A sermon on 2 Corinthians 4:3-6 & Mark 9:2-9 by Nathan Nettleton

Over the last few months, I have been experimenting with my patterns of daily prayer by using a form of daily prayer that is basically just an English translation of the standard Islamic daily prayer, with a few minor tweaks to enable me to pray it as a follower of Jesus. The experiment has been quite enlightening, and I have been very interested to see which aspects have become very positive for me, and which aspects have become a bit more uncomfortable over time. One of the big questions that I had in mind for my experiment was about the relationship between this pattern of prayer and the capacity for extreme hostility and violence exhibited by some groups who claim to regularly pray these prayers. It is certainly and clearly not the case that the prayers cause or contribute directly to the violence, but my question was whether the prayers could be interpreted in ways that condoned the violence or whether they challenged it in ways that meant that one would have to close one’s ears to their message in order to continue participating in violence. Now exactly the same question can and should be asked about much of Christian prayer, because our history is littered with examples of extremist violence and horrific oppressive colonialism. How could people who regularly participated in the liturgies of the church walk out and commit such atrocities?

So for me, the experience of asking these questions of a form of prayer that I was not familiar with has then turned me back to ask it of the prayers of the church that I am familiar with. What is there in the content of these prayers that enables them to be assimilated into a hostile and violent, us versus them, view of the world that is so at odds with the spirit of Jesus? Sometimes, the answer may partly lie in language. For centuries, the liturgies of the church were prayed in a language that most people didn’t understand, so how could the content of their prayer hold them to account? Many of today’s Islamist fighters are in a similar situation. Muslims are required to pray in Arabic, so many of those who are praying these prayers are reciting memorised sounds rather than words that can percolate in their hearts and minds and ask questions of them. But there are also scholars, both Christian and Muslim, who understand the language very well but still preach hatred and hostility. So what is going on?

Tonight’s scripture readings shed some light on these questions. We heard the Apostle Paul speaking about the gospel being veiled to those who are perishing. He says that the satan has blinded people’s minds to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. Paul may have been deliberately alluding here to the story we heard in the gospel reading about the transfiguration of Jesus, because that story too contains images of shedding light, and veiling and unveiling the light of the gospel in the person of Jesus.

Now, if we are not careful here, it is easy for Paul’s reference to the satan – or the god of this world, as he calls him – to do the same thing all over again and pull a veil over our minds, hiding the truth of what he is saying from us. The fact that Paul says the satan is involved doesn’t mean that we are thereby absolved of all responsibility. Quite the contrary. If you think about what we do when somebody else deceives us, we don’t just ask who it was. We ask, “how was it that I was able to fall for that?” It doesn’t matter who was behind the spin, the real question is how and why we were susceptible to the spin. The way that the satan goes about veiling our minds is not usually by telling us obvious lies. It is by amplifying one particular aspect of the truth until we fall for the idea that it is the whole truth, and then we think we’ve got it all worked out and our minds are veiled to any other truth that doesn’t seem to fit within that one.

This happens to us all the time. We have many so-called “truths” that we take for granted which thereby veil our minds to any conflicting information. We have observed this again in the news this week with the government’s reaction to the Human Rights Commission’s report into the horrific effects of immigration detention on detained children. The government are dismissing the report as a bit of partisan indulgence. They don’t do this because they are intentionally malicious, but because the conclusions cannot be reconciled with their basic beliefs about themselves and their governance. And most of us in the general population respond in similar ways. We so fundamentally believe in ourselves as good people and in our country as decent and fair, that we cannot begin to believe that we are operating concentration camps that are needlessly destroying the physical and mental health of innocent children. Our bedrock beliefs about ourselves pull a veil over our minds so that we simply can’t see the inconvenient truth.

The transfiguration story seems to be warning us about this pattern and illustrating it quite intentionally, but it is easy to miss it when we just hear the extract we heard. Our minds can actually be veiled by hearing the reading without its wider context, which is somewhat unavoidable when the selections are made for what will be read in worship. The selection we heard tonight began with the words, “Six days later …”, which is a pretty clear indication that what is about to come should be understood in dialogue with what has just taken place. If not, the chronological reference would just be wasted words, but it is not. The link is of the utmost importance to how we understand the story of the transfiguration. In fact, I would go so far as to say that much of the commentary and preaching on this story, by taking it in isolation, falls right into the very same veiling of the mind that the story is trying to overcome.

What is at stake here is the kind of god that God is, and the kind of messiah that Jesus is. Taken in isolation, this story can present a very grand, exalted, powerful image of both God and Jesus the messiah. Jesus is seen, shining with the glories of God on a high mountain, and conversing with the heavenly figures of two of the most famous and influential religious figures from Israel’s past. The vision of Jesus transfigured is so startling and so overwhelming that the disciples who witness it collapse in terror and blab out stupid things. So, many a commentator and many a preacher have declared that this is dramatic proof that Jesus really is the exalted all-powerful divine son of God, and that what we are seeing is a foretaste of the imposing and terrifying figure that Jesus will be when he returns to crush the godless and rule in glory. It is a classic case of interpreting the story as being consistent with a pre-existing image of who Jesus is, even though the story itself may be trying to challenge exactly that. A veiling of the minds, if ever there was one. If we want to unveil our minds, we have to take account of what happened six days before – the context into which this story speaks.

So what did happen? Well, it was an event that was clearly about whether we are capable of getting it, of seeing the truth about Jesus and his God, or whether our minds remain veiled by preconceived notions that cloud the truth. Six days earlier, Mark tells us, Jesus asked his disciples firstly what the people were saying about who he might be, and secondly what they, the disciples were thinking about who he might be. Peter identifies him as the messiah, the one everyone had been waiting for. No sooner is that said, than Jesus begins to teach them that he must face great suffering and be rejected by the religious authorities and be killed. “He said all this quite openly,” Mark notes. But Peter will have none of it, and he pulls Jesus aside and begins giving him a telling off. In effect, what Peter is saying is, “Look, we’ve just agreed that you are the messiah, so now, let me set you straight. Messiahs do not get rejected and suffer and get killed. The messiah gets exalted to the max. The messiah rides in in triumph and drives out the enemies and rules in glory and splendour. So cut this crap about suffering and defeat, and let’s get on with the business of defeating the enemies and establishing your glorious throne.”

And how does Jesus respond? What does he call Peter? A satan! “Get behind me, you satan. For your mind is not seeing divine things, but human things.” Do you hear that? His mind is veiled by his assumptions about God and the messiah. He is not seeing the truth of God, but a distinctly human, or even satanic view of things. He is acting as a satan because he is deflecting people’s attention from what Jesus is actually saying and trying to reassert a view of God and of the messiah that is all about victory and glory and crushing enemies and being exalted as the all-powerful ruler. And so Jesus promptly calls the crowd together with his disciples and begins to spell it out in even more detail, and with the implications for how they are to live if they are going to follow the kind of Messiah he actually is, instead of the kind of messiah they would like him to be. “If any of you want to be my followers, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. That is, do things my way. For if you want to hang onto the life you’ve got, you will lose it. Whereas if you give up your life for my sake, and for the sake of this surprising news about my way of doing things, you will really have life. For what’s the point of gaining the whole world if it kills you? You’ll get nothing in return for a wasted life, will you?”

And then he says something really revealing, really unveiling, if you like: “Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.” Why would anyone be ashamed of Jesus? Well, if you thought you were backing an all-conquering hero who was going to trample down all opposition and be exalted on the highest pedestal, and what you instead got was a condemned criminal, rejected and shunned by all, and strung up to die in the most painful and humiliating way imaginable, you might indeed be ashamed of him. What a let down. What a failure. You could indeed be embarrassed about ever having been associated with him in any way whatsoever. Peter was certainly pretty insistent that he didn’t want Jesus contemplating any such shameful path. He wanted Jesus to be the messiah of his dreams, not the messiah of humiliation, suffering and death.

So when the gospel writer ties these stories together and says, “Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves, and he was transfigured before them,” the transfiguration story can no longer be a story of Jesus as the glorious all-conquering hero. That would suggest that Peter was right after all. Instead it has to be part of the reinterpreting of the expectations of what the messiah was supposed to be and what following him was all about. So what we actually have on the mountain is God declaring that “This one”, this one who is accepting the path that leads to rejection, humiliation, suffering and death, “this one is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to this one.” Not to Peter with his dreams of glory. Not to the satan who seeks to persuade us that divinity and suffering cannot be reconciled. Listen to this one, this suffering self-sacrificing messiah. Listen to this one who is willing to endure defeat, failure and death to ensure that love and mercy are not sacrificed to hatred and hostility and vengefulness.

So do you begin to see how easily our minds can be veiled and the truth can be hidden beneath layers of conventional wisdom about the nature of God so that we can even hear the words of our liturgies and somehow find ways of fitting them into a worldview that says that we are the chosen ones who have got it right and who are being used by an exalted God to cleanse the world of those “evil others” and bring in god’s rule at the point of our swords? Church history is littered with tragic examples of exactly this kind of veiled mind thinking, the kind of thinking Jesus labels as satanic. Even those who walked in Jesus’s presence could make this mistake by clinging to their dreams of glory and triumph over vanquished enemies. It is much harder to grasp that the path of life goes through the valley of death, and that the exalted glory of God is revealed in the self-giving love of a man laying down his life rather than taking up his sword. It shatters all our preconceived categories to think that the ultimate glory of God might not be seen in an exalted throne, but in a man allowing himself to be gruesomely executed. But there you have it. If we surrender ourselves to God and allow God to pull back the veil from our minds, that’s what we see. And if we wish to be transfigured with Christ into the fullness of the image of God in which we were created, then Jesus’s call is clear. “Take up your cross, and follow me. We’re heading down the mountain.”