February 15, 2026
What would it be like to be with Jesus, being transfigured on the mountain? Can you picture it? In my mind, it is more like a movie or even a cartoon than real. Like Jesus ascending into the heavens at his ascension, resurrecting from the dead, and walking around after the crucifixion, and this text, as well as the transfiguration scene, are, to be honest, a bit of a challenge to place in the reality of Jesus shimmering in the clouds. As someone noted in this text this week, like the disciples in the Gospel lesson, encountering the divine can be frightening, like meeting an angel, God also then sends reassurances to not be afraid.
More science fiction than scientifically proven, we often want our sacred stories to be a bit “normal” and testably true. Even those of us who think ourselves especially open to mystery feel uneasy in the whole notion that Moses and Elijah, who have been dead for centuries, would just suddenly appear alive on the mountaintop with Jesus. Mystery and how life changes suddenly challenge us and our reality. We often expect of God a consistency and dependability, yet the reality is that Jesus undergoes major life, spiritual, and physical changes. And threshold boundary changes are holy places: a new land, a marriage, a birth, and at our death.
The same is true for our lives’ transformation — physically and spiritually —we change: losing someone in your life whom you have known and loved so well, how life is different in our bodies after a stroke, a surgery, a diagnosis, the move from one home to another, a change in jobs, a change in country and language.
The Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously asked: “Who is Jesus Christ for us today?”—the question that Jesus himself put to his disciples, “Who do you say that I am?” (Matt. 16:15). How might we recognize Jesus, the Christ, God’s divine presence in our reality – here, now?
Jesus was feeling the escalating tension that the gaining visibility of the movement he was building was causing, and he knew that instead of backing away from the conflict, he was headed right towards it. No one can save Jesus and the heartache and suffering to come.
Instead, Jesus takes three of his disciples up to the top of a high mountain, where Jesus is transfigured. Together they encounter their ancestors – Moses and the Prophet Elijah, and as a cloud overshadowed them, they hear a voice from Heaven echoing the words from Jesus’ baptism, saying, “This is my beloved, my child, ” and the voice adds the instructions: “Listen to him.”
These are the moments when people begin to understand that where there is suffering and sacrifice, there is Holy Ground. The transfiguration affirms Jesus’ divinity while giving a glimpse of God’s light in the chaos to come: death, loss, and fear.
As that light shines in our hearts, God is made real in the everyday. C. S. Lewis writes a final word from Aslan in The Silver Chair: “Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly. I will not often do so in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear, and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you expect them to look when you meet them there. That is why it is so important to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearance. Remember the signs and believe the signs.”
The transcendent moments in life are a memorable grace: the grandeur of the mountain, the expanse of the clouds, the blinding light of the sun, and the crispness of the air.
“How do you experience the transcendence of God?” I was asked a question in a final faculty interview in the seminary. And I ask that frequently amongst us here in our concrete, cinder block cathedral. Some answers I have received among you include “in music, in reconciled relationships and welcoming strangers, in silence, some have heard an audible voice and others visions in the clouds, in the ordinary bread and wine, water and word.”
Transcendent realities that change us, inspire and motivate, challenge and teach can also be found in ordinary moments in classrooms, meeting rooms, food banks, offices, or walks in nature, or any place where we make a space for the Holy to be present.
The transfiguration offers the disciples the paradox that while there is nothing they can do to save themselves from suffering, there is also no way they can shield themselves from the light of God that sheds hope in their darkest moments.
But as we begin this week on the mountaintop and look ahead to our journey through the wilderness of Lent, the days lengthen in a journey to Jesus on top of another mountain, Golgotha, the place of the Skull, where there will be no sparkling white robe, but bloody wounds. On the mountain of Golgotha, there is no reassuring loving voice from Heaven. God feels far away, even to Jesus, who cries out, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
There are times when a person comes into our lives as a gift of grace, offering us the opportunity to love again. That person may be a child, a relative, a friend, or a stranger, and through that individual we experience a gift, a joy, a relief. And we can say “thanks be to God”.
And then there are those moments when we see dimly through a glass. When we can’t see the set of footprints in the sand. When we feel abandoned, confused, and alone. And it is much harder to see the bigger picture, to realize any grandeur or even a way forward.
We may want the extraordinary signs and wonders of a pillar and fire that assure us of God’s presence, but also can frighten. There is no way to build tents to stay on the mountain. The body of Christ is always on the move, in ephemeral moments and glimpses. In the resurrection, as soon as their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus, he vanished from their sight. Jesus gave the disciples what they wanted when they had wanted the extraordinary. And yet that ordinary flesh and blood of Jesus was quite extraordinary: healing, teaching, loving, redeeming, resurrecting.
In everything that you do, from the most ordinary to the most extraordinary, remember that God the Almighty, Jesus the redeemer, and Spirit of the Comforter is with you, and goes before you, sometimes recognized, sometimes hidden from our eyes, but always present. Know that nothing can separate us from God’s ‘yes,’ and therefore we say ‘amen’ through him to the glory of God.