Down from the Mountain

Where can we encounter God?  A strong strand in Matthew’s gospel suggests that it is on the mountain, up in the high places, that we come closer to God and to the divine presence.  As the disciples climb up with Jesus in our story, they know that something special is about to happen – they sense that up in the mountains Jesus’s own relationship with the Father is closer, somehow more manifest.  By this point in the gospel they have heard Jesus’s legendary sermon from the Mount, and they were with him when he fed four thousand hungry people who came to him when he was praying up on a high hilltop.  But none of this prepares them for what is to come – for the shining face of Jesus, for the voice of God from heaven, for the momentous, dramatic nature of this mountaintop experience.   An experience so profound that it cannot be contained in the mountain, but must come down to transform the plain.

The symbolism of this story is rich, and mysterious.  But in Matthew’s telling, we catch sight of the event in large part through the reaction of the disciples.  Their first thought is to stabilise the moment, to offer earthly hospitality, to make this strange event somehow more normal, more acceptable.  But they quickly find that God is not interested in earthly politeness, in keeping things safe and manageable.  A voice breaks through Peter’s small talk to speak instead of love, of the beloved Son who fulfils his father’s work, and the voice calls on the disciples to listen.  Its demand is overwhelming and in the presence of the power of God, of the transcendent light shining in and through Jesus, they fall to the ground in fear and astonishment.  They hide their faces from that light, curling up into the ground to shield their human bodies from the divine radiance that surrounds them – no place for politeness now.  And yet Jesus, filled with that divine presence, does not turn away from them or leave them trembling.  He touches them, takes them by the hand, and releases them from their fear.  He leads them gently back down the mountain, and back to the crowd who are waiting for Jesus, wanting him to heal them and teach them.

To Matthew, as to the compilers of the lectionary, these moments on the mountaintop were reminiscent of the time when God gave the law and the commandments to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Back in that Exodus story, as we heard, the law was written on tablets of stone, fixed for ever, so that the people could follow the law and obey God’s commandments.  Later in the text God will command Moses to build the ark of the covenant, a sanctuary so that God could dwell with God’s people.  Even then, God would not be confined to the mountain but would come down, to the people, into their lives in the desert.   The people would be bound to God by covenant, and soon they will hear that the covenant extends into a future when the laws will not only be inscribed on stone but will be written in the hearts of all people.   Even a special ark, however beautiful, cannot contain God’s presence.  Always the logic of the covenant is outwards, revealing and sharing the divine light among all peoples.  

The transfiguration experience, then, cannot only be for the mountaintop.  It needs to be carried down, into the plain, into the people, into the everyday.  Just as Jesus shares the experience with his disciples, and God shares the beloved Son, so the disciples must learn to share, especially with those outside the inner circle, the crowd waiting down below.   How easy it can be, as we all know too well, to restrict the presence of God and of truth, to keep it for ourselves and those we approve of – how often do we experience this in our own society and church, and perhaps too in our own hearts.  But, the disciples come to realise, God’s presence cannot be restricted in this way, it cannot be fixed with tents and or with the rituals of our social life that contain but also exclude.  The disciples need to allow God to shape them, to open them up to the world around them.  Only then will the power of God to heal and save really flow through them, as it flows through Jesus.   

In these moments on the mountain, then, the disciples are coming to learn what divine love is like, the liberation that it offers but also the demands that it makes.  They cannot hold onto it, fix it and keep it, it’s a love that must be offered to others, not just divided and rationed out but given up completely – for only then is it truly known.  This is the lesson that Jesus teaches them as they walk down the mountain, as he warns them of his passion that is to come, of the time when he will be lifted up on the cross in suffering and anguish.  He knows that only then will the disciples truly understand the cost of God’s love, what it means truly to let go of their own needs, their own safe ways of doing things, and to trust instead in the eternal power of God, to heal and save all people.  Their fear on the mountain top will seem nothing compared to the darkness of Good Friday – and yet Jesus will still come to them with words of comfort and peace, with the radiance, with the glory, of his divine power.  He will enable them to live open to divine love, not clinging to possessions and the conventions of this passing world, but guided instead by his divine vision of openness and abundance.

What might God’s love mean down in the plain, in the valleys below the mountain?  Perhaps we see something of it in a poem by the German author Richard Dehmel, set famously to music by Arnold Schoenberg, a poem that is called ‘Transfigured Night’.  It tells of a couple walking through a bare cold wood in darkness, the jagged mountaintops just visible beyond them.  The woman is silent, burdened by the shame of carrying another man’s child, until her sadness bursts forth in a stumbling confession.   After an anxious moment the man replies, not to condemn but to draw that unborn child into the couple’s own love.  That love, he says, will transfigure the stranger’s child, just as you, my love, have transfused me with splendour.  It is a moment of forgiveness, of reconciliation, a moment above all of love.  Not only the child but the whole night is transfigured, verklärte in German with its overtones of radiance and light.  The bare cold wood becomes the high bright night.

In Dehmel’s poem, there is no jealousy, no recrimination, not even any concern for the niceties of social convention.  There is only the love that can make all things new – if we have the courage to embrace it.  It’s a love not contained up in the mountains but streaming down to the plains, the woods, the everyday moments of all our interactions – a love that can be painful, heartbreaking even, but a love that nothing can overcome.   Just as Jesus invited his disciples to share with him in that dramatic moment of openness to God, so we too are invited to share in God’s presence and abundance – open to him and to each other.