March 2 2025 Sermon
On this final Sunday before we enter into the holy season of Lent, our attention turns toward the mysterious event described in today’s gospel and referred to by the author of today’s epistle. The Transfiguration of Jesus. Luke tells us that this event, took place about 8 days after Peter declared that Jesus was the Messiah of God, but was told by Jesus that should not tell anyone until after Jesus suffered and put to death, and rose from the dead.
What a roller coaster ride. Wallowing, post-viral infection, physically and mentally exhausted, feeling an emotional toll as I contemplate the politics of the day, especially south of the border, feeling like the country of my birth and early formation was crumbling.
2nd Peter urges us to look for the illumination of God’s future glory, as revealed to the disciples at the transfiguration of Christ. I listened to the hymns which, by faith, began to bring me out of my funk. The story of the transfiguration and mediated to us today by the Holy Spirit through Holy Scriptures. In this way the Holy Trinity will transform us more and more fully into the divine glory (see 2 Cor. 3:18) until Christ, the Daystar, rises fully in our hearts (1:19; see Luke 1:78; Rev. 2:28).
8th century theologian and historian the Venerable Bede comments on this passage, “In the night of this world, so full of dark temptations, where there is hardly anyone who does not sin, what would become of us if we did not have the lamp of the prophetic word?”
Pray with Jesus
This is my son – listen to him.
The Christian hope of God’s final deliverance of creation depends entirely on Christ’s manifestation of God’s glory in the fragile and chaotic realm of human history.
In the transfiguration Jesus shows his true identity as God’s divine Son, an identity that derives from and points beyond this world. To behold the glory of God in Jesus Christ requires, above all, the kind of understanding that we call faith, which is made possible only through Christ’s death and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit. In faith, Christians see that the human being Jesus is not merely human. Christ can never be limited by the canons of human knowledge—particularly if we consider how little we understand about ourselves and the world in which we live! To know Christ as God’s Son is ultimately a theological act, based on God’s revelation in human history.
Lent is a time for a reality check for Christians. Begin with facing our mortality, facing how far short of the glory of God we fall – but this leads us through the cross and self-sacrifice to the resurrection and our eternal hope. A hope infused in us by the faith of Jesus and the gift of his spirit in our lives.