Tag Archives: transfiguration

Time Travel in the Bible?

Posted on by

I’m so incredibly exhausted by the world’s news cycles. Each new day brings a brand new insanity. So, here’s the thing. How about we just swim around in our own weirdness as Christians for a moment? Here’s what I mean.

For starters, I’m only late to this topic for those who follow the historic lectionary, which we do here at Our Savior. For everyone else in the liturgical community, the Transfiguration of Our Lord will likely be celebrated this Sunday. The next stop—Ash Wednesday.

I suppose another reason I say I’m late to this discussion is that after worship here at Our Savior three weeks ago, during the Adult Bible Study hour, I shared a thought I had while preaching on the text for Transfiguration Sunday from Matthew 17:1-9. Yes, it landed on me in the middle of the sermon. It didn’t make it into the sermon. But it certainly was rattling around in my brain. Essentially, I wondered whether it might be plausible that Moses and Elijah, the two patriarchs who stood and spoke with Jesus on the mountain, were actually stepping into that moment from moments in their own time.

I shared that thought with the adults in the Bible study. However, I never finished the thought. And so, this is it.

Typically, the moment Moses and Elijah arrive is interpreted as a visit from heaven. But the whole thing seems almost too dense for that simple deduction. I mean, if this is merely a visit from heaven, even just to serve as witnesses, why does the moment feel so heavy with the entire history of divine revelation? I know it’s not a good idea to form theological positions from speculation. However, I guess what I’m wondering about is not merely what happened, but how deep the event actually runs into the fabric of the Old Testament accounts. When Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus on the mountain, is something more taking place? Is time and space converging? Is it possible that when Moses and Elijah encountered God in the Old Testament, they were, in one or more of those moments, actually meeting with Christ in the Transfiguration moment? Is this something that—not merely theologically, but actually—is a binding moment that shows the simultaneous reaching backward and forward of redemptive history? Christianity teaches that such things are true. But is it being demonstrated in the Transfiguration?

I know it might sound like a huge waste of time to some. Still, the New Testament provides the necessary theological foundation for at least asking the question. Saint John writes pretty plainly, “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18). Christ Himself says, “Not that anyone has seen the Father except he who is from God” (John 6:46). And yet, the Old Testament repeatedly describes Moses, Elijah, and others as truly encountering God—speaking with Him, seeing His glory, standing in His presence. What’s more, the Church has historically resolved this tension by confessing that all visible manifestations of God in the Old Testament are manifestations of the pre-incarnate Son. In other words, whenever God shows Himself to anyone, Christ is the One they see. One of my favorite professors, Rev. Dr. Charles Gieschen, has written a crisp resource that leans into this kind of stuff. His book Angelomorphic Christology: Antecedents & Early Evidence, while thickly academic, is great fun.

In the meantime, these things place Moses’ experience on Sinai in an entirely new light—no pun intended. Exodus 33:11 tells us that “the Lord used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend,” and yet moments later, Moses is told that no one can see God’s face and live. The paradox only resolves if the One Moses encountered was truly divine, yet not the invisible Father in His fullness.

Something similar happens with Elijah’s encounter at Horeb. The prophet stands on the mountain as the Lord moves by, accompanied by wind, earthquake, and fire, yet is finally revealed as God speaking to Him in a quiet voice (1 Kings 19). The text uses the same language of divine self-disclosure found in Moses’ encounter—“the Lord passed by”—and, like Moses, Elijah returns from the mountain back into historical time, commissioned once again for his prophetic task of preaching a faithful Word. Like the scene with Moses, though happening at different times, this one includes the mountain, the divine glory, the overshadowing presence. Once again, the Transfiguration account begs the same question—if no one has seen the Father, who was Elijah encountering?

I don’t want to force anything into this. Eisegesis is dangerous. Still, the Transfiguration itself seems almost designed to invite a deeper investigation.

Another quick thing… Saint Luke’s version of the Transfiguration account tells us that Moses and Elijah speak with Jesus about His ἔξοδον—literally, His “exodus”—which He is about to accomplish at Jerusalem (Luke 9:31). First of all, the disciples weren’t invited into this discussion. He was talking to Moses and Elijah. Second, this isn’t casual vocabulary that Luke used. Moses’ entire ministry is defined by the Exodus. And Elijah stands at the head of the prophetic tradition that would proclaim what the Exodus was all about—calling Israel back to the covenant, confronting false worship, and insisting that the God who delivered His people is the same God who remains faithful to the end. And both Moses and Elijah are, right now, on the mountain with Jesus, talking about the fulfillment of everything they were commissioned to enact or proclaim.

Well, okay, one more quick thing. Did Jesus wink toward the possibility of the kind of collapse of linear time that I’m talking about when He said to the Pharisees in John 8:56, “Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad.” Not merely believed it, but that he saw it. I think Hebrews echoes this too when it says that the faithful of old did not receive the promise apart from us, because their perfection awaited Christ (Hebrews 11:39-40). Their story was never complete in their own time. It awaited His appearing.

In the end, is any of this provable in a strict sense? Nope. Not at all. Scripture never explicitly states that Moses was temporally present at the Transfiguration while also standing temporally on Sinai, or that Elijah consciously stepped into a future moment with Christ while at Horeb. But as I said, I thought about this right in the middle of my sermon on the Transfiguration, and this morning I decided to have a little fun with it, especially since I left it hanging during Bible study a few weeks ago.

I suppose, through all of this, regardless of the theological wandering, we did land on something the Bible establishes pretty firmly. It’s something that the dispensationalists may want to keep in mind. Essentially, all divine self-revelation is Christological, all theophany is mediated by the Son, and all redemptive moments converge in Him. Time in Scripture is not merely sequential. It’s centered—situated entirely in Jesus. You cannot be God’s people apart from Christ, who was, is, and will always be.

So, before the private messages start arriving, calling me crazy or saying I have too much time on my hands (which I absolutely don’t), I suppose the safest and most faithful way to close up shop on this is not in terms of literal time travel, but in terms of unveiled continuity. When Moses and Elijah encountered God in the Old Testament, they encountered Christ, though they did not yet know Him as Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, while Moses and Elijah were there at the Transfiguration, no matter where they came from, they weren’t visiting with someone or something new. They were visiting with the same One they’d been with during their own theophanies in their own time.

In that sense, even the Transfiguration becomes less about Moses and Elijah showing up, as if they’re appearing to the disciples alongside Jesus, and more about Jesus appearing as He is to and with Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, and John—with an element of enlisting the new guys into the same company that has always stood before Him, now finally seeing Him without the veil.

And so, however you feel about what I’ve written this morning, rest assured, it was a far better way to spend my morning than simmering in everything else going on in the world. Although the student walkouts deserve some consideration. Maybe I’ll be “unexhausted” enough to think about those things for my regular eNews message this Sunday.

No Do Over

Posted on by

God’s Word is rich. I just love it.

One of the main thrusts of today’s celebration—the Transfiguration of Our Lord (which, because we follow the Historic Lectionary, comes to us at Our Savior in Hartland a little earlier than the churches that use the Three-Year Lectionary)—is the importance of listening to the Word above all other things (Matthew 17:5). In fact, the Heavenly Father turns the disciples’ combined attention away from the Lord’s glorious display to the simplicity of listening to Jesus. And why? Not only because Jesus is the Word made flesh, but because it’s by the Gospel that He chooses to engage with and save His world (Romans 1:16). Spectacular light shows and wowing performances might inspire awe, but they’re impact is easily dulled by sinful human forgetfulness—as all three of these disciples will continue to prove time and time again not long after the Transfiguration. James and John will run away in fear when the Lord is captured. Peter will deny three times that even knows Him.

“Listen to Him,” is the Father’s Word. That will always be more important.

One of the things I love most about God’s Word is that the more you study it, the more it reaches into you and equips you for seeing things in ways that you didn’t before. An easy example of this comes from what I read this morning in 1 Corinthians 1:18-31. Essentially, Saint Paul sets the stage for us to keep our senses attuned to how God operates, writing plainly that He often does so in opposites. He chooses the weak things instead of the strong. He chooses to work His powerful victory among us through what appears to be the brutal defeat of His Son on a cross.

Of course, I knew these things already. Still, taking Paul’s lead, I began contemplating the familiar opposites I experience in life, specifically success and failure.

Like you, I experience victories and I suffer defeats. The old saying “You win some and you lose some” is not lost on any of us, and neither are the feelings of joy and sadness that come with winning and losing. But digging a little deeper into these opposites, what’s really at their centers? What’s really driving victory’s joy? What is it about defeat that induces genuine sorrow? Because God is big on opposites, I wonder if He has in mind for us to understand that the midpoint for winning or losing is in some way relative to what’s at stake for its opposite. In other words, it’s not necessarily the victory that delivers the joy, but also the knowledge of what was almost lost. The same goes for losing. It’s not so much the defeat that stings as it is the knowledge of what remains out of reach, of the inaccessible value of what was almost won.

I preach and teach fairly regularly how these deeper perspectives matter to the Christian Church. If you don’t know the value of what God says is good, how can you truly care to steer clear of the bad? If you don’t know the deeper significance of what’s at stake for eternal life, how can being connected to the One who can rescue you ever really rise to a place of genuine prominence in this life?

While many of us might not want to admit it, part of the problem is that we’ve retooled our spirituality to match the world’s spirituality, believing that there will always be another opportunity for everything, that there will always be a next season. We do this with our favorite sports teams. We do this with our jobs. We do this with so many things in life. Unfortunately, we also do this with marriage, making it disposable, and figuring we can always try again with someone else. We do the exact same thing with churches, friendships, and even our children. Far too many in our world are now doing this with Natural Law and human sexuality, thinking they can change the unchangeables and live as somebody new. And while we may get away with abusing these things in this life, we ought not let ourselves be fooled into thinking that there will be a next season for winning eternal life. When you breathe your last, or if the Lord returns again in glory, all seasons will have passed. All opportunities for running a different play, taking another shot, or trying a new pitch will have ceased. The buzzer will have sounded, and the divine Referee will have declared the winners and the losers for an unending future.

This is it, folks. Everything is on the line. Everything for the world to come matters right now in the world of today.

Come to think of it, I suppose another reason any of this might come to mind is because I learned this morning of a friend’s recent passing. It appears he was killed suddenly in an auto accident. Having met him at a side job in my college years, and getting reacquainted online through comments he’d sometimes make on my posts, he was the kind of guy who was betting on making it to old age, to a stage of life when he’d be able to see his own death on approach. And assuming he’d know when he was in that inevitable season, it was then he’d start to “get right with God.”

But time ran out. He was killed instantly.

Admittedly, our gracious Lord does sometimes move within the framework of a person’s final moments. He gives a little insight into this possibility in Matthew 20:1-16, which, by the way, is the Gospel reading appointed for next Sunday, Septuagesima. But if you take a moment with the parable Jesus tells (which is another example of opposites), you’ll notice that our Lord insists on doing things His way, not ours. In that respect, I’m reminded of a short video clip of Rev. Dr. David Scaer (https://wp.me/aaCKV0-1Be) in which he talks about how we like to hold up various examples of deathbed conversions, usually only doing so to justify believing that our delinquent loved ones made it into heaven. But Scaer admits we all know: it rarely happens this way in reality. Not everyone goes to heaven. People do actually end up in hell.

There’s value in admitting this.

Changing gears only slightly (or, perhaps, getting back around to where I started, which was the topic of listening to the Word), Bishop Hardy and I had a conversation this past week about the challenges of being pastors, namely, dealing with the kinds of people who appear to thrive on accosting us. I remember us needing very little back-and-forth when it came to one particular aspect of the calling, which is that every day brings new opportunities for being someone’s villain. The message we believe and bring, both Law and Gospel, all but guarantees this. In short, the point of the conversation, and an opposite of sorts:  Why do we stay in a job that so often feels like defeat when we certainly could be doing something else that enjoys greater success? We agreed that whether we’re received as heroes or villains, neither of these opposing titles outweigh the value of the message we bring and its inherent power to change us—and to equip us—for the long haul. It makes us into men who are content to do what the Father commanded—which is to listen to the Word. In the end, we continue in the combat because the Word is everything to us. I’m guessing other pastors keep at it, enduring the same things for the exact same reason. The Word has made them into men who, like them or hate them, simply believe what Jesus says, and are quite well with taking any flak His words are guaranteed to stir.

I should add one more observation. It’s also likely pastors stay in the game because they want this endurance for more than just themselves. They want it for you, too. I know I do. Interestingly, and again keeping Paul’s theme of “opposites,” that encouraging thought also bears a word of warning to the wolves among God’s people. Or better yet, a clarification. Against pastors and people devoted to God’s Word, your troublemaking better have stamina for the long game, and not to mention lots of help, because those who embrace, believe, and stand on the Word—again, like them or hate them—are not only emboldened by God through His Word, but they are empowered. That means they aren’t quitters. They won’t roll over so easily in the face of devilry.