You may or may not believe in the virgin birth. It isn’t a box you have to check to be in this place. You might explain away the appearance of walking on water, the feeding of the five thousand, the acts of healing and exorcism, even the ways in which the disciples experienced Jesus as still present after they had seen him executed. There is no reasonable way to explain away the story of the Transfiguration, today’s gospel text from Matthew. It is possibly the least probable of the miracle stories, not the glowing white part, not even the voice of God part, but the appearance of Moses and Elijah, one dead for twelve centuries, the other for seven. If we grant this one, we might as well go all in on the miracles, water into wine and passing through locked doors and the whole shebang, and we are way too sophisticated for that sort of thing, right?
But even if we discount the historicity of the lesson, the physical reality of Moses and Elijah joining Jesus on a mountain-top, we must not discount the importance of the story. Even as the pious fiction it probably is, it tells us something about how the early Christian communities understood themselves in relation to the Pharisaic movement, the dominant form of Hebrew religious practice that would become Rabbinic Judaism, and how they understood Jesus, the Jewish reformer they followed. Those early Christians were taking the raw stuff of their experience of Jesus as being more than, being extraordinary, and cooking it up into a religion, and we are the distant heirs to that tradition, keepers of one version of that family recipe, so we are called to look past the creative and imaginative bits where we might stumble, look past them to the meaning, for the meaning is the treasure.
Let us begin with Moses. His story is truly the foundational story of the Hebrew people. Sure, there is Abraham who journeys from what is today Iraq to Palestine, the myth that lays claim to the land, but in Moses we begin to see an ordered society and a unique identity, something more than just one tribe among many competing tribes between the Nile and Euphrates river valleys.
The numbers we are given for the Exodus are excessive, impossible hundreds of thousands liberated and wandering for decades, and we must not forget the immense loss of life before they even escape, not just to the plagues, but also to the passover, the slaughter of the first born in every household except those Hebrew homes marked with blood. And again, at the sea, the dead horses and soldiers of the Pharaoh, whether we picture the immensity of Cecil B. DeMille or simply a sea of reeds, as some scholars suggest.
Behind the exaggerations of the Exodus are facts, a group of Semitic people escaping Egypt and eventually settling among their Semitic kin in Palestine. Along the way, Moses, the leader of the rebellion, encounters a manifestation of Yahweh. Moses with the glowing face because that is what happens when you encounter God, Moses who receives the treaty between this wandering band and God, Moses who takes the leaders of the tribe up onto the mountain in a ritual act of ratification.
Here we have elements we find in the Transfiguration, the mountaintop, the glowing, the presence of God.
But Elijah? His name is familiar, his story less so, and the critical traditions related to him almost completely lost, for the stories are unpleasant, and there is no book with his name. Better to teach our children slaughtering Sampson than slaughtering Elijah, though for reasons I’ve never quite understood.
Elijah was not a prophet in the Judahite tradition in which Jesus and the Second Temple are found. The Hebrew people had a glorious century under David and Solomon, but they became divided, two kingdoms growing ever weaker, dishonest leaders, shady business practices, and a collective forgetting that they were Yahweh’s people. Elijah was a prophet in Israel, the northern kingdom, eight centuries before Jesus. It was the larger of the two Hebrew kingdoms, but the first to be destroyed.
The story of Elijah is largely polemic, a condemnation of inter-marriage, of syncretism and the acceptance of foreign gods, especially Baal, a god of storm and fertility, the god of the foreign-born queen, Jezebel. Her husband, King Ahab, had allowed this to happen, and it was the prophet who would call him out, who would challenge the priests of Baal to a sacrificial duel of sorts. Two bulls were placed on altars on Mount Carmel, again a mountaintop, and the prophets of Baal raved about their altar, cutting themselves, calling on their god to bring fire, all day, and no fire. Then, as the sun was setting, Elijah prepared his altar, but he had it drenched, three times they doused the altar. Only then did Elijah call on Yahweh, who sent holy fire to consume the offering. But, lest we be too eager to sanitize the ancient story, that victory is followed by slaughter, for just as the sons of Egypt died, so would the prophets of Baal, slaughtered on Elijah’s command at Wadi Kishon. And, in an intentional echoing of the Exodus story, the ancient authors have Elijah bring Ahab up on the mountain to renew the covenant with Yahweh. Later, we find Elijah on a different mountain, Horeb, and like Moses, he has a direct encounter with Yahweh, who is not in wind nor earthquake nor fire, but is in the silence.
Moses and Elijah, rebelling against temporal power, men of mountain and covenant. Both were always ever-present in the Hebrew imagination, Moses as liberator, as the diplomat who negotiated the treaty with Yahweh that governed Hebrew life. And Elijah, ascended in a chariot of flames, who did not know earthly death. It was believed he would reappear on earth before the Messiah. The power of this legend, of Elijah as a figure in Hebrew tradition, can be seen not only in Elijah’s cup, the fifth cup of Rabbinic Judaism’s seder meal, but in the cemetery that blocks Jerusalem’s eastern gate, for cemeteries are unclean and Muslim caliphs believed they could prevent Elijah’s re-entry to the city in this way.
And so we see some elements that are repeated in the early Christian imagination, the mountain top, a thin place to encounter the divine, and there is that direct encounter, the making of covenant, this new covenant between God and all people, not just the tribe of Abraham, but Gentiles as well, and the glow, the light, for holiness leaves a shine. These are characters, elements in a story, not meant to deceive, but meant to interpret, to understand.
It is easy to mock poor Simon Peter, fisherman turned disciple, who wants to build something, for this is a miracle, perhaps, that can be made permanent, institutionalized, and our desire to tie down the holy is rightly mocked. In some translations Peter proposes not dwellings but booths, giving the whole scene a carnivalesque feel, but we should give Peter a break, for he is earnest and besides, here he too is but a character in the hands of a hidden author.
It is worth noting that Jesus touches the disciples at the end of the story to break the spell, for touch plays a key role in this ministry of healing and teaching, as do all the senses. Jesus touches the unclean and they become clean, healed in body and in spirit. He “breaks the spell” that has transported Jesus and the three disciples, transfigured Jesus, out of the mundane and into the miraculous.
Moses is there, and the authors of this particular gospel want you to be attentive to parallels between Moses, maker of covenant, and Jesus, maker of covenant, so they’ve rearranged the teachings of Jesus to create five great sermons to match the five books of Torah traditionally attributed to Moses. They add the slaughter of the innocents narrative, sending the Holy Family to Egypt in order to have the new liberator come up from Egypt. But Jesus is not Moses, the authors don’t try to make him Moses. Moses leads a holy rebellion against a powerful enemy, the Egyptians holding the Hebrews in bondage. Moses does not teach and heal. He warns the enemy, calls forth destruction, negotiates with the divine. He is the leader that is needed at that time, called by God when he’d just as soon have stayed in Midian, herding livestock, living in peace with his family. Moses is Moses.
Elijah would take on this after-life as a herald of the Messiah, and that is why he is on the mountain. But Elijah is not himself the messiah, is not the leader of a rebellion despite the violence done to the prophets of Baal. In fact, that moment is his one and only public success. His primary role is that of nemesis, and nemesis to only one man, King Ahab. He performs miracles, speaks for Yahweh, but mostly he is on the run, at risk, sometimes petulant. He thinks he is the only one who gets it. Elijah is not Moses, is not the son of the Pharaoh’s daughter. He does not lead a people across the desert. Elijah is Elijah.
Jesus is not Moses. There is a brutal foreign power, the taxes are crushing, but the Hebrews are in their own homeland, the Temple yet stands, the priests still perform the rites. Jesus is not Moses because the people don’t need Moses. Jesus is not Elijah because the people do not need Elijah. There is no Ahab. Jesus is Jesus, and despite the miracle on the mountain, they will come down to the mundane, the journey to Jerusalem, the good news that God is love, and that God’s kingdom is open to all who choose the way of self-sacrifice and love. They will come down to antagonism and bickering, to secret meetings and plans to see Jesus killed.
Of course, love wins. Life wins. But first, there is this moment, Moses and Elijah and three disciples and light and shine…
“Is he the new Micheal Jordan?” we ask. Well, no… Michael Jordan was Michael Jordan. He was that athlete at that moment, and the game is not the same as it was then, and the game today is possible because Jordan was Jordan then, and Giannis is Giannis now, and our faith today is possible because of a shepherd who saw a burning bush and a prophet who challenged a king and a healer who went to Jerusalem and proclaimed the good news. A healer and teacher who was executed in the most brutal and humiliating way, and who rose from the grave.
We do this all the time, politicians, athletes, performers, we look backward, compare. It is only human. But today is today, and the leaders we need to 2020 might not be the same leaders we needed in 2008. This is the day the Lord has made. This is the chapter in our story in which we find ourselves. This is our story. May we make it a story of light, of love, of life. Amen.