We are all very attracted to stories of people changing, maybe especially when they change dramatically. Even when these stories are pretty unlikely, like a well-known celebrity seen carrying a Bible into prison when previously it had seemed unlikely she had seen any book before in her life, much less a Bible, even those stories we’re suspicious about attract our attention. Because in our hearts we would like to believe that people can change, that people can find new directions and act on them. We might be cynical about it, but we want to believe.
This gospel today is a story of Jesus suddenly changing, his transfiguration, we call it in our tradition. But there is a real difference between this change and the kind of change we usually think of. Instead of Jesus changing into someone new and different, he changed into who he really was. Suddenly his disciples were given the gift of seeing that the person who had looked to them like a charismatic preacher and rabbi with remarkable powers, was in fact dazzlingly divine, close to God in a way they had not yet begun to imagine.
And not only did Jesus’s appearance change, revealing this new vision, but his life changed, after this transfiguration he began a new direction completely. He came down the mountain and turned his face towards Jerusalem, and instead of wandering the countryside he single-mindedly began the most important chapter of his life, his passion and death and resurrection, everything he was truly meant to do.
This season of Lent is really all about transformation, and if we find the image of Jesus being transformed appealing, we should also remember about why we’re hearing it today — because Lent is about our transformation, not just his. Lent is the time for doing whatever we can to remember who we really are, or to find out who we are now, and not just that, but to begin what we are to do about it. It’s a hard project to begin.
Knowing our hearts isn’t very easy, is it? We all have so many distractions, so many requirements already placed on us by other people and by ourselves. It is hard to separate what feels good from what feels genuinely right, it is hard to separate what we feel like we should do from what we are being called to do, it is even hard always to realize or remember what makes us truly happy, to put a name on the things that give us deep joy.
This isn’t a project like coming up with New Year’s resolutions, all those little things we wish we could change about ourselves, like our weight or our bad habits. This is a project about finding ourselves, not doing a little fix-up. What are the times in our life when we have felt God’s presence? Where is the work we have felt strangely attracted to? When did we once feel that God was tugging us in a new direction?
These are questions that it takes time for us to reflect on. It might not be a coincidence that the disciples are given this vision of Jesus after they have agreed to go off on an arduous climb up a mountain to pray with him. Prayer and careful discernment and long effort might be the only way we ever manage to separate all this out, to see clearly what might be next for us, what might give us great happiness. We sometimes fear doing this work because it is so much work, also maybe because we are worried about what we’ll find, we think God only wants people who do something drastic and heroic. We forget that God is not after our misery, God is after us, he wants us to find the place where we will feel that we have come closer to him.
What does a transformation like that look like? Maybe it is spectacular and heroic, but maybe not. The story that comes to my mind is a conversation I had with a friend of mine under very unexpected circumstances a couple of years ago. It was the middle of a work day, and I guess I am going to have to come clean and reveal that I was asleep on the couch in my living room. What this story reveals, among other things, is that good things can happen to you even when you are asleep on the couch. Someone knocked at the door, and it was a friend my mine I hadn’t seen in five years. He said he just happened to be driving by, and that he thought he’d take a chance and see if we were home. What he told me was that he had just retired about a year before, and that he was spending his time tutoring and mentoring kids who needed a lot of extra help with their work and with their life. He has never really seen himself as that kind of a person, but having ended up in it almost accidentally he suddenly realized he was on the mountaintop. He said, “It’s like my whole life up to this point was just preparation for where I am now.” That man had a new life.
That’s what we’re looking for here. Our whole lives up to this point have prepared us for something, too, something that is our Exodus, packing up and looking for the promised land. Something that will give us the real inner joy of knowing we are doing what God has wanted us to do all along. That’s why, as Peter says in the gospel, it is good that we are here, here in this church to ask again what change God has in mind for us.