February 15 2026 Feast of the Transfiguration
Today we come to the end of our epiphany journey, and this ‘epiphany’, the greatest epiphany ever – the transfiguration of Jesus with blinding light, heavenly voice, visions of Moses and Elijah, concludes with a very strange request. All three gospels end this story in the same way – don’t tell anyone what you have seen. But I will come back to that thought.
Jesus invites three of his disciples to come with him ‘up the mountain’ and while there, they are enveloped by a cloud. Now in our Exodus reading, Moses received the 10 commandments, up a mountain, when it too was enveloped by cloud. Here in this community, we ‘on the mountain’ are also occasionally ‘surrounded by cloud’, but it is not like the ones we read about in our Scripture. For us, we can usually still see, we can still navigate our way around. For Moses, the cloud was like ‘a devouring fire’, and it was in this terrifying cloud that God spoke to Moses. Matthew alternates between bright vision and the obscurity of the cloud on the mountain. The disciples appeared to see clearly when they saw Jesus standing with Moses and Elijah, and then the cloud covered them as they heard the voice speaking to them. And it was saying something we remember hearing at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry ‘this is my beloved Son, with him I am well pleased’ and then a new phrase was added ‘listen to him’. With a thunderous voice from the cloud, the disciples are frightened, but with Jesus’ gentle touch and voice, they are no longer frightened. And then they are alone again, and Jesus starts to go down the mountain. Now we could all probably agree that this sight would have been one you would be ‘breaking your neck’ to tell everyone about, but Jesus asks them to ‘tell no-one’, ‘yet’.
The story of the transfiguration moves us away from trying to understand Jesus only as he is revealed in glory, and points us down the mountain to continue to walk with him. The voice in the cloud commands us to listen to him, and listening is more than just hearing. We have all been in situations where you know someone is hearing you, but you also are aware they are not actually listening to you. As Jesus tells us during this Sermon on the Mount, building on rock takes more than just hearing words, we have to act on them as well. Hearing without obeying leads to downfall and catastrophe.
One of the issues we can have with this story is, we want mountaintop experiences for ourselves. We want to ‘see’ the glory of God, we want to ‘hear’ God speaking specifically to us. And when it doesn’t happen, we can feel deflated and ‘less’. We can feel like there is something ‘missing’ in me. And if we do have a mountaintop experience, sometimes we don’t want to ‘walk back down the mountain’, we want to do as Peter indicates, I will make a tent for you all and we can stay here. But staying up the mountain will not get anything done. It will not allow us to live, it will not allow us to see God in the community around us, to listen to God speaking to us through those we meet on a daily basis.
I am not meaning to say that mountaintop experiences are not good. I am not saying that we should not set aside times and places for ‘quiet’ to ‘be with God’, private times, personal times, or even times of meditation with a group, it is good to move from the ‘mundane’ and experience the indescribable Otherness of the divine. Most of life is unspectacular, but all of life contains the sacred. The challenge is to cultivate the kind of sight that perceives God in places darker, murkier, and more obscure than a mountaintop.
In the chapter prior to the one we have read, Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is, and Peter makes the bold declaration that he is ‘the Messiah’, and Jesus tells them ‘don’t tell anyone’. In fact, throughout the gospels, Jesus tells many people ‘don’t tell anyone’. In the gospel of Matthew alone I think he says it about 17 times. So why ‘don’t tell’. When you think about it, who would believe you. How often have you told someone about something that is ‘difficult to explain’ but you know it to be true, only to be greeted with ‘scepticism’, even ‘patronising’ smiles and nods. Jesus tells the disciples to say nothing until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead because it is only after the resurrection that this story of transfiguration can be ‘almost’ understood.
Thirty years after the gospels were written, the author of 2 Peter still appeals for his readers to consider the transfiguration. What to make of the story. Is it fable, myth, theological metaphor? Is it eyewitness history, or even some combination of these. He knows some will dismiss the story as ‘fiction’, because we, educated people that we are, know better than those gullible people all those years ago. The author of this letter rebuts criticisms that the early believers followed ‘cleverly invented stories’. He tells his listeners they are ‘eyewitness’ accounts of actual events even if the story, like so many stories in the gospels, was easier to describe than explain.
Last week Jesus told us he came to ‘fulfil’ the law and the prophets. On this mountaintop, Jesus fulfills the law the Moses received and consummates the end of all things that the prophet Elijah was thought to herald. And this voice not only reminds us of Jesus’ baptism, it also affirms what Peter has confessed, that Jesus is God’s beloved and specially appointed Son who merits our total allegiance – ‘listen to him’. It is easy for those who have become ‘all too familiar’ with the gospel texts to ‘tame’ what we cannot explain; to ‘trivialize’ the indescribable, and to ‘trim and package’ God into bite sized pieces we can manage and deal with. But the transfiguration of Jesus belies all our efforts to dilute the stringent wine of the gospel. The blinding light, the voice from the clouds, challenge faith that has become tepid, perfunctory, and bored.
May we see the wonder of God around us, may we be open to the transfiguring light that shines in places and people we forget to notice, may we remember to ‘listen to him’.