EpiscopalCenter at Duke University

Our president once, famously, referred to himself as ‘the decider.’

I’m ‘the explainer.’ I like answers. I like to have answers. It’s taken me a long time to learn that saying, “I don’t know” isn’t a moral failure.

It’s not too hard to figure out that being the decider means being the person in control. But what may not be as obvious is that being the explainer is also about being in control. If we can explain something, we can get a handle on it. We can manage it.

And maybe that is what Peter is doing when he and James and John are up on that mountain with Jesus and suddenly, right before their very eyes, Jesus is all lit up and shining like the sun, transfigured as they’re standing with him—and suddenly Moses and Elijah are there, too, talking with Jesus in his brilliant white clothes.

And what is Peter’s response to this dazzling blaze of glory?  He offers to build three tents to contain it.

It’s a spectacular non-sequitur. Peter has absolutely no idea what he’s witnessing or what to do about it, but he makes an attempt. He wants to have an answer to the unanswerable, to explain the inexplicable, to have some idea of what to do. He’s trying to grasp this astonishing, awesome vision of Jesus in all his glory, to get hold of what’s happening right in front of him, manage it, and bring it under control.

But God can’t be managed. And Peter is not in control.

People are still trying to explain the Transfiguration. They debate when in the course of Jesus’ life it happened. They even argue about which mountain Jesus and his disciples had climbed. Was it Mt. Tabor? That’s where the Church of the Transfiguration now stands. Or was it Mt. Hermon? There’s a ski slope on Mt. Hermon now, the only one in Israel, apparently. I’m not sure if that’s evidence for or against its being the right mountain, but there we have it.

The thing is, we love data. It lets us manage things and be in control. We’re smitten with measurements and analysis and quantifiable evidence. We assess risk, weigh costs and benefits, and rate schools by test scores. We measure inputs and outputs and make policy based on what we learn. We carbon date things to figure out what really happened way back when. We are convinced by data, by the things we’re able to nail down and explain, and that shapes our view of the world.

And if we bring that way of seeing to our reading of Scripture, if we allow our need for management and control to shape how we hear the Word of God, we tend to end up in one of two places: as a fundamentalist who hears the account of Jesus’ transfiguration and says, “Yup, that’s exactly what happened and exactly how it happened because the Bible says so”; or as a rationalist—a fundamentalist’s secret twin—who hears the same account and says, “People’s faces don’t light up like the sun and voices don’t come booming out of clouds, so this is bunk.” Either way, that’s the end of that conversation.

So where does that leave us? What are we to make of the Transfiguration? What happened? Why did it happen? And what is this incredibly strange story doing in our Bible?

I had a really terrific English teacher in high school. Actually, Linda Tucci is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had in any school. She was passionate about poetry, and novels, and plays and she made us memorize line after line of Shakespeare and stanza after stanza of poetry. I don’t think any of us fully understood the passages we were memorizing. For the most part, they were about things that were beyond the realm of our experience. At any rate, I didn’t fully understand them, nor did I particularly like getting quizzed on memory work.

But maybe Ms. Tucci hoped that if we did memorize all those words—all those powerful ideas and emotions we weren’t yet ready to wrap our minds around—they’d stick; they’d stay with us and do their work from the inside out, even if it didn’t happen right away. Maybe she hoped the words we didn’t yet understand would stay with us like the lamp Peter describes, ‘shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.’

Maybe the Transfiguration was something like that. Jesus gave it to Peter and James and John to witness that glorious vision—to have that vision burned onto their retinas and branded into their consciousness. Maybe that dazzling revelation was given to them to live in their hearts until Christ the morning star had risen and they knew that that was what they’d witnessed.

We can’t capture God’s infinite mystery with our finite understanding. We can’t contain God’s glory in manageable tents. But we can hold the witness of Peter and James and John and the whole communion of saints in our hearts and let that witness transform our lives from the inside out.

We are called to engage God’s word, to ponder it, study it, and carry it into the world. But we are also called beyond the limits of our understanding. We are called to live in the immensity of God’s love, to live fearlessly and joyfully, in freedom and abundance, to worship and give thanks, to live and learn and love, to break bread together and together rejoice and sing God’s praises. Until at the last, we, too, will stand before God and behold Him in all His glory.

One of Ms. Tucci’s poems is by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It begins,

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.

Peter and James and John saw the Transfiguration. Later, after Jesus whose face had shone like the sun, had been nailed to the cross, after his Resurrection, they remembered the vision that had been living in their hearts. Then they could see that God’s glory can no more be contained by sin or brokenness or even death than that glorious vision on the mountaintop could be contained by Peter’s three tents. That even from the cross, even from the grave, God’s grandeur will flame out, like shining from shook foil.