A Glimpse of the Eternal

            Years ago Bonnie told me about an interview with the Winans that she had watched. The Winans are a very gifted family that includes the gospel singers, Bebe and CeCe Winans. You may have seen some of the Winans at the funeral for Whitney Houston the other day. During the interview, Bebe and Cece spoke of a time when their older brother had been taken to the hospital only to find that his heart was shutting down; functioning at only a fraction of normal. 

The hospital decided to operate. Later on the surgeon reported that right in the middle of the surgery their brother’s heart gave out. There was nothing more they could do; no way to take him off the machines at that point and bring him back to consciousness.

The surgeon met with the family and explained what had happened. He told them it was over. At that point the patriarch of the Winans, BeBe and Cece’s father who was also a pastor, stepped forward and said they would like to pray for the surgeon. They gathered around him. The father placed his hands upon him, and together they all prayed. When they finished the father looked at this surgeon and said, “You can take my son off that machine. He is going to be all right.”

            Now the surgeon was a man of science, and the science here was clear: the Winans’ brother wasn’t going to make it. What struck that surgeon, though, as he walked back down the corridor was that he actually believed what that father had said. He actually believed the son was going to survive. And incredibly, miraculously, when they took him off the machine they found his heart had healed. He did, indeed, survive.

            Bonnie and I were in our bedroom back in Colorado when she told me that story. The morning sun was filtering in through the blinds. Our dog, Shadow, was lying on the floor beside us, snoring away. And there, on that very ordinary morning, hearing that story, I felt like I had caught a glimpse of the eternal. I was reminded again that there is so much more to this life than what we are aware of; that there are dimensions to reality, a power at work here that is so far beyond what we can see, and touch and somehow grasp. 

            That’s what those disciples encountered there on Mount Hermon. They saw Jesus’ true nature; not just fully human, but the divine in human form. The curtain was pulled back for just a moment, and they caught a glimpse of all eternity.

            The phrase with which our text begins, “six days later,” is far more than just a convenient transition. It makes a clear connection between what has preceded and what’s now going to follow. “Six days later” – later than what? Six days later than what has just happened in Caesarea Philippi.

Caesarea Philippi sits on a fertile plateau at about 1,150 feet on the southwest slope of Mount Hermon. It is about twenty-five miles north of the Sea of Galilee, and very close to the cave from which springs the origins of the Jordan River. 

It is in Caesarea Philippi that Peter first confesses Jesus as the Messiah. It is there that Jesus first tells them about the suffering and death that lie ahead for him. The disciples simply couldn’t believe it. What Jesus was saying contradicted everything they had ever believed about the Messiah. How could the Son of God suffer and die? He was God’s favored one. He was all about power and victory – the kind of power they had already seen in the miracles that Jesus performed.

When Peter tried to contradict him, Jesus came back with his famous rebuke: Get behind me, Satan! 

If you look down at verse 30, you’ll find that it is this same message that stands on the other side of the transfiguration, as well. Jesus and the disciples are making their way south, back into Galilee, and once again, Jesus is trying to prepare them for what lies ahead. Verse 31, “he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” And once again, the disciples still don’t get it (v. 32), “But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.”

So we have Jesus talking about his pending death on either side and there in the center is this mountaintop experience of the transfiguration. Jesus’ suffering and death weren’t an accident. Jesus knew it was coming. He could have turned away. He could have chosen some other path, some other form of ministry. Instead, he chose this way of self-sacrifice for the sake of all humanity – for the sake of each one of us. It is through his sacrifice that we come to see the boundless depths of God’s love for us. The transfiguration serves as God’s confirmation, God’s way of saying “Jesus has it right. Contrary to what you’ve always thought, this is what it means to be the Messiah.” 

What does it mean to follow this Jesus? He makes it very clear:

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels (Mark 8:34-38).

And just in case we thought he is exaggerating or somehow got it wrong, here comes the transfiguration and the Father’s voice from the cloud: “This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!”

Back in the twenties and thirties of the last century there was a family named the Sousley’s living in a four-room cabin amid the mountains and hollows of eastern Kentucky. They had no electricity, no plumbing, just a potbellied stove for heat, and an outhouse in the back. They were farmers. They had been going back almost a hundred years, and Duke along with his wife Goldie had every intention of carrying that tradition forward.  

            Their first son, Malcolm was born in 1923. Their second, Franklin, came three years later. When Franklin was just three, his older brother came down with appendicitis. He died in his mother’s arms. When he was eight, his younger brother Julian arrived, but just a year later his father could no longer make it out to the fields. He succumbed to diabetes at the age of thrity-five, and Franklin, now just nine years old, found himself the man of the family with a mother to comfort and a younger brother to help care for.

            That’s a lot of suffering, a lot of loss for any family. You would understand it if I told you Franklin grew up with a chip on his shoulder – if he had become sullen and angry and suspicious of the world as a young man. Certainly, there was nothing fair about the hand he’d been dealt. But that’s not the way it played out. It his book, Flags of Our Fathers, author James Bradley shares what happened next:

The special mother-son bond between Goldie and Franklin deepened, but it wasn’t lost in gloom. Goldie, only in her early thirties, had already lost a son and a husband. But she didn’t mope. She displayed the implacable optimism; the will to go on that was transferred to Franklin, even through these dark days of hurt… Goldie didn’t smother her son in sadness, but encouraged him to revel in life’s joys. And Franklin took the lesson to heart.[i]

            Of the Marines who fought on Iwo Jima in February and March of 1945, almost twenty-six thousand were killed or wounded – two out of every three of them. Of the nearly seven thousand who died, one was Franklin Sousley, nineteen years-old, a young man best remembered by those who knew him for his humor, his laughter, and his ability to put smiles on the faces of those around him. 

Those who knew Franklin Sousley have probably passed on by now. Today he is remembered not for his laughter, or his humor, but remembered as one of six men who placed a flag on top of Mount Suribachi on the fifth day of that terrible campaign for Iwo Jima. A photographer named Joe Rosenthal captured their image, and it has become one of the enduring images of the Second World War.

But it is the image of that mother, of Goldie, that has stayed with me – this thirty-five year old woman who had known so much loss, so much hurt and sorrow in her short life. But instead of pulling her son down into bitterness, instead of using him to strike back at this world that had been so patently unfair, she taught him to revel in life’s joys; taught him to laugh and sing and enjoy this rich gift that God has given us…what an amazing woman. What an incredible gift she gave her son.

            That’s at least part of the message that this text offers us this morning. Remember Toto in the Wizard of Oz? Dorothy’s dog who pulls the curtain back and reveals the little man behind all the great effects in the Wizard’s chamber?

            Here on Mount Hermon, the curtain is being pulled aside for the briefest of moments, but far from diminishing our understanding of God and God’s Kingdom, the revelation stretches us and expands our understanding.

            Who is this Jesus who sacrificed his life there upon the cross? There is no doubt that he was human and knew the full agony of that terrible day. But Mount Hermon, the transfiguration, remind us that it’s not just humanity nailed there to the cross. No, that’s God’s own self, as well – God in the form of human flesh. That’s love we see there, love in its purest and undiluted form.

            That’s what Jesus is calling us to – the kind of love that Goldie showed in the way she raised her son; a love that is willing to let go of bitterness or anger, and that seeks instead what’s best and true for those around us. 

We long for power to impose our will on those around us. Jesus gave it up in order to serve. We insist on our own way. We put our own wants and needs first. Jesus chose instead the way of love. So which way are we going to choose: Jesus’ way or our own? That’s the choice here, and Jesus’ message is clear: if we continue to put ourselves first we are going to miss life’s best. 

“Listen to him,” God says. Will we truly listen and allow this Jesus to shape our lives? Or will we, like so many others, simply give a polite nod in his direction before continuing on along our own merry, and hell-bent way? 

 

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