Text: Luke 9:28-36
Beloved
in Christ, “Jesus…went up on the mountain to pray.” He did so, “taking
with him Peter and John and James.” Now at last we think that we might
learn the reason for Christ’s success. We’ve seen Jesus preaching with
authority. We’ve seen Him do miracles. We’ve seen Him cast out demons and heal
the sick. He was the most spiritual man of His generation. Now if only we could
see what gives Him that power so that we can go and do likewise!
It
looks as if the answer is prayer. Throughout Luke’s gospel, we see that
Christ is portrayed as a man of prayer. When He was baptized, He was also praying.
When crowds were pressing upon Him and demanding His attention, He
systematically took time out to pray, even going to a desolate place to escape
the crowd. Then, when He had to make the momentous decision of which twelve men
to choose as His disciples, He spent the whole night in prayer first. Later in
Luke’s gospel, we will see Jesus teaching again and again about what prayer is
to be like. And so when we hear that Jesus went up the mountain to pray and
especially took some of His best students with him, we think that we might
finally learn how to have all the power our Lord has.
But
we get a real lesson in prayer, all right. Our Lord prayed all night
long while on the mountain, but His disciples fell fast asleep. And we
recognize ourselves in them. We snooze and we lose. Our wandering minds prevent
us from connecting with God in prayer. And then when we do wake up, we babble
nonsense and make requests that are wrong or inappropriate. So, for example,
Peter woke up rather late and saw that everything was nearly over. And so he
tried to salvage the situation by asking Christ’s permission to build three
tents, so that Moses, Elijah, and our Lord could continue their conversation
indefinitely. Luke tells us that Peter made this request not out of some sort
of genuine piety, but out of ignorance. He hadn’t been paying attention to what
Moses and Elijah had been talking about with Christ, namely, how Christ had to
go to Jerusalem and be crucified there and rise from the dead. If he had taken
that conversation to heart, he wouldn’t have made the request to stay on the
mountain; he would have known from the beginning that such a request was
impossible. In the same way, we often make ignorant and foolish requests in our
prayers because we don’t know God’s Word very well or we disregard it when we
pray.
 |
| Carl Heinrich Bloch, The Transfiguration of Christ |
But
when we pray, we discover that it isn’t all about us—our strength, our power,
our spirituality, our ability to tap into the divine. Instead, it is all about
Christ. Yes, our prayers should imitate those of Christ in their fervency and seriousness.
But the good news is that our salvation and well-being does not depend upon us
and our prayers, but upon Christ and His. For pray as hard as we might,
the appearance of our face will never be made glorious and our clothing will
never become dazzling white because we are shining brightly. Moses and Elijah
will not appear and beg to have a conversation with us. And so we see that
Christ is unique. He is the Son of God, and we are not.
I
do not mean to denigrate or deny His humanity. He is fully human and did
many things that human beings have to do. He ate, He drank, He got tired and
slept. Even in His relationship with the Father, He behaved in many ways as all
humans should: He prayed, He meditated on God’s Word, He lived a holy life in
obedience to God’s commandments, He showed love and compassion toward those who
needed it. By trying to do these very same things, we would embrace what is the
very best for humanity. But we can imitate Him in many ways, but not in all,
for He is also true God. And when it comes to His divinity, the best thing we
can do is not to imitate Him in ways that are beyond our ability, but rather to
receive the gifts that He brings.
You
see, there are two things that we learn about Christ in this passage, as well
as many other places in the Scriptures. We learn who Christ is and what He
does. We learn who Christ is from the words spoken by the Father: “This
is my Son, my Chosen One.” Now we might have been able to figure this
out by considering various things. He had to be superior to Moses and Elijah,
the greatest prophets of the Old Testament, given the way that they showed
deference to Him. Christ had to be at least an angelic being, the way that His
clothes shone and His whole body radiated with glory. But, of course, He was
more than a prophet and greater than any angel. And so it is helpful to have
the Father’s words pointing to Christ and explaining who He is.
But
how does it help us to know that Christ is God’s beloved Son? It helps us to
see that being a Christian isn’t merely about imitating Christ. Now, of course,
we should imitate Him in the ways that we can, as I mentioned earlier. But
there will come a point when we realize that He is so far above us that none of
us, not the saintliest among us, can come close to equaling Him. Instead, the
truly Christian thing to do is to honor His unique mission on behalf of
mankind.
And
that leads us to consider the second thing we learn about Christ: what He has
done. On the Mount of Transfiguration, He spoke with Moses and Elijah about
“His departure, which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.”
He didn’t talk to them about what laws would most improve mankind. It isn’t
because the law that Moses had proclaimed and Elijah repeated was bad. The Ten Commandments
are the very best for explaining the sort of moral obligations we have. But
giving a detailed explanation of the law won’t save humanity. Trying to enforce
that law rigidly won’t save us either. That is because the problem is the human
heart. We can recognize the goodness of the law, but it doesn’t mean that we
will keep it.
Let
me give an illustration that might be helpful on this Super Bowl Sunday.
The rules of football are rather straightforward, even if there might be some
nuances that escape most people. The major strategies for playing football are
also learned easily enough. Even people who watch only the Super Bowl are able
to figure out that it’s a bad idea to run the ball when it’s third down and
sixteen yards to go. But when you actually are put in the middle of the game,
everything that you’ve learned goes out the window. There will be plenty of
plays made today that we will call stupid, rookie mistakes, but we wouldn’t be
any better—in fact, far worse—if it were up to us to play the game. In the same
way, it is easy enough to understand God’s rules, as laid down in His law, but
that doesn’t mean that we will be able to keep them, especially in the hustle
and bustle of life.
That
is why we need more than a lawgiver or a law preacher. We need a savior.
We need someone who can delve into the heart of the problem and take it on, no
matter the cost. And that is why our Lord went to Jerusalem. He went there
because it was the heart of the problem. There the law had been preached for centuries,
but it had saved no one all by itself. The law left some people in despair,
since they realized that they would never be able to keep its demands fully.
Others became hypocrites when they heard it, because they didn’t look at it
carefully and just assumed that, since they were decent folks, they hadn’t ever
really broken the law. But in each instance the law all by itself—apart from
the promises of the coming Messiah—had been unable to save people. And so
Christ stepped in to do what the law demanded. He didn’t just observe the
sacrifices being offered at the temple; He Himself became the sacrifice for the
whole world. And it didn’t take place in the beauty of the temple grounds, but
on an ugly, barren hill, far removed from the ornate buildings of Jerusalem. It
wouldn’t even be on the Mount of Transfiguration that it would take place, but
on the gloomy mountain of Golgotha, the Place of the Skull. And to reconcile
God and sinners, Christ had to and keep His glory under wraps. Instead, He
would appear as the weakest, most despised human being.
But
because Christ went down from the Mount of Transfiguration and went up to
Calvary, we have been redeemed from sin, death, and hell. And so God delights
in us, for He delights in His Son and His Son delights in us. And if God
delights in us, then that means that we can talk to Him, that we can pour
forth our prayers. But our prayers ought not to be the sort of babbling and
drowsy nonsense that Peter poured forth. Instead, they should be voiced only
when we have done what God bids us do: listen to Christ.
When
we take seriously what Christ has to say about Himself and His mission, then we
are able to pray to Him as we ought. It won’t be about holding on to the glory
of a moment. Instead it will be about Christ and His redemption. Prayer won’t
frighten us or bore us, but instead delight us. And that sort of prayer will
sustain us as we leave the mountaintop and head back down to the dark valley.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment