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Weekly Sermon
Canby UMC
February 19, 2006
Rev. Jim Frisbie
Mark 9:2-13
The Secret
Nothing is harder to do than to keep a secret. Just ask anyone in government! It seems the more important it is that something remain confidential, the more it seems to burn a hole in one’s consciousness.
Have you ever been in on planning a surprise party? How do you keep the plan, while inviting all kinds of people and gathering all the stuff you need? It is a legend in the making, keeping a secret that just doesn’t want to be kept.
When Jesus and the disciples came down the mountain, he insisted that they not tell anyone of the transforming experience they had just witnessed. Why? Who would believe them? If they told the others, there would be jealousy. (How come you got to go up the mountain and I had to stay down here!!!) There would also be incredulity. (“Yea, right…. You saw who? Doing What???”)
Jesus did not want to spend the next sixty days sorting out arguments between the disciples. Neither did he want to spread rumors about his nature and glory among the people. They were gullible enough as it was, he did not want to add more to their vivid imaginations!
But what did this all mean? The imagery of this story is enough to engage our imaginations! There is this windy mountaintop, bright lights blinding the vision of the disciples, the sudden appearance of strange beings, and the voice of God from the cloud enshrouding the mountain.
How would you make sense of such an otherworldly event?
What we have here is an example of two of the consistent themes of the New Testament: mystery and paradox. There is mystery aplenty in the experience of that mountaintop. How could simple fishermen who never traveled more than fifty miles from home understand something as cosmic as a glimpse of the intimate nature of God? The tradition in the Old Testament was that no mortal could look upon the face of God and live. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, his face shone so brightly that the people could not look at him.
Great indeed is the mystery of our God! The disciples on the mountain with Jesus were struck to the core by the experience. They did not know if they would survive the encounter. Perhaps they didn’t care. The one thing they did know was that they had experienced the presence of God.
This is the mystery that we all seek isn’t it? I remember a young woman in a church I pastured telling me, “I don’t want someone to tell me what to believe. I just want to experience God.”
This is what we all want. We want to experience God. We want to come into the presence of the Lord is such a way that we no longer doubt his existence. We want to feel the wonder of the grace that sets us free from shame and guilt, washing us with a love that gives us the assurance of salvation that frees us from the fear of death. We want to know the one who knows us, and experience the cleansing fire that changed the face of Moses into a countenance as bright as the sun.
But there is a problem with the mystical encounter with the holiness of God. It raises more questions than it answers. It washes us not only of our shame and guilt, of our pre-conceived notions of what God is like. Father Timothy Kelly of St. John’s Abby once said, “The mystic and the atheist are saying the same thing: ‘the god you taught me about does not exist!’”
The clearer our vision, the farther the horizon appears!
Mystery was not the only thing the disciples encountered on that mountaintop. They also experienced the other great working theme of the New Testament: paradox. They had followed a very human Jesus to the top of the mountain. But they would never again see him entirely in that light. He was very human. But he was also divine. They had been there, seen it, heard it and believed it. But in spite of the convincing truth they had encountered, they were sworn to secrecy. It would be their own special understanding between Jesus, Peter, James and John.
It seems paradoxical, but it is essential that the more human Jesus is, the more divine he becomes. The closer he comes to the Father, the more intimate his relationship with his disciples grows. Do you see the paradox in this? True spirituality is earthy and human, not mystic and otherworldly.
Have you ever recognized that some of the smartest people can explain the most complicated things in the simplest language? One of the great German theologians of the 20th century was once asked, “What is the greatest theological truth you have ever discovered? His answer was profound. He said, “The greatest truth I have learned about God is this, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so!”
It is a paradox that Jesus came into the world as the son of a carpenter to stun the wisdom of Greece and Rome. It is a paradox that Jesus chose fishermen, tax collectors and uneducated women to tell the story of God’s amazing grace. It is a paradox that Jesus never wrote a book, but became the source material of the greatest story ever told and the most widely read book in history.
Scripture is full of mystery and paradox. Our lives follow a similar course. Is that surprising? The disciples came down from the mountaintop with an intimate experience of God that they could not share. Though they did not fully understand what they had seen, they carried the experience that would change them forever. That is the ultimate paradox of faith. We don’t need to fully comprehend what God is doing in our lives to be changed by it.
There is mystery, and paradox in the experience of God. If it were not so, it would not be a genuine experience of transcendence. It was true on the mountaintop for the disciples, and it is true for our own mountain top experiences of God’s presence as well.
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