Texts:

2 Kings 2:1-12

Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-9

Today, we, along with Peter, James, and John, catch a glimpse of God’s glory, seeing him with Moses, the Lawgiver, and with Elijah, the Prophet, has a physical manifestation of Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and of the prophecies, the one for whom the people of Israel have been waiting.  We receive a glimpse of Christ for who he is - the Messiah - the transcendent ineffable God.  I love Peter in this… maybe it’s because I have a soft spot for people who prefer fill awkward silences with awkward speech (I don’t know anything about it personally, of course). Peter has no idea what to say, but he keeps talking anyway, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  Peter thought he was seeing the whole picture.  The image of glory was so obvious, so tangible, so easy to understand, that it’s easy to make that the whole picture.  And Jesus’ response to Peter: “But Peter, where will you live?”

Peter, Peter, Peter.  He gets so close to getting it right, and then promptly sticks his foot in his mouth.  In Mark 8, which is right before this chapter, we hear Jesus asking, “Who do people say that I am?”  They answered him, “John the Baptist; and others Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”  He asked them, “Who do you say I am?”  Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”  Peter gets it right.  Then Jesus goes on to foretell his death and resurrection, to tell us the shape of God’s reign in Jesus, and Peter rebuked him.  “Get behind me, Satan.”  We shake our heads at Peter, clucking our tongues at his short-sightedness.  But would we have done any different? 

Peter wants to build three dwellings on the mountain: one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus.  But Jesus isn’t that kind of Messiah.  Jesus is the sort of Messiah that looks back at Peter and says, “But where will you live?  Peter, my home is with you.”  Jesus is the sort of God that becomes human for our sakes, coming into the world naked and helpless, yet proclaimed as a king.  Jesus is the sort of God that is baptized into the sins of humanity in order that we might be marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit forever.  Jesus is the sort of God that wades right into the trash and brokenness and disgustingness of humanity because Jesus is less interested in being the God we want and more interested in being the God we need.

When we’re on top of the mountain, when everything is going well, we think we can see everything.  We think we have figured out how God works.  It would be easy to have the mountaintop experience and think that that was the whole of the experience.  Somehow, it’s a lot easier to point to God and how God works in the midst of victory and glory than it is to point to God and how God works in the midst of brokenness and pain.  It’s a lot easier to have a God that stays on top of the mountain than it is to have a God that comes down the mountain.  This Messiah, the one who is to usher in the New Age, the Age in which the people of Israel no longer live in bondage to the Roman Occupation, no longer in bondage to their exile, isn’t supposed to hang on a cross.  

I think that’s part of the problem.  Our Messiah hanging on the cross is surely a commentary about humanity and the nature of sin that we don’t want to read.  It’s a story that tells a little more of the truth than what we want to hear.  The God we want is the mountaintop God, the God who is obvious and shows up when we expect him to.  The God we want is the one who ties up our messy lives with a neat little red bow and makes them always make sense.  But if we only see God on the mountaintop, where is God when we’re in the valleys?  Where is God when life stops making so much sense? 

He’s making his home with us.  Jesus is with Peter in his moments of clarity, “You are the Messiah, the son of God,” but he’s laying his down life for Peter even as Peter says, “I swear to you, I do not know the man.”  In the depth of Peter’s brokenness, in the depth of betrayal, in the depth of our brokenness, in the depth of our betrayal, Jesus walks down the mountain with us, preaching, healing, teaching, and saving, proclaimed a King even as he hangs on the cross.  And it doesn’t make sense.  But a God that does not know our brokenness wouldn’t know how to save us.  Knowing our sin, knowing our death, knowing our devils and our brokenness, Jesus became our salvation.

God does God’s best work in our brokenness, but we don’t want a God that comes to us in our brokenness.  We want a God who will look at all of our accomplishments, smile, and say, “Yup, that’s my kid.”  But we have the sort of God that looks at us after we have chosen apathy over compassion, hate over love, our own pride and ego over relationship, and our love of self over God’s love for us, and says, “You are mine.  I have named you as my own.”  And God doesn’t say this from the mountaintop; he says this from the cross.

Martin Luther, in his Heidelburg Disputation, states, “Now it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross.”  Jesus, you are supposed to be the Messiah with the castle on the hill, the one who beats up all the bullies, the one who makes all the bad stuff go away.  Jesus is supposed to be the one we can point to and say, “See what our God can do!”  You’re not supposed to be a Messiah hanging on a cross.

Jesus is not content to stay on the mountain, where there is the illusion of control, where we can lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we can see everything.  Jesus draws nearer to our reality, nearer to our brokenness, coming down into the muck and trash and disgustingness of humanity, into our brokenness, into the places we hide, into the places that we don’t think we can bear in public, much less bring to church, and comes into the depths of humanity’s darkness because his home is with us.  His home isn’t with us as we are at church, his home isn’t with us when we’re having the mountaintop experience, in which everything seems so clear, his home is with us when we’re broken, when we feel like we have been crushed beyond repair, when we are convinced of our unworthiness, Christ is at home with us.

Walking down from the mountain with disciples that barely understand him, who want a messiah that looks a little more like a superhero than a Roman criminal, Jesus is not the God we want: the God who beats up all the bullies, who makes all the bad things go away, who magically makes us happy people all the time.  Jesus is the God who dwells amongst humanity’s brokenness, who is born to a teenage mother, who is baptized into our sin, who decides we are worth it despite all evidence to the contrary, and journeys to the cross in order that we might see Jesus is the God we need.  From the mountaintop, we think we can see everything, but it’s not until we recognize Jesus in the humility and shame of the cross that we are able to recognize him as our resurrected Lord, who has conquered sin, death, and the devil because He is the God who refuses to be at home without us.