Exodus 24:12-18
2 Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-9
One of my favorite TV shows of all time has to be M*A*S*H which is set during the Korean War and features a medical unit near the front line of the fighting. There is a lot of good comedy in the series, but there are also some very dramatic moments. In a recent episode, Father Mulcahey the chaplain was about to receive a visit from a Cardinal who was touring Korea. And because this Cardinal was a particularly well-known figure, Father Mulcahey wanted everything to be in order as evidence of his effective ministry as the camp’s spiritual leader. When he didn’t get everything he wanted when he wanted it, he got rather persnickety with the people of the camp with his seemingly excessive demands.
The Cardinal was to be the celebrant at the Sunday service, and Father Mulcahey was to be given the honor of introducing the Cardinal. However, a crisis had developed on Saturday night due to a soldier having been diagnosed with leukemia during a routine blood test, and Father Mulcahey had stayed up all night with the soldier to visit with and console him. Because he had gotten so wrapped up in where he was needed, Father Mulcahey had lost track of time and was late for the service where the Cardinal and most of the camp were all waiting.
Father Mulcahey showed up in his bath robe looking disheveled and was obviously and admittedly not as prepared as he would like to have been. Rather than try to remember the sermon he had been preparing, he chose instead to tell the story of what had happened during the course of the previous few days in his rather self-centered preparations for the Cardinal’s visit in wanting everything just so in his vain effort to impress the Cardinal. He then pretty much slam-dunked himself and his apparent lack of humility as well as his selfishness when he was confronted with the other man’s imminent demise due to leukemia. He had come to realize how self-centered he had been and was reminded about how fragile and short life is. He was also reminded that the Lord did not put us on this earth so that we could look good for visiting dignitaries; we were put here so that the Lord’s presence could be evident in the eyes of the last, the least, and the lost.
The Transfiguration is among the most difficult topics for me to address primarily because I tend to over-think it. For instance, Jesus orders Peter, James, and John to “tell no one of the vision …” until after He has been raised from the grave. There is another element that makes the passage a little more difficult to comprehend: how did the three disciples know they were looking at Moses and Elijah? Additionally, throughout the Gospels whenever the disciples did not fully understand something such as many of Jesus’ parables, they asked questions that were usually answered by Jesus. It would seem to me that the Transfiguration would raise a whole host of questions, but Peter only offered to build three dwellings.
That Moses would represent the Law and that Elijah would represent the Prophecy is pretty simple to appreciate since Jesus makes it known early in Matthew 5:17 that He is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, but does such an appreciation fully address what it was that could obviously wait until after the Resurrection?
Offering to build dwellings for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus would indicate that perhaps Peter at least thought he was fully aware of what he and the others were witnessing: the completeness, the wholeness of the Lord God in the Law and the Prophets through the complete manifestation of His glory in the Son, and They were all coming to claim all of creation as the Kingdom of Heaven. Even still, Peter was missing some important element because Jesus seemed to indicate that Peter’s willingness to build permanent dwellings on earth for each of these was premature, that it was not the right time and, perhaps, not the right place.
Like the baptism of Jesus, however, I think the message of the Transfiguration must go much deeper than a mere doctrinal prescription of how man thinks things ought to be. The image that was before the disciples was not like any image that is comprehensible to the human mind – they were seeing Jesus in a whole new form as well as looking at Elijah and Moses! I think maybe that Jesus finding it necessary to comfort the three was an indication that they clearly could not comprehend what they had seen; this notion may also help to explain why Jesus had ordered the disciples to keep quiet about it. After all, if they were unable to understand it, how could they possibly explain it to others?
If you’ve not already seen it, I highly recommend the movie, “The Last Sin Eater”. It is set in 19th century Appalachia in which Welsh immigrants settled. The Sin Eater was a man who had been designated by a casting of lots to come only during burials which were always conducted at night. No one was allowed to cast eyes upon the Sin Eater as he came to accept a gift of bread and wine laid upon the body of the deceased on a shawl. The Sin Eater would take the gifts, eat and drink, and then offer this mournful prayer: “Who will take away MY sins?”
The main character of the movie, an 11-year-old girl called Callie, had a difficult relationship with her mother due to the untimely death of her 5-year-old sister for which she blamed herself. She was determined to find the Sin Eater who lived up in the mountains away from the community so that he could take away her awful sin. Throughout this ordeal the relationship between her and her mother seemed to be one in which mom really did seem to hold Callie responsible for her sister’s death.
When Callie finally caught up with and found the Sin Eater, she convinced him that she needed her sin taken from her before her death because she could not bear the overwhelming burden. When the Sin Eater told her that he could only perform his duty at burial, she swore that this would be her next step if that’s what it would take. Upon hearing this, the Sin Eater agreed to perform for her the next day. The next day came and the Sin Eater did his deed while Callie lay with the bread and wine on a shawl upon her chest with her eyes tightly shut, but she felt no different once the Sin Eater had finished. She still had her sin upon her!
Shortly thereafter, Callie happened upon a stranger near a creek whom she had actually met a few days before when she about to cast herself off the same tree bridge her younger sister had fallen from when she was killed. The stranger got to Callie just as she was about to fall and had asked her what could possibly be so bad in such a young life to do this terrible thing, but she ran away.
At the second meeting the stranger invited her to sit with him and eat while he spoke to her. Their conversation finally turned to the sin which so haunted her, and she told the stranger of her visit to the Sin Eater who was unable to take this awful sin from her. The stranger turned out to be an evangelist who spoke with her about the ORIGINAL SIN EATER who had come some 1800 years before to take away sin. It was not long before Callie was able to embrace this New Reality, and she had proclaimed to her imaginary friend who had come to her earlier that “it no longer hurt” after she had been made aware of THE Sin Eater.
It turned out that the community “boss” was the son of a very mean man who had helped the Welsh get settled in the cove by slaughtering the Indians who were already settled there. This very mean man, upon his death bed, needed a “sin eater” to take away the overwhelming burden that was now his as he lay near death. The Sin Eater who hid in the mountains had been deceived into believing that it had been the “will of God” that he serve the community in this capacity. It was not until an elderly woman who was a child when this massacre took place decided to come forward that this practice of using an earthly “sin eater” ended.
I will stop short of the ending so as not to ruin it. Needless to say, the ending was everything it should have been, but the message that came from it was even more powerful. It may be a message that has a parallel with the Transfiguration.
The disciples who had witnessed this phenomenon on the holy mountain could not have possibly been able to fully understand or appreciate what was before them, and would likely not be able to until after the Resurrection when they would then be able to see the resurrected Christ in all His glory. Peter’s willingness to build dwellings for each of the Three seemed good TO HIM to do, but he and the others were not ready for the true meaning of the Transfiguration.
The message of eternal life lay in the Transfiguration by the witness of Moses whose grave was unknown (Deut 34:6) and by Elijah who had been taken up from this world into Heaven by a “chariot of fire” (2 Kings 2:11), personified by the Glorified Christ whose wholeness of the Lord God was attested to by the Voice which had been heard by Peter, James, and John on the holy mountain. I don’t think they would have been able to fully comprehend the meaning of the Transfiguration if they had run off half-cocked and make something up that seemed to make sense to them but would still come up short of what subsequent generations would need to know.
The Transfiguration was the evidence that was needed then, and is by many needed now, to remind us that we are not alone. The world comes crushing in around us, and we need to know that we’ve not been forgotten, not been forsaken. But it also seems to me that the other necessary parallel in the Transfiguration that helps it to make more sense is that one must be walking with Jesus in order to not only witness such a thing but, more importantly, to embrace it and appreciate it for what it is: Emmanuel – God with us.
We are about to enter into the season of Lent. It is time for renewal and revival not only in the Church but, perhaps more relevantly, in our communities. It is time for us to reconnect with The Sin Eater so that we may go about our work of making disciples and not be overburdened with the drudgery of daily living but with a sense of freedom like no other. If we feel like we are missing that now, I can think of no better time than during Lent to reconnect, to experience for ourselves the New Reality that always was, is, and is to come.
Amen.
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