The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Last Sunday before Lent
Mark 9: 2-9
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed
Till earth and light and water entering there
Gave back to us the clear unfallen world.
Edwin Muir
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen
It doesn’t seem so very long at all that we were gazing at
the Christ child in the manager—the love of God made
manifest in the potential of a human child. Sometimes I
think that whenever we hold a newborn baby we are
caught in a moment in which God and reminds us to stop,
to think and to remember: ’I came to be among you, I am
among you’. The incarnate Lord comes to be with us, with
all our human frailty, with all our human needs, with all our
human hopes and dreams. Today we stand looking back at
the promise of God’s love and forgiveness completely held
in the palm of a tiny child. The revelation of God among
us can seem so fleeting in the church calendar, we yearn to
hold on to it, to cradle it for just a little longer, in all its
innocence and potential.
But we stand on the doorway now, and in just a few days’
time we turn to face the beginning of another Lent. There
is nothing we can do but turn and begin to look towards
the cross. It is inevitable—just as month follows month
and year follows year, as it did in the life of the Christ as
he grew, gained in knowledge and became increasingly
aware of his task here amongst us. We may not want to
look toward the cross, but we must.
In the transfiguration—when Jesus ascends the mountain
with his friends—we get a moment to pause, to experience
the child of Bethlehem come to full stature. We get a
moment—as Edwin Muir says—to allow our hands be
‘made new to touch holy things’. Just as in the baptism of
Christ, heaven and earth seem to touch, the glory of God
is revealed in the Father’s voice reminding the disciples—
reminding us—that this is the Son of God, the Beloved. And
just as we are caught up in the divinity of Christ, his face
transfigured, clothes dazzling white, in breaks the voice of
humanity in Peter’s exclamation: ‘let us make three
dwellings’ ….
And Peter’s exclamation is answered by the voice of God
echoing the words of baptism, drawing him back to the
reality of the incarnation, the reality of God amongst us:
’This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!’
God is not to be kept on the mountain, God did not come
in Christ to stay on the mountain, dazzling, wonderful,
awe-full (in the proper sense of the word). Instead, Christ
descends, to the dirt of the road, to his nomadic life
dependent on the kindness of those who would give him
and his followers a night’s shelter and a simple meal. Christ
sets his face to Jerusalem, to the cross. There is nothing
that Peter can do—nothing that we can do—to stop him.
There are no alternatives, no second options, Peter cannot
build a sanctuary, a refuge, to hold on to the one who would
give all for love.
Like Peter, we too each have our own transfiguration
moment. The reality of human life is that we all try to hold
on to people or situations that are travelling away from us
towards a destiny that we cannot accept. We see it in the
death of a loved one, or a relationship that is beyond our
repair. But these are also the moments in which we realise
that—like Peter—we are standing on holy ground. The
ground of suffering is ground that God has stood on in the
person of Jesus Christ—fully human and fully divine. It is
hallowed ground, made possible to bear by the Christ who
suffered on the cross. The transfiguration not only affirms
Jesus’s divinity, it points us towards his humanity—a
humanity that we share.
Holy ground: ground of human and divine. Ground upon
which we walk, ground on which Christ walks with us.
Jesus brings the disciples up the mountain to witness his
transfiguration, to begin to understand not only his work,
his fate, but also his identity. Jesus prepares his disciples
and us to meet him in that transcendent place of the
everyday. Because in everyday life there is beauty and joy,
but also pain and suffering. Human beings cannot protect
themselves from suffering and pain. These things will
happen. But as one writer comments ‘neither can they
shield themselves from the light of God that sheds hope in
their darkest hour’.
God came among us in the incarnation, to fully experience
our humanity and to draw us to him in hope of the
resurrection to new life. Perhaps our question today is how
will we meet Jesus in that transcendent place of the
everyday—and go on meeting him there—as we journey
with him towards Lent and to Easter?
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.