“The Journey of Joy” (Isaiah 35)

As I was preparing to preach this week, I considered giving my sermon the title “Getting Serious About Joy”. Then I thought better of it and came up with “Joy Is No Laughing Matter”. All joking aside, were you aware that joy is currently the subject of a high-level academic examination? Nine years ago the Templeton Foundation awarded Yale University a $4.2 million grant to embark on an intensive and wide-ranging multi-year study under the banner “The Theology of Joy and the Good Life”. Since then the project has engaged some top scholars and religious leaders from around the world.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve spent more time than I should have reading articles and listening to interviews with some of those individuals. Here is a quote from one of today’s leading New Testament experts, Tom Wright: “Joy … has everything to do with God rescuing his people… when God finally does something that people have been waiting for… Joy is not just an emotion, but a whole way of looking at the world…” Wright also laments, “There is a serious lack of joy in our society today…,” a lack which he attributes to what he calls “the failure of the modernist dream”.

Another interviewee was renowned German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. When asked, “How do the pursuit of happiness, fun and optimism differ from joy?” this was his reply: “Fun is superficial. It must be repeated again and again. You cannot make yourself joyful—that would be self-satisfaction. Joy is unexpected. It comes as a gift. Joy in the end wins.”

If you’ve got the time, I commend those interviews to you. You can find them, along with a host of others, on YouTube. But this morning our focus is not on theologians and scholars, as learned and helpful as they may be. It is on that wonderful passage that we have just read from Isaiah 35.

Karen and I have a lovely Middle Eastern restaurant that we enjoy eating at from time to time. There is one particular dish on their menu that they feature as “bursting with flavour”—and it happens to be my absolute favourite. Well, perhaps you’ve noticed already that this morning’s verses from Isaiah are bursting with joy. So let’s turn to Isaiah 35 for the next few minutes and see what God has to teach us about joy through this great Old Testament prophet.

First, and just to get our historical bearings, let me fill in some background to say that Isaiah was writing at a critical time. The year was 701 bc, and the seemingly unstoppable forces of the Assyrian empire had overrun pretty well the whole of the little kingdom of Judah. The once fertile vineyards and fields that graced its hills and valleys were a scorched wilderness, its towns and villages heaps of smouldering rubble. Now those armies stood at the very gates of Jerusalem. I can only imagine the sense of doom and desolation that must have gripped the hearts of its people.

The joy of anticipation

Into the midst of this scene comes the prophet, with a message not of doom but of hope, words not of grim despair but of exuberant joy. So let’s turn to chapter 35 and let’s take a moment to count the number of times the prophet uses the word “joy”:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad (1);
    the desert shall rejoice (2) and blossom like the crocus;
it shall blossom abundantly
    and rejoice (3) with joy (4) and singing.

Do you think Isaiah was getting his message across? It’s a good thing that the Hebrew of the Old Testament was a language rich in words for joy, because even with these four, Isaiah had not exhausted its possibilities. When we read farther along, we will see that he would still have three more to come before the chapter concludes.

Now the joy that Isaiah was writing about in these opening verses is what I would describe as the joy of anticipation. Certainly there was nothing in their current circumstances that Isaiah or his hearers could be happy about. Think of the situation in Israel and Gaza today (or Sudan or Burma or Ukraine for that matter) and you’ll have something of a picture of what the good citizens of Jerusalem were facing in Isaiah’s day. All they could feel was a sense of doom as the Assyrian armies advanced unrelentingly upon them, right up to their very gates.

But Isaiah bids them look not around but ahead. His goal was to help them see that while their present circumstances might be grim (to say the least!), there was a future that God was preparing for them that was nothing less than glorious.

Was Isaiah being excessively optimistic? Perhaps as far as the immediate future was concerned, yes. But Isaiah had his eyes set on a longer outlook—on God’s design for a glorious new heaven and earth. And this is the perspective that we find again and again in the New Testament too. Think of these words from the apostle Paul:

The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. … And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God! (Romans 8:19)

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! (echoes the apostle Peter) According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you… Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory… (1 Peter 1:6-9)

Surely this joy of anticipation is what Advent is all about, as we look forward with patriarchs and prophets and with Mary and Joseph to the coming of the Christ child—and even more as we await that day when Jesus will come again in his glorious majesty to claim all creation as his own.

The joy of accompaniment

But our joy lies not only in our anticipation of the future. It is also something that God desires us to experience in the present. And I want to affirm that it is a joy in which we can share even in the direst of circumstances.

Fortunately for the people of Isaiah’s day, tragedy was averted. The Assyrian armies were suddenly and mysteriously struck down overnight and forced to withdraw. (Isaiah reveals it was the work of an angel.) But little more than a century later the massive stone walls of Jerusalem would be breached and its thick wooden gates would succumb to the battering ram.

Those who survived the onslaught would be led out in chains to serve as slaves in the Babylonian Empire. Psalm 137 gives plaintive expression to the desolation that gripped the hearts of those exiles:

By the waters of Babylon,
    there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land? (Psalm 137:1,4)

But there were those like Esther and Daniel and others, who would not surrender to their outward circumstances. They remembered the promise that the Lord had made to Joshua centuries before: “I will never leave you or forsake you.” (Joshua 1:5) Even in the face of tragedy and adversity, they held firm to that conviction and to the God of promise.

In the New Testament, Jesus’ followers were increasingly burdened by the dark forces that brooded around them as they gathered in the upper room. Jesus recognized the heaviness that was weighing down on them and said, “You have sorrow now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy from you.” (John 16:22)

A little story that has helped to make this real for me was told by Stephen Neill, a missionary who served in India eighty years ago. Here is what he wrote:

Some years ago the Christians of a village in India came to me and said “Our well is already dry, and there is no hope of rain for four months. What shall we do?” I said, “I think there is water deeper down; try boring a shaft in the middle of your well.” For six days they worked, and nothing came. The seventh, they came to me radiant with joy and said, “There is water in the well to the height of two men!” They had pierced the hard rock, and forty feet down they had found the hidden stream. Since that day the well has never gone dry. In the hottest weather, when everything all round is scorched and dry, it is always surrounded by a brilliant strip of green. The water was there all the time. When they went deep enough, they found it, and then their hearts were filled with joy.[1]

I don’t want to underestimate the pain and sorrow experienced by those captive people of Judah during their decades of captivity under the Babylonians. Yet I do believe that they survived their enslavement because beneath the adversity and all the suffering and confusion of their exile, there was still for many of them a quiet joy. It was not like the cheers you hear in a football stadium or a hockey arena. But it was grounded in the deep and unshakeable conviction that God, who had led them out of Egypt and into the Promised Land, was with them still—even in their suffering—and that he would never let them go. And so it is that the apostle Paul’s words hold for us today as it held for them: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!” (Philippians 4:4)

The joy of arriving

But there yet remained a much greater joy that Isaiah looked forward to. It would be the joy that coursed through the people’s hearts on the day that they finally were permitted to resettle Jerusalem after a captivity of more than fifty years. And it was looking ahead to that event that Isaiah took the opportunity to use his two final words for joy:

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return
    and come to Zion with singing;
everlasting joy shall be upon their heads;
    they shall obtain gladness and joy,  
    and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Now there is something about this third joy that marks it out from the other two. In fact it elevates it to a whole new level. And that is because the joy of their celebration is not just their own. It is the joy of God.

It is the joy that Jesus spoke about at the conclusion of the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin. Do you remember the shepherd’s words when he returned to the fold? “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.” Or how about the woman after she finds her lost coin? Jesus tells us, “She calls together her friends and neighbours, saying, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost.’” (Luke 15:6,9)

Most movingly of all, it is the joy of the father in the parable of the prodigal son. No doubt there was joy in the heart of the son as he caught sight of his father waiting for him. But his joy did not even begin to compare with that of his father—a joy within him that was such that he ran down the road and embraced him and kissed him; a joy that was such that he put a robe on his back and a ring on his finger and called for a great celebration. (I must admit I always feel a bit for the fattened calf at this point!) But then do you remember his words when the older son complained? “It was fitting to celebrate and be glad, for this your brother was dead, and is alive; he was lost, and is found.” (Luke 15:32)

So it is that this Advent season calls you and me not only to look forward to Christmas and to the celebration of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem. It calls us to look farther ahead, to that day when we will join our voices with those of all the redeemed to sing,

“Hallelujah!
For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.
Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory…”
(Revelation 19:6-7a)

And we will stand before the Father to hear his welcome voice, “Well done, good and faithful servant… Enter into the joy of your master.” (Matthew 25:23) And you and I will be joining in nothing less than the joy of God.

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[1]     The Christian Character, 35

“The Way of Mercy” (Psalm 67)

Ever had the feeling you’d bitten off more than you could chew? Well, that’s exactly the sense that began to come upon me as I got more and more deeply into preparing my sermon this week. It was my intention to focus on Psalm 67, a psalm I committed to memory years ago in the old-fashioned idiom of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer:

God be merciful unto us, and bless us;
     and show us the light of his countenance…
That thy way may be known upon earth,
     thy saving health among all nations.

When I looked at it a couple of weeks ago in the New International Version (the translation in our pew Bibles), I found these words:

May God be gracious to us and bless us
     and make his face shine on us…

It’s not that different, except that the word “merciful” has become “gracious”. In fact, virtually every English translation since 1952 has dome the same thing, substituted that word “gracious” in place of “merciful”. This whetted my curiosity. And so a few clicks on biblegateway.com revealed that, while the words “mercy” and “merciful” occur 310 times in the King James Version of the Bible, they are to be found only 144 times in the New International Version. Why the change?

First of all, there are half a dozen words in each of the languages of the Old and New Testaments that can be translated “mercy” and each one has a different shade of meaning. There is one that carries the notion of “faithful devotion” and is often translated “loving kindness”. “I will sing of the Lord’s mercies forever; with my mouth I will make your faithfulness known through all generations” (Psalm 89:1). The word that is used in our psalm this morning has been defined as “the gracious favour of the superior to the inferior, all undeserved”.[1] A third term in the Old Testament is related to the word for “womb” and so has the meaning of “motherly care” or “tender love”. It is the word the psalmist uses when he prays, “Surround me with your tender mercies so I may live” (Psalm 119:77).

When we come to the New Testament there are again three words that are often translated “mercy”. The first simply means kindness: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy” (Matthew 5:7). “If your gift is to show mercy, do it cheerfully” (Romans 12:8). “Mercy triumphs over judgement” (James 2:13). There is a second word that means “compassion”. Thus Paul exhorts the Christians at Rome, “I urge you …, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice,” (Romans 12:1) and James declares, “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy” (James 5:11). But the most colourful term in the New Testament really means “bowels”—suggesting that we’re talking about a powerful emotion that comes from deep within. It’s the word that the desperate father uses when he comes to Jesus imploring him on behalf of his epileptic son: “If you can do anything, have mercy on us and help us” (Mark 9:22). And on more than one occasion, when Jesus saw the crowds that gathered around him and their neediness, the gospels use that same word. Today we might easily say, “Jesus’ heart went out to them” (Mark 6:34, 14:14).

The Nature of Mercy

My suspicion is that our contemporary Bible translators have moved away from that word mercy because in today’s world it has taken on negative implications. For many people “mercy” has become one of those outmoded words like “charity”. For them it carries with it a sense of condescension, of pity. While claiming to help, in reality it demeans its recipients, who end up being beholden to the one who bestows it. But that is certainly not the mercy that we find in the Bible or in the psalm we read this morning.

One of the characteristics of Hebrew poetry is that it often takes the form of a series of parallel statements, in which one phrase amplifies or enhances the one that precedes it. And this is what we see in Psalm 67:

May God be merciful to us and bless us
and make his face to shine upon us.

One of the things I’ve always loved to do on a hot summer day is to go body surfing. I stand out in the water up to my waist and a little wavelet passes by. Then there’s slightly larger one that wets me a little higher. And that is followed by a great rolling wave. I plunge in front of it and it carries me right into the shore. It seems to me the same is happening in this opening verse. It’s a kind of crescendo. May God be merciful to us; may God bless us; may God smile upon us. Each phrase builds on the previous one until it carries us like a wave into the shore.

You see, mercy is not about sparingly dispensing something when people beg for it. It’s not as though God grudgingly bestows his mercy only when we plead to him long enough and desperately enough. (Do you remember the story Jesus told about the persistent widow who pleaded her case before the unjust judge? The whole point of that parable is that God is not like that.) No, we have a God who desires nothing more than to show mercy. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercy and the God of all comfort …,” writes the apostle Paul (2 Corinthians 1:3). “The Lord is full of compassion and mercy,” echoes James (5:11). “His mercies never come to an end,” sings Jeremiah, “they are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:22-23).

And so mercy is about abundance. It is about generosity. It is about the lavishness of grace. It is about a shepherd who leaves his ninety-nine sheep in the fold to go in search of the one that is lost. It is about a father who kills the fatted calf for his errant son and runs down the road to embrace him. It is about a God who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all.

The Need for Mercy

The tragedy is that that kind of mercy is a rare commodity in our world today. You can see the evidence of its disappearance in the social media on a daily basis. How quick people are to become judge, jury and executioner often on the slimmest of evidence! They hide behind the anonymity of the internet to lash out with torrents of insults and invective, with the result that whole lives have been ruined through unsubstantiated defamations. And then there is road rage, where a forgetful moment behind the wheel on the part of one driver can lead to unbridled fury on the part of another.

Lest we think that we in the church are immune, let me tell you a little story from Don Posterski, who used to be vice-president of World Vision Canada. His position often involved travel and therefore eating in restaurants. He tells of how he would occasionally ask the wait staff what were their best and worst times of the week. Almost invariably the answer would be Sunday lunch. Why? Because that was when they received the lowest tips. And who makes up a significant proportion of Sunday diners at restaurants? Churchgoers. Sadly we have gained a reputation among at least one segment of the population of being stingy and thankless. It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to turn that around when you consider that a five percent difference on a tip in most cases doesn’t amount to more than a dollar or two.

How transforming it would be if we who claim to be followers of Jesus could recapture the Bible’s vision of God’s mercy! And it seems to me the only way we can do that is to pursue it, to experience it, to cast ourselves upon it, on a daily basis ourselves. New Testament scholar Tom Wright has written, “The church is never more in danger than when it … forgets that every day it too must say, ‘Lord, have mercy upon me, a sinner,’ and allow that confession to work its way into genuine humility… ”[2]

Wright is echoing one of the earliest of Christian prayers: “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It is known by many as “the Jesus prayer” and is prayed repeatedly by believers in the Eastern Orthodox tradition. Of this prayer Franciscan writer Richard Rohr comments,

This is not a self-demeaning prayer, nor a self-defeating prayer, nor is it a disempowering prayer. Relying upon mercy, in fact, protects you from the arrogance and pride that wants to judge others, even in your mind. It situates you in freedom from any sense of your own sufficiency or superiority, and affirms a non-need to justify yourself, and thus keeps your heart open for others and for God. It is basically a prayer for detachment from the self, both mind and heart, and its endless games of self-validation. “Lord, have mercy” seeks validation only from God and not from any inner or outer attempts to be worthy, independently “good”, or not-in-need-of-mercy.[3]

The Fruit of Mercy

Before we close, there is another aspect of God’s mercy that we find in Psalm 67 and that we cannot overlook. I spoke of God’s mercy being like a wave that washes over us. One of the things about that wave is that it doesn’t stop with me. It continues to surge forward until it reaches the shore. So too, God’s mercy does not stop with us. Look at the psalm again:

May God be merciful to us and bless us
     and make his face to shine upon us—
that your ways may be known on earth,
     your saving power among all nations.

In fact apart from the first verse the focus of the entire of the psalm is not on “us” but on “them”: “Let the peoples praise you…” “Let the nations be glad…” “Let all the ends of the earth revere him.” God shows mercy to us so that we in turn may show that same mercy to others. And if we didn’t hear that message in the psalm, it certainly comes through loud and clear in Jesus’ parable of the unforgiving servant.

Do you remember the story he told about the king who thought it was time to settle accounts with his servants? As it turned out, one of them owed him an incalculable debt, far more than he could ever hope to pay in several lifetimes, so the king ordered that he and all his family be sold into slavery. When the servant got wind of this, he threw himself face down before the king and begged, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.” Jesus tells us the master had mercy on him and cancelled the debt. No sooner had he left the king’s presence, however, than he sought out one of his fellow servants who owed him what was by comparison a trifling amount. He grabbed him by the throat and shook him and demanded, “Pay back what you owe me!” In response his fellow servant pleaded with him, “Be patient with me, and I will pay you everything.” But he refused and had the man thrown into debtors’ prison. When the king heard about this, he was enraged and said to the servant, “You wicked servant! I cancelled all that debt of yours because you begged me to. Shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?” And with that he handed him over to the jailers.

The point of the parable is that that is the way it is with God’s mercy. He does not intend it to end with us, but to flow out from us, to bring freshness, renewal, joy and hope into the lives of others.

In his remarkable little book, The Name of God Is Mercy, Pope Francis relates the story of when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires and a priest came seeking his counsel. The priest felt guilty because he feared he was too prone to offer forgiveness to the penitents who came to him in the confessional. The pope asked him what he did when he had these doubts. His reply: “I go to our chapel … and say to Jesus, ‘Lord, forgive me if I have forgiven too much. But you’re the one who gave me the bad example!’ ”[4]

Praise God that there are no limits to his mercy! And may it be our highest privilege and greatest delight to share God’s mercy in a world that desperately needs it.

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[1]     “Mercy”, The New Bible Dictionary, 809

[2]     Evil and the Justice of God, 99

[3]     “Why We Need to Say, ‘Lord, have mercy!’ ”, Huffington Post, 16 Sep 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/fr-richard-rohr/why-we-need-to-say-lord-h_b_3935884.html

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“What does he mean?” (John 16:16-24)

I wonder how many of you may have seen Martin Scorsese’s film Silence when it was showing earlier in the year. Sadly, it has received far too little attention and was a failure at the box office. Yet I believe it is one of the most profound films to have been released in years. I won’t tell you too much about it, except to say that it is based on a novel by Japanese Christian author Shusaku Endo.

The story takes place in the late 1600s, with two Jesuit missionaries, Fathers Rodrigues and Garupe journeying to Japan to try to find their former mentor and fellow priest, Father Ferreira, who is rumoured to have abandoned his faith in the heat of the vicious persecution unleashed against Christians. Suffice it to say, the film is gruelling to watch, as the situation becomes bleaker and bleaker for the two priests, not to mention the Japanese peasants and villagers who have embraced the Christian faith.

Here at First Congregational you have been making your way through what are almost Jesus’ final words, spoken to his disciples as they shared their last supper together in the upper room. I can’t help but think that, as in the film Silence, there must have been an overpowering, almost palpable, sense of foreboding, indeed of bewilderment, as Jesus donned a servant’s towel and washed the disciples’ feet, as he warned that there was one among them who would betray him, as sent Judas Iscariot off into the night, and not least as he used the bread and wine of Passover to speak of his own body being broken and his life’s blood being shed for them.

No wonder, then, that the evening was filled with confusion and questions: “Lord, are you going to wash my feet?” “Lord, who among us would ever betray you?” “Lord, where are you going that we cannot follow?” “Lord, how can we know the way?” “Lord, why do you intend to show yourself to us and not to the world?” And now, in this morning’s passage, “What does he mean? We can’t make head or tail of what he’s saying.” (Notice that at this point the disciples’ confusion has reached the stage where they don’t even bother to address their questions to Jesus any longer, but to one another.)

So it is that into the midst of this gloom and confusion Jesus speaks once more: “In a little while you will see me no more…” “You will weep and mourn…” “You will grieve…” Hardly words to instill confidence and hope! Yet I believe that as we look into them, as we take time to examine them, we will find that they are words bursting with a richness that is scarcely possible to fathom. So let’s turn in our Bibles to John 16, verses 16 to 24.

The Wonder of the Cross

The passage begins with Jesus saying to his disciples, “In a little while you will see me no more…” As I’ve suggested already, these words must only have added to their confusion. Twenty centuries later we have the advantage of hindsight. It is clear to us that what Jesus was speaking to them about was his death on the cross. Within a few short hours Jesus would be forced away from them to be humiliated in a series of mock trials before the religious council and the secular authorities. He would be savagely beaten and then subjected to the cruellest form of execution the Roman Empire had managed to devise—the slow, painful process of hanging exposed on a cross gradually to asphyxiate to death. By the time it came to that, however, all but one would have left the scene. Both through the wicked actions of the authorities and through their own weakness, the time was swiftly coming when the disciples would indeed see Jesus no more.

In my mind’s eye I can picture them on that first Good Friday going back to the places where they were staying or possibly to the upper room, their bowed heads and stooped bodies bearing silent witness to the profound dismay and utter bewilderment that filled their hearts. “You will weep and mourn,” Jesus warned them. “You will grieve…”

Yet little did they know that as their hearts were being ripped apart, so too was the veil of the Temple, the thick curtain that separated the Holy of Holies—revered as the very dwelling place of God—from the rest of the Temple. So holy was this place that only the high priest could enter it, and he only once a year, on the Feast of the Atonement (Yom Kippur). He would have a rope tied around his waist, so that if he happened to die or become incapacitated while performing his duties he could be dragged out and nobody need enter to rescue him.

What happened that day on a physical level, dramatic as it was, was only a sign of what was also taking place on a cosmic level. Through his sacrificial death on the cross Jesus had breached the separation between God and humankind that had been a reality since the days in the Garden of Eden.

Centuries before, the prophet Isaiah had proclaimed, “Your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you…” (Isaiah 59:2) Now, because of Jesus’ death on the cross, the church can proclaim, “Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain…, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings…” (Hebrews 10:19-22).

Clearly all of this was far beyond the grasp of the disciples. Indeed theologians today still ponder over it with amazement. American preacher Fleming Rutledge spent eighteen years working on her more than 600-page book The Crucifixion. New Testament scholar Tom Wright, who himself has just published a book on the crucifixion, has written, “I am under no illusions that, even if I were to write a thousand pages on the subject, I would never exhaust it.”[1] Surely in the end our response to Jesus’ death on the cross can only be one of amazement and praise. In the words of Isaac Watts,

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.

The Wonder of the Resurrection

However, back to the disciples in the upper room… Jesus had warned them that their hearts would be filled with sorrow. But he also promised that they would be filled with exultation. “In a little while you will see me no more, and then after a little while you will see me… You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy.” And so the scene shifts from Good Friday to the first Easter morning, from Calvary to Joseph of Arimathea’s garden. If those first disciples could not come to terms with Jesus’ crucifixion, how were they to handle his resurrection?

It was only with great difficulty and after considerable persuasion that they came to believe the reality of Jesus’ resurrection after it occurred. They dismissed the women’s reports of the empty tomb and the angels as old wives’ tales. When Jesus appeared before them in the upper room, they at first assumed he was an apparition. So no wonder Jesus’ words about their sorrow being turned to joy and about not seeing him and then seeing him only left them befuddled and confused! I know for certain that I would have been.

Yet within a few short weeks they would be proclaiming, “You … put [Jesus of Nazareth] to death by nailing him to the cross. But God raised him from the dead… Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:23-24,36). The resurrection points to Jesus as an individual utterly unique in the course of history. And that alone would have been enough to blow the disciples’ minds—or anyone’s mind for that matter. But dare I say that that is only the tip of the iceberg?

Look at what Paul writes in his famous chapter on the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15: “But Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians 15:20). You see, Easter was only the beginning. Because of Jesus’ resurrection we can look forward to that day when, as Paul again writes, “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious liberty of the children of God” (Romans 8:21).

It’s Jesus’ resurrection that assures us that all the injustices, all the seemingly pointless suffering, the atrocities and the horrors that human beings are subject to will one day be gloriously, mysteriously redeemed. Climatologists warn us that human existence may come to an end when our pollution of the environment reaches the point where human life is no longer possible. Astronomers warn of a collision with a comet of the proportions of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. Still others see us all being sucked into the oblivion of a black hole. None of them is a pretty picture. But Jesus’ resurrection tells that there is more, that God has greater plans for his creation than we could ever imagine—in Paul’s words, “that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (Romans 8:18).

Now that does not mean that we are not to seek justice, to minister to the downtrodden, or to care for the environment. Quite the opposite: Jesus’ resurrection calls us to be outposts of that new creation that is to come, to be glimpses, even if ever so weak and glimmering, of the light that is to be revealed.

The Wonder of Communion

If all of that were not enough, Jesus reveals a third point of wonder for the disciples. The first is the wonder of the crucifixion; the second, the wonder of the resurrection; and I was going to call the third the wonder of prayer. But on reflection I think it is better to call it the wonder of communion. Listen to Jesus’ final words in this morning’s verses:

Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy. In that day you will no longer ask me anything. Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.

On the surface it almost seems like some magical formula—the kind of thing we read about in fairy tales: “Make a wish and all your dreams will come true.” Yet I suspect that all of us have had enough of an experience of prayer to know that that just isn’t the case. Nor is it what Jesus is speaking about here. For prayer, as we all know, is not some mechanical formula—put a loonie in the slot and down slides a candy bar. No, prayer is a conversation, and like all conversations it is an expression of a relationship.

When we begin to see it in this way, we also begin to recognize that asking something in Jesus’ name is not just a matter of tacking those words onto the end of a petition—“… in Jesus’ name. Amen”—as though that makes our prayer valid in a way that it wouldn’t be without them. No, it seems to me that to pray in Jesus’ name is to pray the prayer that Jesus himself would pray. And that in turn means that a significant element of prayer is seeking his will. It means coming to him and allowing him to come alongside us, and to be with him in the Garden of Gethsemane as the disciples soon would be, where they would hear him utter, “Father, not my will, but yours, be done.”

In that gift of prayer, that gift of communion, of being able to come into his presence, of knowing that he is with us even when we are not conscious of it, Jesus has given us something again that we will never fathom, never understand, yet to those of us who have entered into its mysteries, a gift more precious than words could ever express.

The disciples asked, “What does he mean?” And like them, our minds will never fully grasp the mysteries into which our faith in Jesus leads us. But more importantly he who has died for us, who is the first-born from the dead, and who is ever-present with us—he has grasped us, and he will never let us go.

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[1]     “The Cross and the Caricatures”, Fulcrum, Eastertide 2007, https://www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/articles/the-cross-and-the-caricatures/

“Bathed in Glory” (Mark 9:2-9)

From the slopes of Mount Hermon you can look across and see all of Galilee, fifty miles away. Rising to an altitude of 9,100 feet above sea level, and crowned with snow the year round, locals speak of it as “the gray-haired mountain” or “the mountain of snow”. Throughout the year its temperatures hover in an alpine range. From its snowy peak the land slopes downwards in a rapid descent. Melt waters rush down its rugged slopes and the broken surface of its intervening valleys. They feed into springs at its southwestern foot that form the source of the River Jordan. Along the way they give nourishment to fertile plant life—lush vineyards, and pine, oak and poplar trees.[1]

This is the setting of this morning’s Gospel reading. Once again Jesus has taken his disciples with him to one of those lonely places where he was in the habit of devoting extended periods of time to teach them and to be with his heavenly Father. This time, however, it was to be no ordinary teaching.

So extraordinary were the events that took place on that mountainside, so utterly outside the realm of normal human experience, that many people since—Christians among them—have had difficulty accepting that it really happened. Some have theorized that what we have here is really a resurrection appearance of Jesus that has somehow been transposed into an earlier place in the gospel accounts. Others have suggested that what this passage relates is not an actual event, but a vision that was given to the three disciples. Still others have gone so far as to argue that there was never any such occurrence at all, that this was a story invented by the early church in attempt to visualize the glory and deity of Christ.

It seems to me (and to much better scholars than myself) that in the end none of these theories can really hold water. Morna Hooker, for example, who is the former Lady Margaret’s Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge, has written,

Although the story causes problems for the modern reader, it is unlikely that Mark was aware of them. In his God-filled universe, a heavenly confirmation of Jesus’ identity would have seemed no more out of place than the acknowledgement of his identity by the unclean spirits. The true nature of Jesus is a hidden mystery which breaks out from time to time, and for Mark these revelations do not require explanations.[2]

As we think about the transfiguration this morning, then, I believe that we have every reason to accept it as a literal event, and here are a couple of reasons why. For one thing, Mark is careful to place the transfiguration at a specific point in time, six days following Peter’s famous declaration of Jesus as the Messiah at Caesarea Philippi. Added to that, the inclusion of Peter’s almost comical response to what he witnessed gives further evidence of the genuineness of what we are being told. Altogether, it seems likely that, as they stood in Jesus’ presence that day, the three disciples were at one of those points where the barrier between heaven and earth becomes thin and eternal realities are glimpsed, even if only for an instant, for what they are.

The glory on the mountain

So let us take a few moments to look once again at what took place on the mountainside that day. Jesus has gone off with three of his disciples, Peter and the two brothers James and John—the ones often referred to as Jesus’ inner circle. There, high above the Galilean hills, they found themselves entirely alone. Notice how Mark emphasizes the point: he “led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves”. It is Luke who informs us that Jesus was praying. All the while, I can imagine the three disciples either taking in the magnificent view or perhaps foraging for food (a few berries, maybe) after the arduous climb.

When they looked at Jesus again, what they saw must have taken their breath away. Jesus had utterly changed. The verb in Greek is metamorphoo. You can recognize it in our word “metamorphosis”—when a caterpillar is transformed into a butterfly or a tadpole into a frog. The transformation that the disciples saw in Jesus, on the other hand, was on an incomparably different level. It penetrated even his clothes to the point where they positively dazzled. (Here I love the quaintness of the King James Version: “such as no fuller on earth can white them”.) With Jesus were two other figures, whom the disciples were able to recognize as Moses and Elijah—perhaps representative of the Law and the Prophets.

Mark tells us that that the two were in conversation with Jesus—and I guess Peter was eager to get in on the discussion as well. “Rabbi,” he blurted out, “it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” Peter’s words seem almost ludicrous, but I believe they expressed the genuine desire to prolong this unique experience. I think of the words of the old nineteenth-century hymn,

Father of Jesus, love’s reward!

what rapture it will be

prostrate before thy throne to lie,

and gaze and gaze on thee!

But that was not to happen. Hardly had the words gone out of Peter’s mouth than they were all overshadowed by a cloud. Here we can only think of the cloud of God’s shekinah glory, the cloud that hung over Mount Sinai as Moses received the Ten Commandments, the cloud that accompanied the people of Israel through the wilderness, the cloud that filled the Temple at its dedication under Solomon. And then from the cloud, more terrifying still, a voice: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!”

It seems to me that there is a lesson in those words, a lesson that at times I find difficult to learn. It is that while I know God delights for us to come into his presence and to offer our prayers, how much more important it is that we learn to listen. I am convinced that some of the most valuable time that we can spend in prayer are those moments of silence, when we allow God’s word to sink deep into our minds and hearts, when, instead of speaking to God we give time for God to speak to us. I sometimes wonder if this isn’t part of the reason why it took forty days after Jesus’ ascension for the Holy Spirit to fall upon the disciples. They needed to run out of things to say and simply be silent before the Lord!

Whatever the case, no sooner had the words been spoken than all was silent and the disciples were alone with Jesus once more.

The glory of the cross

What are we to think about all of this? Tom Wright maintains that we cannot come to terms with what happened on this mountain until we think of what was to happen on another one. It is no coincidence that both before the transfiguration and after it, Jesus warned the disciples about his suffering and death. “The Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” (Mark 8:31) “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” (Mark 9:31) And so between the transfiguration and the crucifixion we find some eerie parallels. To quote Bishop Wright,

Here, on a mountain, is Jesus revealed in glory; there on a hill outside Jerusalem, is Jesus, revealed in shame. Here his clothes are shining white; there, they have been stripped off, while beneath him soldiers gamble for them. Here he is flanked by Moses and Elijah, two of Israel’s greatest heroes; there he is flanked by two brigands. Here, a bright cloud overshadows the scene; there, darkness comes upon the land. Here, Peter blurts out how wonderful it all is; there, he is hiding in shame after denying he even knows Jesus. Here, a voice from God himself declares that this is his beloved Son; there, Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and a pagan soldier declares, in surprise, that this really was God’s son.[3]

Could it be that this is the reason why, on the way down the mountain, Jesus ordered the disciples not to share with anyone what they had just witnessed until after he had risen from the dead? We all want the glory. But was Jesus saying that there can be no glory without suffering—and specifically without his suffering? “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” wrote the apostle Paul,

who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11)

“If we suffer with him, we will also be glorified with him.” (Romans 8:17b)

The glory that awaits us

Before we leave the transfiguration, there is another thing we ought to note. Apart from what we read in the gospels, the word “transfigure” occurs in only two other places in the whole of the New Testament. One them is 2 Corinthians 3:18 and it reads thus:

And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transfigured into the same image from one degree of glory to another…

What does this teach us? I believe that when Peter and James and John looked on with awe at Jesus that day on the mountain, they were also looking at themselves—not as they were, but as they would one day be. As John himself was later to write, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2)

This is a truly astounding truth and it carries with it astounding implications. C.S. Lewis spoke about them in his famous sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory”.

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship… There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit… And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner… Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses…

All of this brings us to the one other place in the Bible where we find the word “transfigured”. It is in Paul’s great exhortation in Romans 12 to “be transfigured (that is what the word is literally) by the renewing of your minds”. And so, if we take Lewis’ words seriously, the transfiguration stands as a challenge to you and to me to see ourselves and those around us in the same way that God sees us in Christ—in other words to love with that same self-giving love with which he loves us.

I’d like us to pray using the words of Charles Wesley.

Finish, then, thy new creation;
Pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see thy great salvation
Perfectly restored in thee;
Changed from glory into glory,
Till in heaven we take our place,
Till we cast our crowns before thee,
Lost in wonder, love, and praise.

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[1]     Westminster Historical Atlas to the Bible

[2]     The Gospel According to Saint Mark, 214

[3]     See Matthew for Everyone, Part 2, 14, 15 (slightly altered)