The light on the mountain

A word for the week

For most of the Gospels, Jesus looks entirely ordinary. That is the whole scandal of him; he ate and slept and got tired and looked like any other man from Galilee. But for one strange moment, on a mountain, in front of three of his closest friends, the ordinary appearance thinned, and they saw straight through to what he actually is. Mark says he was changed in front of them, his clothing became blindingly white, whiter than anything on earth could be made, and Moses and Elijah, dead for centuries, stood there talking with him. For a few seconds the veil lifted, and Peter, James, and John saw the glory that had been there the whole time, hidden inside the plain man they walked the roads with.

And notice who stands with him: Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets, the two great witnesses of the old story, talking with Jesus as friends talk. Everything the scriptures had been carrying for centuries converges on this one figure on this one hill. Peter, overwhelmed, starts babbling about building three tents, one for each of them, because he does not know what to say and cannot bear for the moment to end. And you can hear what the offer assumes: three tents, three equals, a shrine apiece. The cloud corrects him gently by how it clears. A voice out of the cloud says the same thing the voice said at the river: this is my beloved Son. And then it adds three words that are the whole point: listen to him. And just like that it is over. The cloud lifts, and when they look up they see no one, Mark says, except Jesus only. Moses and Elijah do not remain. The law and the prophets pointed; he is what they pointed at. Back to the ordinary man. The glory folded away again.

Two things to carry down from that mountain. The first is that the glory was always there. Jesus did not become something greater on the mountain; the disciples were simply, briefly, allowed to see what was always true. The plain man they ate with was, the whole time, shining with a light too great to look at. Most of the time it was hidden, because a human being cannot live day to day staring into that. But it was real, and it was there, under the ordinary surface, all along. The mountain did not change him. It let three tired men see him, once, for a moment they would spend the rest of their lives measuring everything else against.

The second is what the voice commands: listen to him. Not, build monuments to the experience, which is what Peter wanted to do. Not, chase the mountaintop feeling. Listen to him. The point of the glimpse of glory is not the glimpse. It is to send you back down the mountain trusting the words of the man you came up with. The vision fades, as visions do. What remains is: listen to him. Go back to ordinary life and do what he says.