus alone, and we probably can say safely that their experience was at least different from how they might have imagined it, what their ideal experience would have been like with Jesus alone.
Six days after Peter both confessed Jesus to be the Christ but also rebuked Jesus for His teaching that He would suffer, be rejected, killed, and rise again, Jesus took with Him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain by themselves alone and was transfigured before them. Jesus’s clothes became radiant, intensely white, and there appeared to them Elijah with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus. Peter said something both about its being good that they were there and about their making three tents, but the Divinely‑inspired St. Mark uniquely tells us that Peter did not know what to say, for they were terrified. As St. Mark tells it, even before the cloud of the Holy Spirit and the voice of the Father, the three disciples felt a great fear—a fear originally signified with a Greek word that the whole New Testament uses only one other time, when Moses on Mt. Sinai said that he, in the presence of God, trembled with such fear (Hebrews 12:21).
Today, some might criticize Jesus for not being very inclusive, for His taking only the three disciples, instead of all twelve, or the 70 or 72, or more than 500, or more than five or six thousand. We might imagine why Jesus did not take more than the three, but St. Mark does not say why; he does say how even those three closest disciples reacted. Even when they no longer saw anyone with them but Jesus alone, and when Jesus charged them to tell no one what they had seen until He had risen from the dead, they, in the verse immediately following today’s Gospel Reading, still did not know but were questioning what rising from the dead might mean (Mark 9:10). Also much later, taken deeper than the other nine into the Garden of Gethsemane, the same three did not know what to answer Jesus when He found them sleeping (Mark 14:40).
Would we really have been any different if we were with Jesus alone? How could we answer Jesus for our failures to watch and pray? Do not we who have the benefit of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead also fail to understand God’s thoughts and ways in our lives? Would His divine nature shining through His human flesh not also terrify us? Like the man and woman in the Garden of Eden we try to hide ourselves from God in fear over our sin (Genesis 3:10). Whether we sin in these or in any countless number of other ways, all sin on its own merits death here in time and torment in hell for eternity. But, as God did with the man and woman in the Garden of Eden, so He also does with us: He calls us to be sorry for our sin and to trust Him to forgive our sin. In the Gospel Reading, the disciples are said to see Jesus’s glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father (John 1:14), and they hear the Father’s voice both identifying Jesus as His beloved Son and telling them to listen to Him (confer Deuteronomy 18:15). The Father offered them salvation, and they received it in faith, and so He also does with us (Kittel, TDNT 1:220). When we are sorry for our sin and trust Him to forgive our sin, then the Father does just that: the Father forgives our sin, all our sin, whatever our sin might be, for His Son Jesus’s sake.
That Jesus is the Son of God in the human flesh born of the Virgin Mary come—out of the Father’s great love, mercy, and grace—to save us from our sin has been clearly revealed, as we have heard and seen especially throughout this Epiphany season—from the Father’s voice over His Son Jesus at His Baptism with the Spirit descending on Him like a dove, to the Father’s voice over His Son Jesus at His Transfiguration surrounded by the cloud of the Holy Spirit, and everything in between. The simply-stated, immediate transfiguration of Jesus is usually taken as a showing‑forth not only of Jesus’s Divine nature but also of God’s glory, yet the arguably greatest revelation of God’s glory is on the cross, something that to our eyes hardly looks glorious at all, but our ears hear Jesus’s death on the cross for you and for me described as glory, and so we in faith receive it as glory (John 12:27‑36). As He Himself prophesied, Jesus suffered many things, was rejected as the Son of God (Mark 14:61-64), and was killed on the cross, all for us, and after three days He rose again. Jesus had no beauty that we should desire Him (Isaiah 53:2), but the Holy Spirit, using His Word in all of its forms, attracts us to Him as our Savior, so that we can be forgiven (confer Lutheran Service Book 537).
When the prophet Isaiah saw the Lord upon His throne in the temple surrounded by the seraphim singing of the holiness of the Triune God, Isaiah arguably also was terrified and cried out on account of his sin. Yet, one of the Lord’s servants took something from the altar and touched Isaiah’s mouth and thereby took away Isaiah’s guilt and atoned for his sin (Isaiah 6:1-7). Likewise you and I do not need to be afraid in the presence of the Lord enthroned upon this altar in this temple, for He has come with His Body in bread and His Blood in wine to take away our guilt and atone for our sin. He works through the bread and cup at His table where we are His guests (LSB 680). No terrifying radiant clothes or appearances of Elijah with Moses here. Instead of fumbling for words in fear, we on earth joyfully join in the liturgy’s words of the eternal worship of heaven (confer Revelation 4:8). Yes, thanks to God’s working through the Holy Ministry, passed down from generation to generation, of which we heard in today’s other two Readings (2 Kings 2:1-2; 2 Corinthians 3:12-13; 4:1-6), we hear God’s Word—such as that spoken through Moses and Elijah—read and preached, we are adopted as His children in Holy Baptism, and, after private confession, we are individually Absolved, but we realize that what matters is not us and Jesus alone but us in communion with His Church, for where even two or three are gathered together in His Name He Himself is present with us through His Word and Sacrament in order to forgive us and so grant us life and salvation (Matthew 1:23; 18:20; 28:19-20).
Since we are not alone but are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, we run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus alone, Who endured the cross, so that we may not grow weary or fainthearted (Hebrews 12:1-3). In today’s Gospel Reading, St. Mark uniquely “bookends” or “brackets” the Transfiguration of Our Lord with references to Jesus alone, yet not even one of the three chosen disciples are therein described as being individually with Jesus alone. The three together are with Jesus alone at the beginning and at the end of the Reading—it is almost as if nothing had changed (confer Krikava, CPR 28:1, 39-40)! Seemingly just as quickly as the radiant clothing, appearance of Elijah with Moses, cloud, and voice began, they also ended (Kretzmann, ad loc Mk 9:8-10, 213). What they had seen and realized was again hidden, as it is with us, though the Transfiguration’s importance remains. As the Collect of the Day said, the testimony of Moses and Elijah confirmed the mysteries of the faith, and the Father’s voice foreshowed our adoption by grace. As the Proper Preface will say, the Transfiguration revealed our Lord’s glory to His disciples so that they might be strengthened to proclaim His cross and resurrection and with all the faithful—including us—look forward to the glory of life everlasting. Although we continue to struggle with sin, we who ever sorrow over our sin and trust Him to forgive our sin will share in that glory then (LSB 413), with similarly glorified bodies (Philippians 3:21; LSB 414). Yet, even now, Holy Scripture says, we are being transformed (Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 3:18), and we have no reason to fear anything—such as a loss of work, problems with people at work or school, or problems with a loved one’s or our own health. Amid the world’s despair and turmoil, amid the rise and fall of nations, God and His Word of salvation by grace through faith in Jesus Christ is unchanging (LSB 583).
Centuries before the group Passion’s contemporary Christian song “Jesus only Jesus” (Lyrics), there was a German hymn translated as “Jesus, Jesus, Only Jesus”—although it did not make it into Lutheran Worship, much less Lutheran Service Book, some of you may remember the hymn, as I do, from The Lutheran Hymnal (#348). Both the contemporary song and the older hymn sing of Jesus alone’s saving us from sin, His blood’s hiding all our guilt, but only the older hymn recognizes Jesus’s leading us to praise Him and our then submitting ourselves to His will. We close now with the prayer of that hymn’s final stanza:
Jesus, constant be my praises, / For Thou unto me didst bring
Thine own self and all thy graces / That I joyfully may sing:
Be it unto me, my Shield, / As Thou wilt, Lord, as Thou wilt.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +