Prayer, Part 7: Transfiguration (Luke 9:29-36
Prayer, Part 7: Transfiguration
March 2, 2025 - Transfiguration Day
Luke 9:29-36
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The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all feature the story of Jesus’ transfiguration, but only Luke tells us that the transfiguration was a prayer experience. According to him, Jesus went up the mountain to pray, and he took along three of his twelve disciples: Peter, James, and John. This seems to be the first time Jesus included others directly in his practice of prayer. At least, it’s the first time Luke makes it explicit. Before then, Jesus had prayed either alone or with the disciples “near him” (9:18). Here, on the mountain, he brings Peter, James, and John inside his own praying. This is an important development in Luke’s Gospel. Praying with Jesus and experiencing this glorious vision is a moment for the three disciples to ‘level up,’ to grow in their understanding of who Jesus is and what it means to follow him.
Jesus helps us to pray by drawing us into the channel of his prayers. “You give your words away,” the poet says with wonder and gratitude, “As though I stood with you in your position, / As though your Father were my Father too.” By bringing the mystery of God’s very life into our earthy world of flesh and blood and bone, by bringing the joy of the eternal divine conversation into our web of human communication, Jesus has opened a place for us to come and join him in the intimacy he shares with the Creator.
Peter, James, and John caught more than a glimpse of this intimacy. As they prayed with Jesus, they saw his appearance change: shining clothes, illuminated skin, the atmosphere around him charged and pulsating. Two of the great former prophets, Moses and Elijah, appeared, speaking with Jesus. Then they withdrew, and a dark cloud fell upon the mountain, and a voice spoke out of the cloud: “This is my chosen Son. Listen to him.” And then, just as quickly as it all had started, they were alone with Jesus again, in grip of a holy hush.
It’s good this story comes around every year, because it is such a dense passage, packed with Old Testament allusions and New Testament resonances. There are so many different threads we might pull. Since we’re concluding this series on prayer, I want to draw out and explore the things that were communicated, first by Moses and Elijah to Jesus, and then by God’s voice to the disciples.
Moses and Elijah “appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” That’s how the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible renders verse 31. “His departure.” Departure means leaving, going somewhere else. This can mean departing from life, dying. Some other translations, the King James Version among them, say that Moses and Elijah were speaking of Jesus’ “decease” – his death.
The Greek word underneath these different translation options is exodon, from the noun exodus. Many interpreters think Luke, with this word, wants to conjure the memory of Israel’s exodus from Egypt, that foundational experience of salvation when God freed the people from oppressive slavery. Yes, exodus can simply mean “departure” or “decease,” but there are other, more common words for these things. It feels like an intentionally super-charged choice. So, the Updated Edition of the NRSV, as well of some other English Bibles, make it explicit: Moses and Elijah, they say, were speaking of Jesus’ “exodus.”
It was a wonderful, terrible conversation. Moses and Elijah appeared to talk with Jesus about what awaited him in Jerusalem. A powerful, saving act of God. An exodus, yes – but an exodus achieved through a kind of departure. Through suffering. Through death.
The disciples themselves had only recently become aware of this, that following Jesus would mean going with him toward an initially devastating end, into what would amount to a failure – at least at first. It was only about eight days prior to the Transfiguration that Jesus had first told them that he “must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and…killed and on the third day be raised to life” (Luke 9:22). He had followed this startling revelation with a hard teaching on discipleship: “Then he said to them all, If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it” (Luke 9:23-24). Hard words to digest – even today, even for us.
And now three of those disciples have come with Jesus into the place of prayer to hear Moses and Elijah affirm the cross-bearing life. I can’t say it better than New Testament scholar Luke Timothy Johnson who writes, “Luke alone supplies the topic of conversation between Jesus, Moses and Elijah: they discuss the ‘departure’ he is to fulfill in Jerusalem. Luke…places the suffering into the very middle of the vision of glory.”
Suffering, in the very middle of glory.
It’s amazing, the glory. The shining light, the appearance of the saints, the divine voice.
It’s scary, this talk of departure and suffering.
Peter, afraid, blurts out that he wants to make three tents for Moses, Elijah, and Jesus. He wants to freeze the good part, the glorious vision, in place. But that would be wrong.
Wrong because God is a God of life. God is a God of this life, this world. God is our God. And you and me? We suffer. We suffer for righteousness in a world that is broken and resistant to grace.
If there is to be glory that holds any promise for us, it has to be forged in the crucible of suffering and sacrificial love. It has to catch our suffering up into something purposeful and glorious. And this is why, when the disciples might be starting to think that it’s all too heavy to bear – because remember, that’s the literal meaning of glory, heaviness – just when they might be tempted to defect from this teacher who has clarified the cost of following him, God speaks to them on the mountain: “This is my Chosen Son. Listen to him.”
God tells Peter and James and John in no uncertain terms to trust Jesus’ words. He is who he says he is. His teachings are trustworthy and true. He will hold them and helps them as their journey grows more difficult, as they mature in the faith and realize that his way of humility, generosity, and kindness is costly.
Let’s take just one example of this.
Right after the transfiguration, Jesus “set his face toward Jerusalem.” He shifted from ministering in the northern regions of Israel to a steady journey south, moving closer to what was waiting for him in the city. The first stop on that journey was a town in Samaria. Samaria was a region whose people were hostile to Jews, and they didn’t want anything to do with Jesus once they learned that he was heading toward the Jewish holy city.
Two of the disciples – James and John of all people, who had been on the mountain of transfiguration – became so angry about the Samaritans’ lack of hospitality that they asked Jesus to give them the power to call down fire from heaven and blow up the town. But Jesus strongly rebuked them.
And not long afterward, when answering a stranger’s question about the greatest commandment and what it means to love one’s neighbor, he told a story in which a Samaritan is the hero who cares for a man robbed and left for dead on the side of the road.
Listen to him. Listen to Jesus, who doesn’t return hate for hate or evil for evil. Listen to this teacher who does not draw sweeping conclusions about “those people” but loves – or lovingly rebukes – each individual person in front of him.
Listen to him – because a ministry marked by miracles and healings and minor resistance is about to fall under much harsher scrutiny. It is one thing to be associated with a popular figure up north in Galilee, in the backcountry. It is another to bring the ministry of sacrificial love, a ministry that dissolves social hierarchies and ethnic distinctions and blurs the line between saints and sinners – another thing entirely to bring that into the center of political and religious power.
If you’re going to endure this call, you have to listen to him – you have to trust him. If you’re going to learn how to let God touch your suffering and transfigure it, the suffering you experience as you confront your own sin and the sins of the world, this thirst within us and around us for retribution, then we have to listen to him. If we listen to him, he will help us carry our own cross daily.
In the midst of that mountain top prayer, Jesus received from Moses and Elijah the gift of encouragement to remain steadfast in the way set before him. Peter, James, and John received from God’s voice that same gift.
This is what prayer is all about.
We don’t pray to freeze in place, a kind of static contemplation of glory.
We don’t pray to avoid or banish suffering.
We don’t pray because it deadens our feelings and makes it easier to grin and bear things.
We pray because prayer transfigures life and helps us to walk with integrity.
I want us to be a praying church precisely because I want us to be a church of action, and a church that acts for righteousness in the world is a church that will suffer. We will suffer in solidarity with those who are oppressed in our society. We will suffer the misunderstanding of our neighbors who’ve acquiesced to the status quo. We will suffer the resistance of systemic powers bound to privilege and violence. And to remain steadfast in the midst of this suffering, to let God touch it and catch it up in glory – that can only happen if we are praying, listening to the words of Jesus.
“Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,” Jesus said, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 5:11).
And the Apostle Paul tells us: “[We know] that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:3-5).
God has told us to listen to Jesus.
And so we come to him, each and every day, individually and together. We come to him and ask, Lord, teach us to pray.
Amen.