Second Sunday of Lent

“And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves; and he was transfigured before them, and his garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them” (Mark 9:2-3).

It’s pretty easy to talk about Jesus the human being, especially during Lent. Jesus is the God who suffers, who allies himself with the poor and rejected, who dies on the Cross. It’s easy to learn from him, because he’s the one we see teaching us, sharing parables, telling us how to relate to God and to one another. While his life is difficult, it’s pretty easy to understand because – at its core – it’s no different from the lives he’s asking us to lead.

But Jesus is also fully divine. He has a unique relationship with the Father because they are Persons of the one God. He's blinding in his glory.

In this reading Jesus is transfigured before his closest friends, in what the Orthodox church upholds is a manifestation of the pure, uncreated divine light. His friends are stunned and terrified. They don’t understand what they’re seeing. It’s easy to see why: Jesus is outside and beyond everything they've known.

At times, Jesus (and God) is incomprehensible to us. At times, we don’t know what to make of any of it. It’s especially difficult to understand events like the transfiguration because they don’t relate to anything we’ve ever known or experienced before. God can be blinding, terrifying, overwhelming. That glory can never be contained or put aside.

And yet Jesus “emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (Phil 2:7). There is only this one moment in his earthly ministry where God’s glory so completely shines through. Jesus does not come for his own glory, but for the glory of the Father; Jesus does not come for his own sake, but for the world which God so loves. As a servant, he humbles himself. The glory is always there, but hidden.

Jesus tells his friends that they must tell no one what they’ve seen on the mountain until after he has risen from the dead (Mk  9:9). They don’t understand. And it is hard to understand that Jesus should not grasp the power of God but lay down his life for us, his friends. Logically, it doesn’t seem possible that the God of glory could ever die. And it isn’t logical. It’s love.

In the transfiguration we see that “the kingdom of God has come with power” (Mk 9:1). When we look around us at dreary world with all its suffering, a world that seems so far from God’s kingdom, we know – even though we can’t see it – that the kingdom is here because Jesus lives. One day, when the kingdom comes in full, “every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2:10-11).

The world was blessed to see a glimpse of that day in the shining raiment of our Lord.