A Dream of Light and Songs of Sorrow
Matthew 17:1-9
by Dave Swanson
March 2, 2014
“But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’ And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.”
What just happened?
If you were hearing this story for the first time, you, like the disciples, would have thought the jig was up. Jesus takes them up to a mountain—crazy stuff always happens on mountains. Everybody’s been wondering when Jesus is really going to be the Messiah and stop wandering aimlessly around the countryside. The three top dog disciples are going with him up a mountain—a vague sense of anticipation builds.
And then Jesus’ face, the dirty bearded face of a dark-skinned vagabond teacher whose words, relationships, and politics excite people, begins to blaze. The fires of the sun start oozing from his pores and his shabby gray robe turns to flame. People have already been building a sense of anticipation and hope, and the adrenaline that comes with the possibility of relief and restoration. Is he the Messiah?
His face starts to shine.
In the icons and pictures, Jesus is often floating in the air in this scene. Perhaps this is why, in my imagination, there is this moment when multiple things start to happen at once. The first solar flare begins to break forth out of Jesus’ right eye and the three disciples begin their super-slow-motion fall backwards onto their rumps. And while that happens, Jesus’ feet begin to change their relationship to the ground.
The small bones and muscles, ligaments and tendons, that have been hard at work bearing the load of his hundred and fifty pounds down to the earth are slowly relieved of their burden. His feet start to relax, and then, there is a gap between Jesus and the ground.
This has to be visual. If we don’t let go of our demand for all of this to get pinned down and tamed by our words and ideas… if we don’t let go, at least for a while, of our expectation that the Jesus story is going to be explainable, we’ll miss Transfiguration Sunday. We can’t be here in this story unless we know that we have no control over what is going on.
Jesus is lifting off the ground.
His eyes have become lanterns. His body is unlike anything. Even the bodies of angels don’t look like this.
Imagine an angel… really.
Now throw that picture away because in the light of this Jesus, the angel fades. This is majesty—a coronation. This is lightening. At some point the disciples look up at Christ only to find him in conversation with the prophets. The founder of the Jewish faith, Moses, and the renewer of the faith, Elijah—THEY ARE THERE, talking with Jesus.
Something clicks. You don’t know how you know, but you know who these figures are, you feel in your guts that the end of things is here—that the time is done. The Messiah, the exalted and anointed bringer of justice, has arrived.
The signs, the signs, the signs.
The vision of everything we have vaguely and specifically hoped for is right before our eyes. We can’t see anything but this exalted image. And one of us goes to call them down from their conclave in the air to live in houses and be with us. We want this. We want this. We want this to be real. Our longing hangs before us as if suspended from a thread. All the things we wish for and even more, that we don’t dare to wish for. All that is before us hanging in the balance. Let’s make houses. Jeremiah told us, “Build houses and live in them; grow gardens and eat what they produce.” Shalom is here. Come be with us. Don’t leave, don’t breathe, don’t let us go! Don’t be a dream. Everything is here. Everything.
Gillian Welch is a haunting songwriter. She writes,
I dreamed last night that the time was done.
I dreamed last night that the time was done.
My soul flew up to the holy sun.
And the Sun is there hanging before us, shining, giving life to the world, with the founder and the renewer, shining, shining. We want to go up, we want the Sun to come down and come among us. Feel this. See it. We are there.
Then… feel the dam break.
We no longer have to merely survive. We can build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat. No more armies tearing us apart, no more deserts to cross, no more rapes. Come down. Come down and be with us. We’ll build houses for you.
And then the voice—the voice comes. The voice of confirmation and affirmation. The voice of the heavens. The voice of all things rolled into the thunder of declaration. Assurance. Let yourself believe. Let yourself believe right through the cheaters cheating you, and even though the abusers abused you. Each of us can see, as clear as day—through all that—to salvation. This is what we have not let ourselves dare to hope for and have yet hoped for all along.
This… is Transfiguration.
But we covered our heads as if missiles were incoming when the voice sounded. We were reduced to fetal balls of fear and joy and hope and relief. And now it’s quiet. We’re waiting for what’s next.
And we feel a touch.
And a different voice: Do not be afraid.
And we look up and we find out why we don’t need to be afraid.
It’s all gone.
The dream is over and we’ve woken up. It’s only Jesus.
(song)
I dreamed last night that the time was done.
I dreamed last night that the time was done.
My soul flew up to the holy sun.
But the devil had a hold of me.
The devil had a hold of me.
I snapped back down,
when he pulled my lead.
The devil had a hold of me.
How did the devil win? What happened to the Messiah? This is the question we only ask in our rarest moments of honesty. But it’s one of our most important ones. We find ourselves powerless and then discover that, apparently, God is powerless too.
It’s only Jesus.
The one we know, the one who smells. The human. The one who is weak. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”
He says, “Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”
“Yeah, don’t worry. We’ve got that covered.” Who would we tell? And who would believe us? The transfiguration makes no sense because the Jesus who wakes us up from the dream makes no sense.
We want our Transfiguration Jesus. And instead we get a moment of Terror—just when we’ve finally let go, when our carefully caged hopes and fears that we’ve worked so hard to contain have burst their bars and are running wild, bearing us along in the freedom of protection— that’s when we open our eyes and the smile fades from our faces. When the light leaves and the color drains, when we realize we’ve been betrayed…
That’s the moment.
That’s the moment.
At the moment of the touch and the leaning in close, when the human odors come into our nostrils, when the rough physicality of a real person rubs up against us.
That’s the moment.
“Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Get up and do not be afraid.”
“Get up. Unfold from your fetal position. Discover that I am not terrible, or at least that my terror is not the same as the one that has left you here on the ground, obliterated.” And there’s the rub. The only kind of Messiah that we feel can keep us safe, is simultaneously the one who scares the hell out of us. Our hope is unleashed in supposed safety, and then, we find ourselves on the ground cowering. We thought we knew what was going on and were so excited.
We were so overjoyed and overwhelmed, that the massively important fact of our cowering—the fact that we, without even knowing it assumed the posture of slaves preparing for a beating—did not dawn on us. After the vision is over, Jesus finds us. We are found to be those with our faces to the ground and our hands covering our heads, or maybe with one hand outstretched to protect us from the blow. And that’s the hand.
The hand whose job is to ward off the onslaught is the one that Jesus reaches for. Jesus comes and crouches down silently, hidden from our gaze and touches our hand. This plain Jesus gives us what the Transfiguration Jesus we imagined could not give us—peace and strength to stand. The peace comes to us, not from on high but through touch. It comes to us, not as those without fear, or impossible hopes, but through those fears and impossibilities.
Jesus comes with the rough touch of calloused hands—Joseph’s son—to be in exile with us. To hold us and to cherish our damaged souls, because he wants to. Because he wants us…
and because he has hope. Jesus has hope that one day we might see that this is that:
The Son of God, meeting in the sky with the great heroes and fathers in the moment of victory, is the Son of Man lifted up, meeting with thieves and revolutionaries in the moment of tragedy. Our dream of light can only find its meaning in our songs of sorrow and vice versa. And so exile and the dream of return are indistinguishable in Jesus.
It’s only Jesus.
(song)
When from our exile,
God leads us home again,
we’ll think we’re dreaming.