Transfiguration: bizarre story or critical incident? Luke 9:28-36

Luke 9:28-36    Gospel reading for Sunday 14th February 2010

What’s God up to here?
First of all, some observations and some questions:
What is it about mountains (always the scene of special events)?
What is it with Peter James and John – are they his mates? Do they get special privileges?
Nice party trick … pulling Elijah and Moses out of the hat! What a blast from the past!
A rare occurrence of God speaking directly in the NewTestament. Not only that, here we have God the Father and Jesus in action together. (Is the baptism of Jesus the only other time that this happens?)
Jesus says don’t tell anyone. (see Mark 9 parallel)

What’s the point of all this? It seems that rather than a bizarre story, it was a critical incident then, necessary and essential to highlight the kingdom of God arriving through the person of Jesus; an authentication of the divine nature of Jesus and confirmation of his relationship to God.
However for us today, I don’t think we need convincing that Jesus is the real deal. So what is the relevance of this incident for us now? We could just pass this off as an interesting biblical story out of the past, or we could take it as a call for serious action.
If we genuinely view scripture as God’s living Word, then we need to allow it to speak to us, to challenge our thinking and our actions at our stations, in our daily lives, in our work place. Here are a few thoughts that came to mind for me.
Well good old Peter (representative of us?) in his usual bumbling fashion, comes up with a plan. Can I paraphrase? “This is so good being with you here Lord, we don’t want this mountain-top experience to end. Let’s build a shelter (a church even?) so that we can live here and just keep on enjoying your presence.” Jesus has other things in mind. “Sorry boys – you need to come down off the mountain, down into the valleys – don’t hide yourself in buildings, get out where the people are … you need to share this with the world around you (but not just yet … I’ve got a bit of work to do first.)”

The challenge for us as key staff in Lutheran Schools, who at some point have had the mountain-top privilege of Jesus being revealed to us, is to do something with that! We are already down off the mountain and in the valleys of the young people and families in our school communities. How will we help these people (and even some of our staff) to see that mountain-top vision of who Jesus really is? We are being called out of our shelters, called into action. How will we show Jesus to someone this week?
Nev