Don’t Leave–Transfiguration Sunday

2 Kings 2: 1-12

Mark 9: 2-9

Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch, Preacher

When I started as pastor of a small church some time ago, I wanted to kick off with an officer’s retreat that dealt with some of the issues that the congregation had left over from when the previous pastor left. I had a conversation with the Christian educator, who’d been there several years and was quite sharp. He explained to me that people were extremely angry and felt betrayed that the previous pastor had left them. We agreed that a Biblical look at betrayal and abandonment would be a good start.

I put together a Bible study around the Last Supper, where Jesus is with His disciples and announces, “One of you will betray me.” I wanted them to identify with Jesus, to recognize that He, too, felt betrayed and abandoned; but move on from that to recognizing that, also like Christ, they can move on from that and rise up to new life.

So I set the Bible study up and broke them into groups. When they came back, I asked them who they identified with, and one group immediately said, “The disciples.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we feel betrayed.”

I was confused. “But the disciples are betraying Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah, but Jesus is betraying the disciples,” they replied. “Because Jesus is going to leave us alone, Jesus is going to abandon us, just when we thought things were going so well.”

They’d taken the study exactly the opposite direction from what I’d expected. It actually said myriads about their relationship with the previous pastor. They were looking at the pastor as their friend, their teacher, their mentor, their leader, their rabbi—really Jesus on earth. And they didn’t view themselves as capable of being a church without him. Over time, they were able to get past that, and to view themselves as a church again—but it took time.

Elisha fears abandonment in our story about Elijah being taken up into heaven. We sense his fear that he will be left behind by his friend, his teacher, his mentor,, his leader, his rabbi Elijah. “I will not leave you,” he keeps insisting, and it’s almost an accusation.  “I won’t leave you, but you’re going to leave me,” is what he’s saying.

And then Elijah is taken up to heaven in a whirlwind. “Chariots of Israel and its horsemen!” cries his disciple Elisha, and you can feel his sense on the one hand of wonder, at the miracle of seeing this overwhelming manifestation of God; and on the other hand of abandonment as he left behind by his mentor. On the one hand, he felt amazed and honored and humbled; on the other hand, fearful, confused, small and oh so alone because God took away the person who gave his life meaning and made sense of this confusing world.

So let’s talk about our New Testament story. Imagine that you are one of four First Century Palestinian Jews who go up a mountain, and one of them is Jesus. And right before your eyes, God transforms your friend, your teacher, your leader, your mentor, your rabbi, this man you love and who gives meaning to your life, into this heavenly figure; and then Elijah appears, with Moses, another of Israel’s great prophets who legend had taught had been taken up into heaven because of his righteousness.

And you’re thinking, “Oh no. It’s just like Elijah. God is taking Jesus away.”

And your world starts to come crashing down.

The plain fact is that there comes a time for all of us when the training wheels come off and it’s time for us to ride our bikes on our own. It’s time for us to respond as responsible adults to God’s call to us to enter the world and transform it in the name of Christ. We came to Jesus as little children who needed to learn, as patients to a doctor, as victims to their rescuer, or as wounded souls needing to be healed, or as a broken community of sinners in need of redemption. We came passive. But the doctors entire point is to cure you; the parent’s entire point is for us to grow up; the teacher’s entire point is for the student to surpass the teacher. The day comes when Jesus says to us, “You aren’t children anymore, you’re responsible adults. You aren’t passive anymore, you’re actors. You aren’t patients anymore—you’re well.”

That was the moment that came to Elisha when Elijah was taken up in the chariot of God. He was no longer a student, he was a graduate. He had to step up.

Peter, James, and John fear that moment has come to them as they see Moses and Elijah standing there with their transfigured Lord. It was time for Him to go, and it was time for them, like Elisha, to take up their master’s mantle of bringing the Gospel to the needy world. They were terrified. They weren’t nearly ready for Jesus to go.

And Jesus didn’t go. Jesus stayed. The disciples breathed a sigh of relief.

What they didn’t realize was that what lay ahead was infinitely worse. Implied in this powerful scene is a decision that Jesus has made. He will not go up to heaven in a blaze of glory like Elijah. He would not rise above the fray, too good, too important to engage in the bloody battle ahead. He would stay with God’s people. He would suffer as they suffer. He had already, right before the Transfiguration, predicted that He would be crucified. On the Mount of Transfiguration, he could have chosen to go right back up to heaven with Elijah and Moses. He could have chosen to skip the cross and go straight to the crown.

But that wasn’t the way it was going to be for His followers. If they stayed true, they wouldn’t avoid the cross. They’d have to bear the moral cross of resisting temptation. The ethical cross of being unpopular and persecuted for standing up for God when nobody else wanted to hear it; and of speaking up for the voiceless, for the victims of injustice, when everyone else wanted to turn away. If they tried to stand up for the Kingdom of God responsible adults, they would suffer. And even if they weren’t persecuted for their faith, they’d certainly suffer, because they’d see and feel the suffering of a needy world, and they’d have learned to love that world, and the suffering of the world would therefore be their suffering. So one way or another, there was a cross in their future.

Jesus was the Son of God. He could have avoided it.

Instead, He chose it.

It’s not a minor thing. In the early years of the Christian church, a sect of Christians called the Gnostics taught that Christ did not have a physical manifestation, that he was all spirit, and that therefore he not only did not die, but he also didn’t suffer, or eat, or go to the bathroom, or really do anything human. The material world, the flesh and blood reality of being human, was beneath Him. It was beneath the dignity of the true God to be truly human, the Gnostics taught. And they also taught it was beneath the dignity of His disciples. Jesus would give them an ability to transcend reality, to transcend the material world, to be spiritual, to leave this flawed, troubled world of suffering behind.

But that’s not true. Jesus, God in human form, chooses to be human, chooses to live a human life, to eat, to drink, to make friends, to be tempted, to be persecuted, to suffer, and to die. Rather than get taken up into heaven and avoid all that pain, Jesus embraces it, and makes the Cross His true transfiguration, His true act of ascendancy—for who ever heard of a God who would abandon His own dignity for the sake of not abandoning mere mortals?

But that’s what Jesus did.

We’ve been studying Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s life and theology in the Northminster Class. Bonhoeffer was a German theologian who tried to organize the German church and the ecumenical movement to resist Adolph Hitler. In 1939, after repeated failures and disappointments, Bonhoeffer had his own meeting with Moses and Elijah. He met with his friend British Bishop Bell, the great US theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Dutch world ecumenical leader Willem Visser’t Hooft. They arranged for Bonhoeffer to Germany and go to the United States to teach for one year. But when Bonhoeffer arrived in the US, he discovered his friends had pulled a well-intentioned fast one on him. Rather than a temporary teaching position, they’d arranged for him to take up long-term residence and to coordinate the assimilation of German refugees into the United States on behalf of the US Federal Council of Churches.

Bonhoeffer was faced with a choice. He could become a German expatriate in America. Other German theologians had done it. He could have become an armchair theologian, expounded his theories of how Christians can respond to Hitler from a safe distance. As biographer Edwin Robertson puts it, “had he stayed, he might have lived still, enjoying his eighties with a whole library of books to his credit—to say nothing of honorary doctorates! But he did not.”[1]

No, he didn’t. After agonizing over the decision three months, he chose to return, he said, because he felt that if he did not share in the suffering of his people, then he would also have no right to share in their recovery when the war was over. Bonhoeffer took what ended up being the last passenger ship to sail between the US and Germany before WWII and returned home, where he was eventually arrested and executed for his participation in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler.

All of us are tempted to look at our faith as all about God comforting us and training us and loving us. But there comes a time when God calls us to be adults, calls us to be responsible Christians dealing with real-world problems, calls us to comfort, to serve, to stand up for others, to be bold, even to suffer.

God calls us to be adults. God calls us to put on Jesus’ mantle and bear the Gospel into the world with all its hope and all its terrible responsibility. When that time comes, sometimes we become angry or bitter or frightened. “Why have you left us all alone to handle this on our own?” we ask. In fact, I’d go so far as to say, whenever you have those feelings and those questions, that’s exactly what has happened. God has called you to be an adult and to take up Christ’s cross.

But the Good News is that God doesn’t leave us alone. He neither abandons us nor forsakes us. The real heart of our hope is that God is no stranger to human suffering. God is right there with us in the midst of it. In fact, through Jesus we need to realize that God is uniquely found in suffering. That is, after all, the most striking thing we know about Jesus—that He suffered for us, that He died for us. God doesn’t leave us or forsake us. When we take up Jesus’ cross, He’s right there with us to help us bear it.

The challenge is to have the faith to believe it.