Luke 9:28-36 Transfiguration Sunday
Pastor Ron Koehler
Grace—Tucson
March 2, 2025
A DAY OF GREAT CHANGE He stands right up here—at the front of the church—looking handsome and looking back at the closed doors at the end of the aisle. The music stops. There’s a pause. New beautiful music begins. The doors are pushed open…and there she is. She looks radiant, positively glowing in her pure white wedding dress. He’s shared so much time and so many experiences with her leading up to that day, but this—this is different. And he melts at the sight of her. As we listen to the words of Luke’s gospel this morning, it’s not a walk up the aisle to the altar, but a walk up a path to a mountaintop. And it is a few men seeing someone they loved in a way they hadn’t before—glorious and gleaming, radiating light unlike anything they had ever seen. Jesus brought Peter, James, and John on a private excursion where something terribly important would happen—like he had done before and would do again in the not too distant future. They could not have imagined what they would see and experience. They had followed Jesus, listened to him, helped him out with things. They knew him, and they believed what Peter said in his beautiful, confident confession about Jesus about a week before this, when he called him “The Christ of God.” But on this day, on this mountaintop, they saw Jesus changed. Well, HE didn’t really change—the way he appeared changed. The divine glory of Jesus that was normally hidden beneath his human exterior was revealed. And what an incredible sight it was! Comparisons to just how brilliant that glory was don’t do it justice, although three gospel writers try to help us: like a flash of lightning, like the sun, clothing as white as the light, dazzling, whiter than any bleach could make them. (Matthew 17, Mark 9). Even outside of this change in appearance, it was A DAY OF GREAT CHANGE for Jesus. This event on a northern mountain marks the end of his ministry in Galilee. Now he would set out on the road to Jerusalem for the last time. A road that would deposit him on the doorstep of the religious leaders who wanted him dead. A road that would deliver him to the judgment seat of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate. A road that would end on a skull-shaped hill where his earthly life would come to a brutal end on a cross. He knew all this. And he went because he there was no other way for the world’s sin to be paid for and because he loved us all. So, he willingly walked the road that led away from this mountain of Transfiguration. As he prepared to take this road, his Father encouraged him by sending Moses and Elijah and by confirming his support for him as he spoke from the cloud.