Reflecting on the Transfiguration with Simon Peter

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Luke 9:28-36

Following Jesus along the way wasn’t always easy, and sometimes it left me downright terrified. I first met him when he came through Capernaum. He’d been at the synagogue teaching, just as we heard he’d done back in his hometown of Nazareth. There’d been some talk about how he’d run into some trouble in Nazareth, but it was hard to know why. In our synagogue he’d not only had some wisdom to share, but he’d also prayed over a man who had some sort of unclean spirit, and the man was made well. That was a bit earth shaking, really, but not nearly so much as what happened next, when he came to my house. My mother-in-law was sick with some sort of fever, that kept her bed-ridden, so we asked if he might help her… and he did. Just like that the fever was gone, and she was up on her feet, looking to find something to cook in the kitchen, just as if she’d never been sick at all.

What do you make of that? I mean there were sometimes holy men wandering around, making the synagogue leaders nervous as they tried to effect cures or talked as if they were God’s messiah, but this Jesus seemed able to actually do the things he talked about. He was intriguing, I suppose, and my wife was certainly grateful to have her mother healed and healthy again.

It was just a few days later that I saw him on the shore of the lake of Gennesaret. We were cleaning the nets after a long night of fishing—or trying to fish, as that lake hadn’t yielded a single thing in the long hours before sunrise. A crowd had begun to gather, and he hardly had room to move, so he asked if he could use one of our boats. I took him out just far enough from the shore that he could actually speak to the growing crowd, and he just mesmerized us with his teaching. All you could hear was his voice and the sound of the gulls, so quiet was that crowd. And when he was finished he told me to push out further and put down the nets. Sure thing, Jesus… I’ll humour you on this. You might be a grand teacher, but I’m the one who knows about catching fish, and after a barren night with the nets there’s no chance of catching anything now that the heat of the day has come up.

And then it happened. No sooner were the nets in the water than they were so full that they risked tearing apart. This is too much… I fell to my knees in front of him, and cried out, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” But he insisted that I could be with him… in fact that I should follow him. And right there on the shore my brother Andrew and I decided to go with him, along with both James and John. He was that compelling, and in his own way so gentle and easy to trust.

That was the thing about Jesus. He’d be telling one of his parables, and you’d see the twinkle in his eyes. He’d come across some poor, sick soul, and compassion was written across his face. When we sat at the fire and ate our dinner, he was as quick to laugh as any one of us. Yet there were these other moments when he’d look at you, and it wasn’t so much as a twinkle in his eyes as it was fire. I’ve never felt safer with anyone than I did with Jesus, but I’ve also never been as afraid as I was in those days.

I remember the day he asked us, “Who do the crowds say that I am?” Someone said John the Baptist, someone else said Elijah, and another said, “one of the ancient prophets has arisen.” “And who do you say that I am?” he asked. My answer was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “The Messiah of God.” I’d been thinking it for weeks but never dared to say it aloud, yet when he asked I couldn’t stop the words from pouring out. “Don’t say that to anyone,” he said, with that fire in his eyes. And then he began to talk about his own suffering and death at the hands of the chief priests and scribes, which wasn’t at all what any of us wanted to hear. The Messiah of God is a victor not a victim, I thought, and swore myself to not say more about this until I could understand what he was talking about.

It was just about a week later that he called me, John, and James to hike up the mountain with him. It was a good climb, and when he got to the top he closed his eyes and began to pray. The three of us weren’t unaccustomed to this, so we just settled down to rest and wait, when we watched his face begin to change. He looked different somehow, with his clothes shining like the sun. Then there were with him two other figures, talking with him. They didn’t look at all familiar, but somehow I knew—I knew—it was Moses and the prophet Elijah. Ghosts? Are we seeing ghosts?

Do you know that kind of fear? The kind of scared that causes your mind to just race, and you end up blurting out something when you probably should have just kept your mouth shut? “Master,” I said, “it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah,” which was really a load of nothing. Good for us to be here? We were scared out of our wits! And dwellings? I’m talking about dwellings in the face of the most frightening and maybe sacred moment of my life to that point?

And then the two figures were gone, and the clouds swirled all around us, so thick we could hardly see. A voice came; a strong, steady, powerful voice. “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”

And then it was over. The clouds dissolved, and it was just Jesus there with us. He looked… well, both calm and determined. And then he smiled at us, and I let out a deep breath when I saw that twinkle in his eyes.

We didn’t say a word about this to anyone, because truly, what could you say? Even my own brother Andrew might have thought we’d lost our minds, so it was just better to hold the story to ourselves. And maybe I was just a little embarrassed about my comment about making the dwellings up there on the mountaintop? Yeah, I was.

I had a good few things to be embarrassed about in those days. That feeling of fear when he had us catch all those fish. The day that I thought I could walk with him across the water, and ended up going under because I was afraid. The dwellings on the mountaintop. The time I tried to correct him for saying that he was going to die at the hands of the authorities, and he called me a “Satan”. All the times he tried to drill into our heads what he was there to do, and we just couldn’t get it straight. We wanted a victory march with banners and swords, ousting the Romans and restoring the land to the people of God under Messiah, and we just couldn’t get past that dream.

Or we couldn’t until the night they arrested him and arranged to have him crucified. That was the night of my greatest shame, when three times in a row I just denied ever having known him. I let him die alone, in spite of all the big promises I’d made about never leaving his side. That just about killed me.

I remember, though, those glorious forty days when he was with us again, more alive that I’d ever seen anyone be. I remember the warmth and light and love in his eyes, and his promise that while he would be going soon to the presence of God, God’s presence would come among us like never before. And I remember that day, when the Spirit struck us like flint, setting us alight and giving us a courage that was almost beyond belief.

I remember too, when young John Mark asked to hear my stories from those days, so he could write them all down and share them with anyone who wanted to meet Jesus. I could have hedged my bets and left out the parts of the stories in which I was such a lost fool, but I loved the earnest look in Mark’s eyes and the way he crafted my stories. Those stories aren’t really good news unless the bad news of my sorry self are told in their fullness. Because the man who thought that Moses and Elijah needed tents up on the top of that mountain was made into the person who would go to any length to tell this story. And maybe that’s the most important story of all.