Mark 9:2-9
“Only Jesus”
February 14, 2021 – Transfiguration Sunday
“Valentine, I only have eyes for you.” “You are my one and only, Valentine.” “There’s no one else but you, my Valentine.” As Transfiguration Sunday fell on Valentine’s Day this year, I mulled over various expressions of exclusive love which we sometimes offer to each other. For husband and wife, and even for not-yet-married romantic partners, that “only” is a key part of the relationship. There are things about such love that simply should not and cannot be shared.
The Transfiguration account shows us God wants our relationship with Jesus to be like that. No matter who else we might honor or listen to or be guided by as Christians, no matter who else we might love, Jesus remains alone and above all of them, as Peter, James and John discovered.
To firmly place Jesus above all else, the scene is a mountain top. Traditionally it’s Mt. Tabor. It rises about 2,000 feet above the Jezreel Valley. It’s eleven miles west of the Sea of Galilee and a climb to the top would have been a reasonable day hike. Here in Oregon, though, that’s not much of a mountain. We’ve had friends and family visit from the East and Midwest and have to tell them that the coast range and the Coburg hills nearby are “only hills. You need a sunny day to see the real mountains.”
Palestine too has higher peaks. Another candidate for the Mount of Transfiguration is Mt. Hermon, soaring an impressive 9,200 feet up from Caesarea Philippi, the last specific location Mark gives, in chapter 8 verse27, for Jesus and His disciples before the Transfiguration. It would have taken some effort to climb, but it’s not impossible. There is often snow on top. Mark does say it was a high mountain. In any case, Jesus took His followers apart to be alone with Him above the ordinary places people lived. But they weren’t quite alone.
The three disciples went up the mountain with Jesus and suddenly found themselves in the presence not just of the Master they followed but of two great figures out of Jewish history, Moses and Elijah. Our Old Testament lesson from II Kings 2 today showed us Elijah being taken up into heaven while still alive. Jewish people expected, and some still expect, him to come back some time. Moses, on the other hand, according to Deuteronomy 34:5, had died. For him to show up was unexpected.
The focus, though, was on Jesus. Verse 2 tells us His appearance was transfigured in an awesome way. Matthew says His face “shone like the sun,” and Matthew, Mark and Luke all remark on the whiteness of His clothes, beyond the capability of any earthly laundering or bleach. Even Gandalf, the “White Rider” in The Lord of the Rings, never gleamed as bright. It’s Jesus who was shining, not Moses or Elijah.
Despite that shine on Jesus’ face and the brilliant white of His robe, Peter’s response to it all pretty much equated those two ancient heroes of Jewish faith with his Master. “Let’s make three separate but equal shelters,” he thought. The three great masters can continue their conversation and the three eager disciples can soak it all in, maybe rotating places at the feet of each teacher. If they were in fact on Mt. Hermon, standing ankle deep in snow, shelter made all the more sense. Make Moses, Elijah, and Jesus each a tent or tabernacle, then sit down out of the wind and cold and learn from each of those great men.
Peter’s plan was frustrated. We’re often told that his problem was a kind of metaphor for spiritual life. You can’t stay on the mountaintop. Wonderful moments of spiritual excitement and joy are not something you can expect to sustain. Normal Christian experience includes long stretches on the plain and even in the valley. Peter wanted to prolong the spiritual high in a way that just doesn’t fit with real life.
That spiritual metaphor has some truth to it, but I wonder if the real problem with Peter’s plan was actually in the fact that his attention was divided. We’ve got three great prophets here, three incredible spiritual guides. Why not hang onto and listen to them all? Why not even do what we know later rabbis and their students did? Compare the different opinions, listen to them debate each other, learn from the give and take of the ideas of three wise men rather than just one? It’s very possible that’s the sort of theological education to which they were accustomed. Why not, then, sit on the mountain at the feet of the three best teachers of all?
The answer to Peter’s plan appeared in a cloud that enveloped them. Out of the cloud they heard a voice, says verse 7. It repeats exactly what they heard at Jesus’ baptism. “This is my beloved Son.” Then it adds, “Listen to him.” God, because that’s who was speaking, says nothing of Moses or Elijah. God did not invite Peter and his friends to listen to Jesus and then compare what He said to the Law and the Prophets which those figures represented. No, it was just “Listen to him.”
Only Jesus. That’s how the rest of it goes. Matthew and Luke tells us Peter, James and John were afraid there in the cloud, hearing the voice of God. Who wouldn’t be? Mark just goes on with what happened after the cloud had passed, “Suddenly, when they looked around, they saw no one with them, only Jesus.” Only Jesus.
Even the two greatest people and symbols of Jewish history simply faded into the cloud as God endorsed His beloved Son. The wisdom and revelation of the Scriptures that have come before, that is, the Law as represented by Moses, and the Prophets as represented by Elijah, get pushed into the background as Jesus moves into the foreground of everything God wants them to hear. “Listen to him.”
“Only Jesus,” is a hard message for our present world to hear. But it always was. Christians kept having to assert that they had only one Lord, and it was not Caesar, not a government. Christians were persecuted then for being atheists because they did not believe in all the gods the people around them did. There was and is only one Lord and His human presence and name is Jesus, only Jesus.
There is a similar multitude of options today. Several billion people in Asia trust in either a Communist party leader or ancient teaching from Lao Tzu, Confucius, or Buddha. Another billion live by the words of Mohammed and yet another billion we’d call Hindus as they honor various gods and read books like the Vedas and the Upanishads. Then there are all those in Europe, North America and in Communist countries who claim to believe in no God at all, perhaps trusting in science to reveal all truth.
All those different teachers and teachings are represented here in America. We had Hindu neighbors two doors down in Springfield 12 years ago. It’s why many of your friends, neighbors, family, may even you might think that it’s just a little arrogant to speak something like “only Jesus.” We might hesitate to say with Peter as he did not so very long after being on that mountain, in Acts 4:12 speaking about Jesus, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven, given to human beings by which we must be saved.” Throw that into a conversation at work or school and see what happens.
Yet there it is, all over the New Testament, “only Jesus.” Paul wrote to the Ephesians, chapter 4 verse 5 that there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism.” And it is all and only Jesus. But it does sound a bit presumptuous, a bit overconfident to insist that 2.4 billion Christians have it right while the other two thirds of the world’s 7.5 billion people have it all wrong.
Many years ago now, my friend Jay found that, when he would talk occasionally with non-Christian students, their reasons for not believing in Jesus had changed. The big question used to be “Why would a good God allow so much evil, pain, and suffering in the world?” Or they would find it impossible to believe in miracles. But more and more my friend found, and I think it’s still true, that what keeps many, many, many people from faith is just what we read here today. It’s that “only Jesus.” That’s what they just can’t swallow.
I can’t tell you everything to say to people who find it absurd to believe that it’s only Jesus who can bring us to God, only Jesus who can save us and transform this world into a place of peace and justice. Honestly, I don’t even have that many answers. But one thing I think we can do something about. If we are going to talk to people, insisting that Jesus is the one true way, that it’s only Jesus, let’s at least be sure that we are talking about the real Jesus.
What I mean is that at least some people may have trouble accepting our faith that it’s “only Jesus” because the Jesus we present to them looks and talks and behaves so much like most of us, like a white, middle class American instead of a brown, middle-Eastern Jew. As we read the story of the Transfiguration, we may be imagining, and communicating to the world, that it was Jesus’ face that was shining white, rather than His clothes.
In our epistle reading from II Corinthians 4, Paul mentions twice the “light of the glory of God” in Jesus, a light that we see in His face, a face that was very likely dark in complexion, topped with black or brown hair, and dark eyes, with perhaps larger lips. It could be hard for people to believe us when we claim Jesus is the one and only, when it looks like we are claiming that we are the one and only. That’s why Paul wrote there in verse 5, “For we do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord.” That’s our message. Now, if we want those around us to understand and believe it, our task is to get ourselves out of the way so that people can see the real face of Jesus, and only Jesus.
Please let me tell you a story that fits in with Black History Month. It begins in New York, in the Black neighborhood known as Harlem, during the “Harlem Renaissance” of Black literature and art and social advancement. In 1930, as that season of hope for Black people was winding down and about to be obliterated in the Great Depression, a young Black seminary student named Albert Fisher invited a fellow student to attend church with him, at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem. That other student was a white man from Germany. He started going to worship with Fisher almost every week. Eventually the German taught youth Sunday School for six months in that Black church.
In a letter home that December the young scholar wrote about his seminary that “there is no theology here,” by which he meant no real Christ-centered Christianity. But in that same letter he also wrote that he had “only heard a genuine proclamation of the gospel from a [Black man].”[1] That man was Pastor Adam Clayton Powell Sr. at Abyssinian Baptist.
Before his time in Harlem that seminarian from Germany thought like many Germans did, that being “Christ-centered” meant being a good German, that the place to find Jesus was in one’s own Volk, to use the German word. He had even preached a sermon himself the year before in 1929 in which he argued that,
Should not a Volk experiencing God’s call on its own life in its own youth and in its own strength, should not such a people be allowed to follow that call, even if it disregards the lives of other people? God is the Lord of history.[2]
To be Christ-centered then, for many Germans, was all caught up with what it meant to be German, to love and promote one’s own people, one’s one race. So said that seminarian before he went to New York. It was what was in the air in his homeland. Christ could be found in the German nation, in the German people. Whatever happened there, including the rise of Hitler and the Nazi party, was God’s doing because “God is the Lord of history.”
Later in Germany, thoughts like those our German student once preached kept growing. Hitler was acclaimed the great savior of Christian faith. Churches merged into the German Christian Church, the Reichskirche. Some had the motto, “the Swastika on our breasts and the Cross in our hearts.” It was all an unhealthy mix of God and country, of Jesus and Hitler, of the Cross and the Swastika. The beginning of all that was what the young seminarian went home to after his time in New York and Harlem.
Back home in Germany, the young scholar kept finding the real Jesus in people who were in places more like his Black friends in Harlem than his old scholarly friends. He taught a confirmation class of rough, troubled working class young men and played for them the collection of recordings of Black spirituals he had carried across the Atlantic. He told them stories about faith and community of the Christians in Harlem and taught them to have a faith like that. A couple years later, in 1933, in the name of the Jesus he met in Harlem, a Black Jesus, he came to the defense of Jewish people in his own country.
Years later, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, because that was his name, would look back and say that he hadn’t really been a Christian until he’d been to Harlem. He hadn’t understood that to be centered on Jesus was to find Him present and at work in every people, in every race, especially among those most suffering and oppressed.
That’s just part of the story of Bonhoeffer and how close he came to being swallowed up in the Nazi-sympathizing German Church. It was Jesus with a Black face that saved him, that helped him realize that you cannot mix up Jesus with a country or a race or any other earthly power or association. If we follow that Jesus, the only Jesus there really is, people might just believe us when we say He is the one and only. We too need to have that cloud come over us and hear God say, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to Him.” Then we must raise our eyes and see no one else, nothing else, only Jesus.
I get really worried when I hear or see Jesus get all mixed up with other things, when I see a banner that reads, “Jesus is my Savior, and Trump is my president,” in one sentence, or when I see an image from a Super Bowl Jeep commercial in which a cross is hung on top of an American flag as if they just naturally belong together. I worry that we might no longer be seeing Jesus only, but Jesus and, and, and… almost anything.
In chapter XXV of The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis has a senior devil encourage his junior to tempt his “patient,” who has become a Christian, toward what he calls “Christianity And.” “You know–,” says Screwtape, “Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianism, Christianity and Spelling Reform.” The hope of the devils is that by allying faith in Jesus with some other cause or person—and giving the two equal importance—that faith in Jesus will be watered down and eviscerated of any real power.
Some of you know that Beth and I are great proponents of both/and rather than either/or thinking. The Covenant church often aims at that. Let’s have both traditional hymns and contemporary praise songs in worship. Let’s be open to both infant baptism and believer baptism. Let’s do our best at both evangelism and social justice. “And” can be a wonderful, inclusive, Christian word. But when it comes to Jesus, when it comes to who has our complete love and devotion and loyalty, there’s no room for “and.” There’s no room for anyone or anything else, no matter how good it is. There’s only Jesus. Beloved, beloved Son of God, Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord, we want to only have eyes for you.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus: Harlem Renaissance Theology and an Ethic of Resistance (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, p. 39.
[2] Ibid., p. 12.