READINGS FROM HOLY SCRIPTURE:
Exodus 3:1-14
2 Peter 1:16-21
St. Matthew 17:1-9
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord
Jesus Christ. (Eph 1)
Who speaks to you on this day of His Transfiguration from
His Gospel, saying:
“And he was
transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes
became white as light”
Who or what is God? Ask that question around town and you
will get as many answers as there are people to answer. He is infinite. He is
almighty. He is eternal. He is all powerful. He is the sum total of all things
in the universe. He is the spirit of good in all things. He just Is.
Someone may even break out into song: my God is so big, so
strong and so mighty there’s nothing my God cannot do”. What this all points to
is that no one can define “god”. Or at least some think they can and this is
what evolutionists say has led to multiple religions. Each culture and populace
has tried to define God, come up with different answers, and therefore
different religions.
And don’t think for a minute that Science is left out of the
religious loop. Anytime they come up against something they can’t explain,
they’ll say, that’s just how that thing works, as if it had a will of its own.
Then you say, we just don’t know enough yet. Yes, and we’ll always “not know
enough yet”.
Ah. Our sinful nature at it again. And it started right
away. Adam’s new religion, instead of fearing, loving, and trusting God above
all things, was the religion of blaming the wife. Now, Adam worships the God
Who created everything, gave it to him, but also gave him a faulty wife,
apparently.
Eve’s new religion is now Adam’s plus the distrust of her
husband who threw her under the bus. Cain then has a new religion. Able has the
right one, but leaves before being able to pass it along to anyone. And on and
on it goes, until a show down with the gods of Egypt, in the book of Exodus.
It is there that the stage is set to truly reveal the one,
true God, as the Lord says, “The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord,
when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel
from among them” (Ex 7:5). So is that another new religion among the
Egyptians, the god who strikes down the Egyptians for his own pleasure??
But that is a secondary problem to the one we now face,
thousands of years in the future. Our primary problem is that God has not acted
in an Egypt sort of way since then, which makes it hard for us to “prove”
God.
Jesus, today, does not make it any easier for our sinful
nature. Because now, on the celebration of His Transfiguration, He appears to
muddy the waters between God and man. Super shiny Jesus, Moses and Elijah back
from the dead, and a talking cloud all add up to maybe men can become gods and
the Greeks and Romans were right?
Repent. The reason God confuses you so much is because you
refuse to see Him as anything except Almighty and Infinite. And on the other
side of the sin coin, you cannot help but see yourselves as anything but worthy
of His position.
What you are really trying to address are the only two
temptations the devil throws at you. First that you are not worthy of
forgiveness and second, that you are in no need of forgiveness. If God is only
Almighty, then He will pass you by on the Last Day either in contempt or
arrogance.
Our first, and only, step to solving this riddle is to let
God speak for Himself, which He does only in His Word. We listen, and He does
start out with “Almighty” in Genesis creating all things, but He doesn’t stay there.
He moves on to the Trinity, revealing Himself to be three persons in one God.
Not three parts or modes or individual gods, but persons: Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit in one God.
This, we confess in the Athanasian Creed, is how we must
think of God, three in one, if we desire to be saved. Neglecting or rejecting
the Trinity is also a non-starter for the Christian. If the God we are talking
about with others is not Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then the conversation
can go no further.
It is to this very point, that Jesus enters the
conversation. Because we cannot argue someone into the faith, faith must come
from somewhere else, that is, it must be a gift from God. Thus, it is also
necessary for everlasting salvation that one faithfully believe the incarnation
of our Lord Jesus Christ, the only source of faith.
What Jesus doesn’t show us today is the power of man to
glorify himself or dig deep to find the power to alter reality in his own,
fabricated transfiguration. This, in a purely human way, is disproved by the
Crucifixion. Since Jesus died, His power must have not come through and is
therefore unreliable for us.
No, it was not the deification of man that Jesus was
accomplishing today, but the assumption of man. The divine fact that God came
in the flesh to absorb, to take all men into Himself completely, as themselves.
2 Corinthians 3 states, “Indeed, in this case, what once had glory has come
to have no glory at all, because of the glory that surpasses it. For if what
was being brought to an end came with glory, much more will what is permanent
have glory” (v. 10-11).
Our bodies were the crown of creation, having the image of
God. The Fall into sin erased that image. It was lost and it is only restored
in Christ. Therefore, if we desire to be saved and think on the Trinity, we
must first contemplate Jesus, Who is both God and man.
“It is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to
recognize God in His glory and majesty, unless he recognizes Him in the
humility and shame of the cross. Thus God destroys the wisdom of the wise. …
For this reason true theology and recognition of God are in the crucified
Christ”
(AE 31:52-53).
All theology is Christology. God does not wait for the right
religion to show up on earth, neither is He going to wait for the big reveal until
the Last Day where one lucky winner got God right. He is going to tell us all
things before hand with His own two lips, in Christ.
In Christ, dwells all the image of the Godhead, all of it.
Transfiguration ends the season of Epiphany for this reason: true epiphany is
the revelation of God in Christ. We do not get to the Trinity without first
stopping at the God-man, Jesus, Who for our sake takes on the sin of the world
in His crucifixion.
We sang, O God of Light, earlier. Not only is God’s Word an
unfailing Lamp for eternity, but also in our humanity now, as well. We will
also “bury” our Alleluias for Lent in a little while, but again, we are not
simply singing about our work to be accomplished for the season.
The true meaning of the “burial of the Alleluias” is us
singing of how deeply God has buried Himself in humanity. A unity that includes
the very last electron, such that what happens to humanity happens to God. God
does not even escape death, in Christ, so close is this union.
Such that, since death cannot slay God and life
automatically wins out over death, God in His resurrection brings humanity with
Him, out of the grave. The Transfiguration light of Christ is the Resurrection
light. In this sense, it is foreign and unearthly. Not because Jesus makes
Himself into something other than one of us, but because to this point death
has always won.
So we pay close attention to Jesus, as the Transfiguration
cloud advised. We pay close attention and find Him working closely with us,
speaking to us, baptizing us, and communing with us. Since Christ is doing that
work, God is doing that work. The Almighty and Infinite speaks to us, baptizes
us, and communes with us, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
So Who or what is God? God is the Lord of the living. He is
also the Lord of the dead, because they come back to the living at His Word.
God is the ultimate Pure Being, because He is not only clean in Himself but is
able to clean His enemies, sinners, as well. God is full to overflowing and He
spills that blessing over onto us, filling our chalice till it also overflows,
just like Him.
God is the God of the cross, Who facing death, dies, and yet
remains God in that struggle. He is so alive, He retains His life in death. And
freely gives such a life to you. A life that is death-proof. A chalice full of
forgiveness, a washing full of rebirth, and an infinite Word contained in a
finite body, Jesus.
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