Jesus As He Really Is: A Meditation on Matthew 17 for Transfiguration Sunday

And after six days Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother,

and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart,

And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun,

and his raiment was white as the light.

And, behold, there appeared unto them

Moses and Elias talking with him.

 

Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus,

Lord, it is good for us to be here:

if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles;

one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias.

 

While he yet spake, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them:

and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said,

 This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him.

And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their face, and were sore afraid.

And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise, and be not afraid.

And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no man, save Jesus only.

And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, saying,

Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be risen again from the dead.

 

In the Transfiguration account from St. Matthew, Jesus took a select group of disciples to a mountain top to reveal His divine nature.  The event was so disconcerting and jarring for Peter, James, and John, that the glorious nature of Jesus together with Moses and Elijah caused them to suggest worship of all three by the use of tabernacles constructed in their honor.  As their confused blasphemy escaped Peter’s lips, the Father overshadowed the vision and directed them back to the centrality of the revelation:  Jesus is the divine Son in whom the Father is well pleased, and their focus should be placed purely upon Him.  While Moses and Elijah appeared in glory around Jesus, theirs was a borrowed glory of creatures made luminescent by their Creator, while the glory Jesus shone forth with was His own.  Jesus was revealed as fully God, the Only Begotten of the Father, not be set on parity with the great Prophets of old.  Mankind may be enlightened and enlivened through Him, but never will the creature be the Creator.

 

There is both challenge and comfort in this revelation.  Jesus revealed in His full divinity is hard for fallen minds to wrap themselves around, as even the chief of Jesus’ disciples demonstrated.  It is Jesus who selected these few to behold His full glory before going on to Calvary, and Jesus who after comforting them, instructed them to keep the vision to themselves until after His Resurrection on Easter morning.  St. Matthew must have heard this story from one of those three disciples in order to put it into his Gospel account, since Matthew was not invited to this Transfiguration event.  Such is the darkness of man’s fallen mind that when confronted with authentic divinity, it becomes almost unhinged—yet the full divinity of Jesus was necessary for His disciples to understand, because apart from that truth, none of the rest of His ministry would make any sense.  Only God Himself could make satisfaction for the sins of the world, paying an infinite debt of justice so as to offer an endless flood of mercy upon those who would trust in Him.  Only God could reach across the chasm which separated Him from fallen men, the infinite to the finite, the eternal to the temporal, and make all things new in Himself.  Only God could be the Savior of the world, just as only God could be the world’s Creator, and only God could be the world’s righteous Judge.  Man could not reach up to grasp God, but God could reach down to secure us.

 

The full divinity of Jesus also helps us wrap our sinful minds around another immutable and necessary proposition:  we are not God.  The rebellion of our first parents echoes down into every age and every fallen heart, where man seeks to make a god of himself, setting his own desires above all others.  That grave and original fault in mankind makes viewing the true God so much more destabilizing, as the corrupted wiring inside our own minds cannot escape the truth that there is only one, true God, and we’re not Him.  Yet breaking through this delusion is critical, because apart from faith in the one, true God, there is no way to approach Him as Savior.  The fallen mind which demands with hubristic insanity to be regarded as the God that he is not, can only rise up in defiant war against the true God who cannot deny the reality of which He is the font.  God must be God and men must be men, and no amount of shouting absurdities into the void will change that reality.  Regardless of what man chooses to identify himself as, or how man may elect to define himself, he is still fundamentally what he was made to be:  a creature of the Creator, and one who owes both his existence and allegiance to the one, true God alone.

 

However, as the delusion of man is debunked in the revelation of Jesus as true God, man’s return to Reason and Truth transforms him into something far more than he was before.  Jesus as the Logos and Truth of God is that divine Word whereby fallen men not only encounter the divinity, but are made new creations in Him.  Jesus as the Eternal Word of the Father speaks not only Law in the exquisite physics of the cosmos, but also the Gospel of forgiveness, reconciliation, and eternal life in Him.  Perhaps this is why Jesus told his select disciples to hide the vision until after His resurrection, because in that post-resurrection moment, the full divinity of Jesus could speak to them of the Atonement He made for them in His Cross, and the glorious resurrection which awaited them all through Him.  Once free from the delusions of Original Sin, the Gospel of Jesus Christ—Incarnate, Crucified, Resurrected, and Coming Again—is one of grace and mercy and life that can only be received in faith.  The resurrected Jesus could approach His disciples with words of peace and reconciliation, as well as the challenge to carry His Eternal Word into all the world and to every living soul.  This Gospel is rooted in the fullness of Jesus’ divinity as well as His full humanity, so that all men who follow Him by faith, might live glorified together with Him forever by His grace, just as Moses and Elijah do.

 

It is good that the Transfiguration destabilizes our fallen minds, to make way for greater and deeper truth:  we are not God, but God loves us so much that He has come to reconcile us to Himself, that in Him we might have an abundant and eternal life that outstrips any shadow of life we perceive here below.  The resurrection of Jesus becomes the promise of our resurrection, just as His victory over death becomes our victory, and His Kingdom becomes our Kingdom.  Hear the Word of the Lord come to you this day, that by the power of the Holy Spirit you might be transformed in body, mind, and spirit to live in Him now and forever by grace through faith in Him.  We are not God, but the one, true God has loved us, and come to seek and to save us, all through His Only Begotten Son in whom He is well pleased.  May we take that destabilizing and liberating truth to every deluded soul we meet, that together we might live forever in Jesus.  Soli Deo Gloria!  Amen.