Our faith is made up of a series of encounters between humans and God, humans and humans, God and God. Sometimes these encounters have ended in floods or wars or colonial oppression. Other times these encounters mean learning, sharing, and being transformed for the better.
And often, the really monumental encounters, the ones whose stories we tell over and over again, happen on mountains. There is:
- Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, which happens on an unnamed mountain.
- Moses encounters God as a burning bush on Mt Horeb and later receives the Ten Commandments on Mt Sinai.
- Solomon builds the first Temple on Mt Moriah.
- God meets Elijah on a mountain in the form of a still small voice, as we read in one of our scriptures today.
- Fast forward to the New Testament, and of course there is the sermon on the mount, where we hear both the Beatitudes and one version of the Lord’s Prayer. The site of Jesus’ crucifixion, Golgotha (sometimes also called Calvary) is also sometimes said to have been a mountain, though that is not explicit in the biblical text. And in between those events is another mountain encounter, the Transfiguration, which we are talking about today.
In this story, Jesus takes his disciples up a high mountain where he is transformed before their eyes and meets Moses and Elijah before God proclaims Jesus his son, the Beloved.
It’s important to remember that at this point, his followers don’t know that he is the messiah and the Son of God. To us, with the benefit of hindsight and thousands of years of the Christian tradition, who Jesus is may be pretty obvious. But at the time, this revelation would have come as a shock to his followers who saw him as a leader, teacher, and maybe at most a particularly great prophet.
So I think that’s important to keep in mind, and at the same time I wonder what Peter and James and John were expecting to learn up on that mountain, and if maybe on some level they knew that something groundbreaking might happen. For a lot of ancient cultures in this region, mountains were seen as closer to God. And in particular, ancient Jewish tradition presented mountains as the place for divine revelation. So maybe, when they went up that mountain with Jesus, those disciples had an inkling that if something was going to be revealed about this man they had come to follow, this mountain might be the place.
The site of the Transfiguration, though not mentioned in great detail, seems to be an important part of the story. Ancient Jewish listeners would probably have found that facet of this story familiar both from their own history (that is, the Bible, which contains hundreds of mentions of mountains) as well as perhaps from personal experience.
This got me thinking about the importance of place, not only in this story but in the present day, too. Christianity is a faith that has deep roots in a particular region (modern day Israel, Palestine, and Egypt) but nowadays is practiced all over the world by a diverse population of people, many of whom do not have ethnic or cultural ties to the region outside of their faith.
This present reality of global Christianity is, unfortunately, partially wrapped up in histories of colonialism, conquest, and people being forced to flee. Some Christians have perpetrated violence in the name of our faith. Others, including Mennonites and Anabaptists, were victims of it. Right now we practice a faith of peace in a place where indigenous residents (in particular, the Occaneechi, Sissipahaw, Shakori, and Eno peoples) were displaced and killed, often in the name of white Christian supremacy. Places and our relationships with them matter.
In thinking through what it means to be a Christian in this place, I’ve found it useful to read the First Nations Version of the New Testament. It was put together by a group of Native North American Christian leaders and reflects the ways that many Native Christians have typically talked about their faith.
Maybe the most obvious and widespread difference is that this Bible uses the native names for biblical characters and locations (Jesus is Creator Sets Free, Peter is Stands on the Rock, Galilee is Circle of Nations, etc). It also makes use of some slightly different kinds of storytelling and more use of metaphor, and references items from Native cultures like frybread. Where in other versions of today’s Gospel reading Peter suggests setting up shelters or tents, in the FNV he suggests tipis.
There are some changes and additions that may feel too significant for some people. And I think it’s reasonable to ask whether it makes sense to transpose this story to a new land, but if nothing else I think that the fact that even small changes to place and culture feel significant is testament to how much the Bible we are used to is steeped in its own time and place.
And I don’t think we can talk about land and religion and power without talking about the war in Israel and Gaza. The Israel-Palestine conflict is long and complicated and involves a constellation of different philosophies and ideologies on both sides, but it is in part a question of historical claims and competing ethnic, social, and geographical lineages. It’s about what it means for a place or a people or a story to belong. Where do they belong? What do they belong to? Who do they belong with?
Like many stories in the New Testament, the Transfiguration serves to establish a clear line from the Old Testament/Tanakh through to Jesus. Moses and Elijah appear in this story to pass the torch to Jesus and position him as the next in this long history of religious and social leadership.
For early Christians trying to find their place in both Jewish and Roman society, this might have been an important narrative, validating them and giving them a spiritual lineage to hold onto. We continue to read the Old Testament and weave it into our Christian faith. I am always fascinated by Jesus’s relationship with the OT, both in how he uses scripture in his ministry and in the ways that I believe the OT foreshadows and sets us up for Jesus.
But for Jewish people, particularly those living in the wake of centuries of antisemitism perpetuated by Christians, efforts to read Jesus into the Old Testament, or view Old Testament figures as characters in the Christian story can sound like supersessionism.
Christian supersessionism is the idea that Christians have replaced Jews as God’s chosen people, and it’s the backbone of a lot of both explicit and implicit antisemitism. You also have Muslim supersessionism that holds that Muslims have replaced both Jews and Christians.
Ultimately, supersessionism treats these stories–and God’s love–as something to be owned. It goes back to the idea of belonging: who do these stories belong to, and who belongs in them?
How we and others who use these texts answer these questions has consequences not only for our own faith but for the lives and freedoms of people around the world.
I don’t have a perfect or easy solution to this, but I think that the pursuit of peace in our world and our worship has to include finding ways to understand stories, histories, land, and love as not as things to own but as things to encounter.
Going back to the mountain, I read a lectionary commentary in the Christian Century in which a scholar named Thomas Long posited that that abrupt shift to the mountain in our gospel text is really an invitation to shift the way we look at the world, to go up the mountain with Jesus and allow ourselves to be changed. He argues that what is transfigured on the mountain is not Jesus himself but the way we see him–finally we, like the disciples, can see Jesus for real.
We’re about to enter Lent, a time to reflect, repent, regard the world as it is and devote ourselves to what it should be. There is a lot in our world that needs to change. There’s a lot of deep rooted historical pain that cannot be simply undone or wiped away. The world around us needs to be radically transfigured with revelatory peace.
That’s not going to happen in 40 days, but perhaps this Lent we can commit ourselves to some small piece of this work. We can take Paul’s instruction to “be transformed by the renewing of the mind” or, as the First Nations Version says, to “let Creator change you from the inside out, in the way a caterpillar becomes a butterfly.” Our psalm today tells us that God will not be silent, and we should not be silent either but instead speak up to injustice everywhere.
We are all here today, together, in this place, because of a long series of encounters, good and bad, which are important for understanding ourselves as people and as Christians. We are here to listen to Jesus, God’s Son and Beloved, and help each other follow him. We are here to encounter the dazzling world God has created and, hopefully, to let ourselves be transfigured by it.