Reflections from The
Hill – Going up, coming down (Mark 9.2-9)

Okay, so you know as well as I do how confusing Transfiguration
Sunday is. Growing up in the dim past, Transfiguration was on August 6th,
now it’s the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. What’s the go?

If your answer is a good one, perhaps we can apply the same
principle to Christmas and do away with “Christmas-in-July” parties, but I
digress.

Transfiguration is a word we hardly use. You’ll never hear it in
the staff tea-room, at the markets or down on the wharves, not the Townsville
ones, at any rate.

How do we deal with this change of date? If you’re like me, you’ll
work with it and make the Feast something worthy of its name, no matter when
it’s celebrated.

Here's a suggestion of how we might do that: regard, look at – and
pay attention to – the movement of the characters in the story. Jesus took his
disciples up the mountain and, after all the drama there, like the Grand
Old Duke of York, he led them down again.

Think of it: Jesus could have stayed there. Indeed, in a mighty
act of human fervour (I chose my words carefully) the disciples wanted to build
him a shrine so he could. Then they could return whenever they wanted to and be
attended by these three giants of faith, Moses, Elijah and Jesus.

It is such a religious thing to do, to go back to the place where
one’s faith first blossomed. It’s often an unspoken reason why people return to
get married in their school chapel, or their old parish church (or Cathedral),
even using their old vicar, if he’s still alive.

Perhaps Jesus should have stayed there – he certainly could have –
but he chose to come down. He came down into the everyday; he came down to the
world of misunderstandings; he came down to those squabbling, disbelieving
disciples; he came down to the dirt and pain that is our life.

Here is the heart of what we are on about as Christians: almost
everything you’ve heard and known about the faith is secondary to this: Jesus
came down. He left his rightful place with the Father and, out of love,
embraced, touched, us.
We make two fundamental errors as we grapple with Jesus coming down. The first,
as already noted, is to keep him up there by building a little booth so that we
can return any time we like.

The second is to fill our head with the belief that, somehow, we
can be like Jesus. Because it’s impossible to be perfect this side of the
grave, we feel that our worst parts are so bad that they actually keep us from
the goal and, by extension therefore, keep us further away from him. How
self-centred we so easily become.

Transfiguration isn't a story about us at all; Transfiguration is
a story about Jesus coming down all the way into our dirt, our brokenness, our
fear, our disappointment. The old Transfiguration hymn says it well:

'Tis good, Lord, to be here.
Yet we may not remain;
But since Thou bidst us leave the mount,
Come with us to the plain.

We don't have to hide the hard bits from the God we know in Jesus. The Big
Fella came to us in and through Jesus to be with us and to be for us through
thick and thin.

For no other reason was Jesus born, lived,
died and was raised again, except that we might know that God is unrelentingly
for us, which is all very nice but means absolute zip if it doesn’t work out in
my life.
How will I know that all this ‘trusting Jesus’ stuff is working?
When I can trust others – my work colleagues, my family members, my relations,
that’s how. That’s the litmus test, that’s where I see the spiritual being
real.