Wednesday: The Way up the Mountain

continuing this week's reflections by Ray Anglesea

In the middle of Galilee, four or five miles from Nazareth there stands a mountain. It is circular, almost perfect in it symmetry, like the top of a great round ball emerging from the Galilean plain. When you get to the top, where it flattens off you can see the whole of the central southern Galilee spread out around you. You look down on the dozens of little villages where Jesus walked and talked. This is Mount Tabor, famous locally as the Mount of Transfiguration.

Mountains matter in the story of God’s people. Moses came to Mount Sinai and saw the burning bush, and discovered himself to be in the personal, close and dangerous presence of God. That moment of commission led to the subsequent visit to Sinai, which was mentioned in Monday’s reflection, where he went up a mountain to wait upon God, to receive the law of God, to plead with God when Israel sinned. When he came down, the skin of his face was shining because he had been with God. So too Elijah, at his moment of deepest desolation, made his way from Mount Carmel, where he had slaughtered the prophets of Baal to Mount Sinai, where after the earthquake, wind and fire, there came a still voice saying “What are you doing here, Elijah?” God commissioned him afresh assuring him that God’s strange purposes were going ahead, despite appearances and despite his depression. Abraham’s strangest and darkest dealings with God too took place on a mountain. David’s lifts his eyes to the hills, and saw them as a symbol of God’s presence.

Here once again Moses and Elijah meet God on a mountain. History suddenly telescoped together: past and present are fused into one and future too, because the transfiguration points forward, as Luke says in his account, to Jesus departure, his exodus, which he was to accomplish in heaven. And the voice from the cloud, the same voice that announced the Ten Commandments to Moses and that whispered a gentle rebuke and decommissioning to Elijah now speak to Jesus and Jesus only: “This is my son, my beloved one, in whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” The next time anyone will suggest that Jesus is the son of God will be Caiaphas, in the trial narrative, and then the centurion at the foot of the cross.

But of course the strangest thing in the story is the actual transfiguration itself. Jesus was transformed so that his face shone like the sun, and his clothes themselves became shining white. This glory that shone from Jesus face on the mountain is the glory of a human being made in God’s image and now totally open to God, totally possessed by God, totally reflecting God’s image, totally on fire with God. Seeing this human being, we are seeing God, God in a mirror, God through the looking glass, God present as in the burning bush but now in the shining face, and even in the clothes of a man amongst men.

And it is because of this that the path of the Christian journey has always included the way up the mountain. The Christian tradition has emphasized two great complementary truths about mountaintop experiences, times of special and transforming intimacy with God. On the one hand they are for anyone and everyone, and if you’re missing out on them you may want to review your life of prayer and waiting upon God. On the other hand, the importance of such experiences lies not in the experience themselves, but in what they do to us, what they prepare us for, what they commission us to do.

Often we live in a perpetual spiritual winter. We look at photographs of buds and blossoms as fairy-tale fantasies, things that don’t happen in the real world. And if our present lifestyle both in the church and in our everyday lives don’t allow spaces for mountain climbing for fresh springtimes of the spirit, we should take steps to put matters right. Deep, rich transforming experiences of the presence of God are not reserved for special categories of people. They are on offer for everyone. They help us glimpse the bigger picture, to glimpse the goal, to gather fresh strength for the journey.

Spiritual experiences, great moments of illumination and transformation are never given simply that we may enjoy them for their own sake. We live in an experience-orientated culture, which teaches us to value experiences for themselves. We know so many Californians who change light bulbs and who want to share their experiences, the danger of course is to think that one’s experiences of the presence and love of God are somehow a possession, given simply to be enjoyed, clung to, celebrated in themselves, for our own use, for our own enjoyment. But the gift is given in the context of vocation, to strengthen that vocation.

Today might be a time to pause as we enter the city, to take time to walk up a mountain and wait patiently for God. Perhaps it’s time at last to do what you’ve always promised yourself and never got round to: to set time for prayer and meditation of scripture, to reordered the haunts of life in which you’ve got stuck, so as to make fresh room for God who waits to show you his glory. Perhaps its time to seek out a friend who may gently help you to move forward along the twisty mountain road. Perhaps it’s time to expose yourself again to the possibility that you too might hear a voice, might glimpse glory, might fall on your face in terror and awe, might be grasped afresh by the majesty of Jesus.

And to those who do climb the mountain comes the promise echoing the transfiguration story but pointing beyond it, from the letter of John. “Beloved, we are God’s children now, and it does not yet appear what we shall see; but we know that when Jesus appears, we shall be like him. For we shall see him as he is.”

The road up the mountain is not for the casual tourist or the faint hearted. But the view from the top is out of this world.


Psalm 54: Luke 9 v28-36