The Sunday Next Before Lent
Sermon
The Sunday Next before Lent
11 February 2024
The Reverend Dr James Gardom, Interim Priest-in-Charge
Mark 9.2-7
The description of the transfiguration represents for many of us what we most long for in the Christian life. If we dare to imagine:
o To go up that high mountain with Christ, apart, and away.
o To see Christ with utter clarity, represented by the shining and dazzling.
o To have presented before us the completed unity of God’s revelation in Law and Prophets and incarnation: Elijah and Moses talking with Christ.
o To hear and to know in our innermost hearts the command “This is my, the Beloved; Listen to him!”
Peter says ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here;” And perhaps we are there, sometimes. Most of us, once in a while, or even often, have an intuition, an apprehension of Christ in the Glory of God. We do sense God in Christ, quite acutely sometimes.
o Perhaps through a moment of fellowship, of unburdening and joyful Christian friendship; we sense the love of God, so real, surrounding us.
o For me, at least, sometimes through Music, notably Bach.
o In St Bene’t’s, perhaps most characteristically in the silence of the community when we approach the sacrament to receive communion; a time which can seem to suspend time.
For Peter and James and John at the same time, too much, and something they long to keep, to preserve, to hang on to. “Peter said to Jesus, ‘Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.”
It really is good when we are there. But we cannot just stay on the Mount of Transfiguration at least in this life. As we approach Lent we need to remember that we have to know Christ in other ways. The point is shown rather clearly when we consider how the disciples come to the Mountain, and also what happens when they leave. We come to the mountain of transfiguration from the set of stories which take place in Caesarea Philippi. 8:27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ And they answered him, ‘John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.’ He asked them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered him, ‘You are the Messiah.’
Here is a different mode of the revelation of Christ. Peter has been wrestling in his mind and in his heart for truth about Jesus. As they travel they wonder, and struggle to make sense. All these answers and suggestions are ones that he and the other disciples have turned over in their hearts and in their discussions. Suddenly Peter can bear it no longer and he blurts out the life changing truth, “You are the Christ”; God’s decisive intervention in God’s world, the key, the turning point. Wrestling for the truth brings knowledge of the great truth. But the wrestling is not over. Immediately Jesus is teaching them what this means. 8:31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.’
We are here because we have wrestled for the truth, and at some point we have seen in Christ God’s decisive and final Word, his intervention in our world and our history. But the wrestling does not stop. Why so much suffering, so much sin? What does God’s decisive intervention actually mean? Can we say “yes” to God’s love when it is so hard to see how it works? Why does God not set about things in the ways that seem to us so obvious and necessary?
We cannot really get to the mountain of Transfiguration unless we have wrestled with the idea of God in the world, unless we have come to that life changing truth, and then let that truth rebuke and change us. Change so much of what we thought was sensible and obvious about us and God and the world. From wrestling in Caesarea Philippi to clarity on the Mountain of Transfiguration. And then down the hill again. And Instantly we are in a story where Jesus is surrounded by dust and noise, and crowds, and argument, with a healing that his disciples cannot carry out. ‘9:17 Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.’
The Child’s father does not find Christ in wrestling to make sense of God and the World. Nor does he do so in the blaze and clarity of the shining and the voice and the command. He meets Christ in absoluteness of his need. 9:23 Jesus said to him, ‘If you are able!—All things can be done for the one who believes.’ Immediately the father of the child cried out, ‘I believe; help my unbelief!
Most of us have probably met Christ in that moment of absolute need. We have flung prayers at God, in fear for a child, in fear for our health or our sanity, the shock of grief, in the total knowledge that our prayers are inadequate and our hopes irrational – and we have found Christ there. In wrestling. In the blasé of Clarity. In seeing our sheer need. If we want to see Christ fully, we probably need all three. (And possibly others besides). And especially in Lent.
We are on the brink of Lent. 40 days of preparation for most powerful and central days of the Christian year and the Christian life. Lent is a time for wrestling, as Peter wrestled, with the impossible, heart-breaking and glorious reality of the crucified God. Lent is a time for recognising, feeling, knowing our absolute need of God, praying ‘I believe; help my unbelief!
Lent is a time of preparing, and if we do this, we shall be ready. Or a little more ready, to know, to be changed by Easter, by the resurrected, transfigured, ascended and glorified Lord.