Matthew 17:1-9
Six men on a mountain… Jesus “My Last Name Isn’t Christ and my Middle Initial Isn’t H”, Simon re-named Peter which is really just Rocky, so “Yo, Adrian…”, the rowdy Thunder Brothers, James and John, taking time off from Friday Night Smackdown, and two surprise guests, Moses and Elijah, one dead for more than five centuries, the other for more than a millennium, so yeah, kinda surprising.
It is quite the scene we are asked to take in on this last Sunday before Lent begins, this Transfiguration of Christ where Jesus shines and a voice in the sky claims him as Son, demanding that people listen to him.
Classic theology treats this as a theophany, an experience that reveals Jesus as God, which is absolutely not in the text, and probably isn’t even part of Matthew’s understanding. The Doctrine of the Incarnation is at least a hundred years in the future when this gospel is written, and no one is even near thinking about a Trinity.
Good skeptics that we are, our question is not “Is it true?” It isn’t even logical. What, Moses showed up with a name-tag that said “Hello, My Name Is” with Moses in faded marker underneath?
Because you know that using dried up markers is a commandment of some sort.
Or maybe John recognized Elijah from Tik-Tok? “Yo, dawg… let me get a selfie!”
Of course it didn’t happen. Not that I am against miracles. They happen every day. But sometimes the miracle is in the perception rather than the reality.
The question we should be asking is what were we supposed to learn from this story? Whether Peter, James, and John thought they saw Moses and Elijah with Jesus or the entire episode is pure fiction, the bottom line is that people made the decision to preserve this story, to write it down and to transmit it, because it served a purpose, because it had meaning for them, meaning before the overwrought interpretation of the Christ event as some divine suicide with humans as supporting actors.
Though, you know, Peter does establish himself as the true founder of the church, for he immediately proposes a building. No doubt there is a capital campaign consultant down at the base of the mountain, mixed in with the other disciples.
What was the meaning of this story when it was included in Mark, the first of the Synoptic gospels?
What was the meaning when it was picked up by the unknown authors of Matthew and by the historian and physician Luke?
How did the early Christians understand it if they didn’t have the lens of those later theologies?
One thing we should avoid is reading too much into the fact that Jesus becomes dazzling and shining. Moses shines too, in the Book of Exodus, after he has been speaking with God on the mountain.
At the most basic level, the Transfiguration established Jesus as being in the tradition of Moses and Elijah. But why these two men? Why not David too, since Christians understood Jesus as the fulfillment of the Davidic covenant?
Moses seems easy enough. Other figures are important in the Hebrew Scripture story too, Abraham and the first covenant, Jacob who is renamed Israel and so names the people, David who unifies the tribes and enters a household covenant with God, but no figure and no event is as central to Israelite identity as Moses and the escape from Egypt. Though escape might not be the best word.
Let’s recap that story. Joseph, once sold into Egyptian slavery by his jealous brothers, has risen through the ranks to become the Pharaoh’s chief steward. Whether he was a dreamer of dreams or just a shrewd speculator, the bottom line is that when a drought hit the region, he helped the Pharaoh buy up all of the land and livestock held by the common people. He profited from catastrophe, creating an absolute monopoly, for when people are hungry, food is power. Like Corporate America today, Joseph was a C-Suite price gouger. Of course, Joseph’s father Jacob was a thief, so maybe we shouldn’t be surprised.
In the midst of this regional trauma and exploitation, Joseph reconciled with his brothers, who relocated to Egypt and were protected by their brother’s position of power and privilege. But time passed, as it does, and the immigrant Hebrew population became a persecuted minority under a new Pharaoh, the lowest rung in Egypt’s authoritarian system, slaves, for the only law was that Pharaoh.
Moses entered the scene as a Hebrew child rescued from genocide and adopted into the Pharaoh’s household. As an adult, he saw a fellow Hebrew being beaten by an Egyptian, killed the Egyptian, and subsequently fled to Midian. It is there that he encountered the burning bush on the mountain, and was called to return to Egypt to lead the Hebrew people out of bondage.
The confrontation with the Pharaoh is told in terms of divine intervention, of miracles and plagues, culminating in the Passover, where the first-born in every household not marked with blood on the doorposts were killed. The Hebrews escaped as the Egyptians mourned, only to be pursued. Moses would eventually lead their escape through the Reed Sea and into the Sinai region, where they would wander for years.
The story still had a few twists and turns to go, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Calf, the punishment that left Moses alone on the mountain as his people entered the Promised Land. Moses would be remembered as the law giver, with the text of the Torah and the hundreds of laws it contains attributed to the liberator.
Ultimately, that is what he was, a liberator. Whether God sent a plague of frogs or not, whether the Passover dead were killed by God or Hebrew saboteurs, the bottom line is that a rebel confronted a ruler, and on the other side of that and a lot of bodies, people were free.
For the record, there are many scholars who believe in the historicity of the Exodus. Not on the scale in the biblical tale, of course, but certainly a slave revolt and escape that fits the timeframe, with some group, possibly only the Levites, establishing themselves in Canaan.
Now let’s turn to Elijah, the third figure with Jesus and Moses. At first glance, he is a bit harder to explain. Elijah comes long after Moses, well after David and Solomon, during the time of the Divided Kingdom. He is from the northern state, called Israel or Samaria. This might seem unexpected if you know biblical history, since the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom were often at odds with one another, geopolitically and religiously, and we are theologically the heirs to the southern kingdom, the Ten Tribes of the north notionally “lost.”
It might be hard for us to identify with Elijah. Though tribalism is on the rise again these days, for most of our lives the world has been becoming less tribal, more globalized and more multi-cultural, which we like to think is a good thing.
It is easy for us to read Elijah through a modern lens as intolerant, to cancel the prophet. But he lived in a tribal context, and you preserved the tribe and the tribe’s claim on land by breeding only within the tribe. King Ahab broke this rule when he took Jezebel as his queen. Not only was she a foreigner, she even practiced a different religion and brought it with her, priests and all. The struggle that was set up was between the multi-cultural interfaith ruling family and Elijah, advocate for ethnic and religious purity, so yeah, Go Ahab, Go Ahab!
Except that Elijah, with divine help, arranged the death of those priests, by the hundreds, with a covenant renewal on the mountain.
To the Israelites, Elijah was the hero of the story. Throughout their history, they felt under constant threat, invaded, conquered, displaced, targets of ethnic cleansing, battling assimilationist impulses in their own community. They would eventually rebel against Hellenistic culture and establish a Jewish state, but that soon became mired in corruption.
By the time of Jesus, the region of Judea was once again cosmopolitan, connected to a network of Roman roads that moved goods, people, and most important of all, taxes. Ironically, those same roads would allow the gospel to spread like wildfire.
There are other bits in the Elijah story, Jezebel portrayed as ruthless and unjust, a schemer who orders the murder of Naboth, Ahab as unwise in geopolitical matters. But in the end, we are meant to remember that Elijah confronted power at great risk to himself. And because the myth had him taken up to heaven in a chariot of flame, spared earthly death, the Israelites came to believe he would re-appear before the messiah. John the Baptizer is sometimes constructed as the new Elijah.
The three men on the mountain are trouble, trouble to those with power. And maybe this is why not David. David is power, and uses his power in sinful ways, even arranging the Jezebel-level murder of Uriah so he can claim the man’s wife as his own. Solomon would be the result of that corrupt union.
Moses, Elijah, and Jesus are powerless in the eyes of the world, facing off against wealth and weapons, their only asset an unshakeable faith, with the requisite courage, and confidence in God. No wonder the followers of Jesus would see him as a continuation of their great tradition.
In this world of the prosperity gospel and American exceptionalism, where white Christian nationalists and Evangelical extremists seek power and claim it is God’s will, scripture tells a different story. God is the God of justice, God for the oppressed, the God who calls us to servant leadership. There is trouble on the mountaintop, and as long as anyone hungers, suffers, or weeps, may it always be so. Amen.