Preview Day

Sermon Transcript

I began my sermon last week by referencing Chad Powers, a six-episode series released on Hulu in 2022, based on a short video in which NFL quarterback Eli Manning pretended to be a walk-on trying out for the Penn State college football team. The quality of his play made people start to ask, “Who is this guy?” Well at the end of the skit, his identity is revealed, but not by him coming out and saying, “I’m Eli Manning.” Instead, he simply took off his mask, and it was clear to everyone who he really was.

 

Last week, in the passage just before the one on which we are focusing today, we got the verbal confession from one of Jesus’ disciples, Peter, of who Jesus is, the question the first 9 chapters of Luke had been pressing upon us, when Peter said, “You are the Christ of God.” Today, though, the mask comes off, and the glory of who Jesus is is revealed. Today we’re looking at what has come to be known as the transfiguration, a word referring to a change of form and used with this passage to describe the change to Jesus’ form. Why did God give the three disciples who were with Jesus on that day this revelation of Jesus’ glory, though? And what does he want us to learn from it? Think back to the Chad Powers skit. Imagine if after taking off his mask, Eli had started coaching the actual walk-ons trying out for the team that day. Do you think they would have listened to him? Of course they would have. And so in our text, after the mask comes off, God himself says from heaven: “Listen to him.” How are you doing listening to Jesus, especially when what he says means something hard for you? The more clearly you see the glory of Jesus, the better you will listen to him. So we’ll talk about seeing the glory of Jesus clearly, and then we’ll talk about listening to him.

 

Seeing the glory of Jesus clearly (28-35b)

 

Our text begins with a timestamp that tells us this took place about eight days after his previous sayings. Luke knows it wasn’t exactly eight days, which is why he says about eight days after these sayings. In fact, Mark tells us it was six days, so why doesn’t Luke just say six? Why say “about eight”? Probably Luke chose it to conjure up some associations already present in his reader’s minds with the eighth day. A standard week has seven days, especially in the Jewish mind. The first day of the week was what we now call Sunday, and the last day of the week was what we now call Saturday, but what the Jews called the Sabbath day. That’s rooted in the creation account of Genesis 1, in which God made the earth in six days, and on the seventh day rested. What is the eighth day, then? The eighth day is the first day of a new week. Early Christians even referred to the Lord’s Day, the day on which Jesus rose from the dead, as the eighth day, the day after the Sabbath, representing the beginning of a new creation.

 

On this eighth day, Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, his first three disciples, and still his inner ring among his disciples. Though Jesus loved the crowds, Jesus gave the majority of his personal time to twelve men, and even among those twelve, devoted himself uniquely to three of them. This time he took them up on the mountain to pray. Mountains also would have conjured up many biblical associations for the original readers. Mountains were the common sites of religious worship in the ancient world; temples were often built on them. They were seen as the place where heaven above met earth below. The first place where God dwelled with man, the garden of Eden, was on top of a mountain. Israel’s temple was also built on a mountain. And we’ve already seen in Luke that Jesus would sometimes go up on a mountain to pray (Luke 6:12).

 

And as he was praying, Luke tells us that the appearance of his face was changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. A more wooden translation would say that his face was othered; it transformed, or as I mentioned earlier, transfigured. Luke doesn’t tell us what the “other” face looked like, but we can infer from the dazzling white clothes what the other Gospel accounts of this story make explicit: His face shone. So we read in verse 32 that when Peter and those with him awoke, they “saw his glory,” and one of the ways glory is used in the Bible is to refer to the bright light that typically accompanies revelations of God. So Jesus’ face was altered, and his clothes shone dazzling white, which Luke describes as “his glory.”

 

There’s another famous story in the Bible of a man who went up a mountain, met with God, and came back with his face changed: Moses. Moses was the leader of Israel when God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, and after doing so, Moses met with God on Mount Sinai, and we read that Moses’ face shone because he had been talking with God. Now here Jesus is praying to the same God on a mountain, and his face changes. Normally when we pray to God, our faces don’t change, even if you pray on top of a mountain. No, this is showing us something unique about Jesus: He’s a new Moses, but not only is he a new Moses–this story also shows us that he’s greater than Moses. 

 

When Moses’ face shines in the book of Exodus, it’s after prolonged interaction with God, what is later described as God speaking to Moses “face to face.” The whole time Moses spoke with God, the cloud of God’s presence was over the mountain, the same cloud that appears over the mountain later in our passage. Moses spoke to God face to face, so Moses’ face shone. The light of Moses’ face was like the light of the moon, reflecting the glory of another. Granted that here Jesus is also praying, but we don’t hear anything of God speaking back to him, or them meeting face to face, and yet Jesus’ face shone, before the cloud of God’s presence appeared. In fact, not only Jesus’ face, but his clothes shone, something that was never the case with Moses. Jesus’ glory looks less like the moon reflecting a glory extrinsic to it, and more like the sun, emanating a glory intrinsic to it.

 

And behold, verse 30 says, look who appeared next: Moses, and Elijah. Moses had died long ago at this point, but like most human civilizations have throughout history, the Bible affirms the reality of life after death. Elijah on the other hand was taken by God directly to heaven, bypassing typical death. Elijah was one of the great prophets of Israel, who also had a significant meeting with God on a mountain. Now here they are with Jesus, and what do we find them doing? Verse 31 tells us they were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.

 

If any ordinary Israelite had been on a mountain and Moses and Elijah had appeared, they would have been talking about Moses and Elijah, not about the Israelite. Moses held an especially prominent place in the mind of any Jew; he led the people out of slavery in Egypt, what the Bible calls the “exodus” of God’s people from Egypt. That takes place in the second place of the Bible, and in many ways the rest of the Old Testament leading up to Jesus talks about the exodus. So Moses is a big deal, and Elijah is too. This is Jordan and LeBron, Newton and Einstein, Da Vinci and Rembrandt, or fill in two figures you idolize. Imagine being with them, and instead of you talking about them, they’re getting together to talk about you. So here, though Moses is the one who led the people out of slavery in Egypt, the exodus story, Jesus isn’t talking to them about that. Instead, they’re talking to Jesus about his exodus, which you should see there in your footnote is the Greek word behind that word “departure” in verse 31.

 

Through Moses, Israel departed, Israel made a mass exodus, out of slavery in Egypt, and ultimately into the land God promised to give to their forefathers. So also Jesus has an exodus to fulfill in Jerusalem, which he spoke of about eight days earlier when he said, “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised” (Luke 9:22). Moses delivered God’s people from slavery in Egypt, but Jesus came to deliver God’s people from slavery to sin. In order to do that, he would have to depart, first from the land of the living, not dying peacefully in his sleep, but dying under the curse of the law, condemned as a sinner, though he was the one truly innocent human who ever lived. Nonetheless, the death he was to die was a death for others, the death that we who are truly guilty of sin deserved. To get us out of our Egypt, he had to first come to our Egypt–he had to take on human flesh, take our sins upon himself, die our death, and be buried in our grave. But that wasn’t the end of his path, because on the eighth day, the first day of the week, and indeed, the first day of a new creation, he was raised. He then departed from the earth and ascended into heaven, where he now lives and reigns forever in a glorified body, never to die again.

 

So what is this transfiguration, then? It’s a preview to these three disciples of what Jesus will look like on the other side of the cross. He’s just revealed to his disciples for the first time that he must suffer and be killed. He’s going to reiterate it again after this (9:44), and he has also told his disciples that they too, anyone in fact who would come after him, they too would need to deny themselves, take up their cross daily, and follow him on that exodus. But what Peter, James, and John awoke to see that day was a preview of the glory that would come, not only for Christ, but for them, on the other side of denying themselves, taking up their cross daily, and following Jesus, for, as Jesus said, whoever loses his life for his sake will save it (9:24). 

 

But the disciples didn’t quite get that yet. In fact, they slept through the conversation between Elijah, Moses, and Jesus about Jesus’ exodus. When they woke up, they saw Jesus’ glory, as well as the two men who stood with him. Notice that though Luke said Moses and Elijah also appeared in glory, the glory of Jesus outshines theirs. They see Jesus’ glory, and then oh yeah, they see those two guys who were with him. But as the men start to go, Peter suggests they make three tents, so that they can all stay. Peter seems to think we still need those other two guys, and he seems to think now’s the time to rest and enjoy the glory. “It is good that we are here,” a true statement, leads to a wrong conclusion, “Therefore let’s stay.” So Luke adds the little note that Peter didn’t know what he said. 

 

Peter had just confessed Jesus to be the Christ, so Peter expected that he would be glorified, but what Peter didn’t expect was that his glory would only come after the cross. So Jesus had to keep telling them. Next time he tells them he even says: “Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is about to be delivered into the hands of men.” We can’t stay on the mountain. Jesus has to depart the mountain, depart for Jerusalem, and then depart from the land of the living, before he departs for glory. 

 

Peter saw the glory of Jesus, but he hadn’t yet seen it clearly. So next the Lord comes and interrupts him. Verse 34 tells us that as Peter was saying these things, a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud. And once again, as in the meeting with Moses, a voice comes out of the cloud. He speaks to Peter, James, and John, and says, “This is my Son, my chosen one; listen to him.” So what does God say we should be seeing when we see Jesus’ glory? Two identifiers here: He’s God’s Son, and he’s God’s chosen one.

 

Earlier in Luke Adam, the first man, was also identified as the son of God (Luke 3:38), but Adam’s face and clothing never shone. Adam was the created son of God, but Adam was not the glorified son of God. He was a good man at the time of his creation, but not a glorified man. In the words of 1 Corinthians 15, he was a natural man, the man of dust, but what Jesus is being revealed here as is the spiritual man, the man of heaven (1 Cor 15:42-49). Jesus is the human son that Adam was supposed to become, and here we get a preview of a glory that Adam never obtained, the glory not only of created goodness, which Adam had and lost, but the glory of consummate goodness, irreversible goodness, completed, perfect goodness that will never be lost. He’s not only the true and greater Moses, who goes through the true and greater exodus for the true and greater redemption of God’s people. He’s the true and greater Adam, the true and greater son of God, who brings our humanity into glory.

 

And, he’s not only the consummate human son of God. He’s the divine son of God. Where’d the light emanating from him come from, anyway? What was the source of his intrinsic glory that emanated out from him and caused his clothes to dazzle? Only God himself and those who have been in his presence have clothing that shine like that in the Bible (Dan 7:9, Matt 28:3). God radiated light on to Moses, so that Moses’ face shone, but Jesus is himself the radiance of the glory of God, and the exact imprint of his nature (Heb 1:3). Before he became man, he was already with God, and was God, as the Son eternally begotten of the Father (John 1:1). In human form, that glory was under the veil of his humanity, but here, for Peter, James, and John, he took the mask off and revealed a glimpse of his divine nature. When Moses spent all that time talking with God on the mountain, you know what one thing he asked of the LORD? He asked if he could see the LORD’s face. But the LORD told Moses he could only see his back. Well, on this day, Moses finally saw the face of God, in the face of Jesus Christ. Jesus is both the true and greater Moses, and the glory that Moses longed to see.

 

And so it is fitting that he is God’s chosen one, the next title God gives him when he speaks out of the cloud. Before Jesus’ coming, God called King David, the great king of Israel that God himself chose, his “chosen one.” Through Isaiah, God also speaks of his “chosen one,” his servant, whom he would send for the salvation of his people. The people of Israel hoped and waited for a new king David, and for this promised servant, and now God wants Peter, James, John, and us to know–Jesus is him. All the streams of all the hopes of all God’s people–the ultimate Son of God, the greater exodus, the eternal king, the servant of the Lord–they all converge on this one person. 

 

I once heard another pastor tell a story of a time he called Jack Miller, a pastor who’s now gone to be with the Lord but who was a pastor in the Philly suburbs years ago. Jack asked the pastor if he’d pray for him, because there’s so much glory in Jesus, and he sees so little of it. Don’t we all need that prayer? There are so many great things about Jesus, and they’re so deep, but we see so little of them. The glory of Jesus previewed here is the glory in which he now exists in heaven, and we see that glory clearly now by faith, as it is revealed in his word. Spend time meditating on him, thinking about him, as the true and greater Moses, the glorified son of God, the chosen one, the Christ, the son of man, the God who became man. Think about the perfection of his obedience, the wisdom of his teaching, the kindness and mercy revealed in his life, the treasures of wisdom and knowledge stored up in him, the power of his word, the miracles he worked, his sin-bearing, substitutionary atoning death on the cross, his burial and descent to the dead, his glorious resurrection, his ascension, his present rule and reign, his coming glory. Let us set our minds on these things, brothers and sisters.

 

And if you’re here today and you aren’t a Christian, this is why many of us in this room are Christians, and this is the reason to become a Christian: Jesus. Christianity is not most fundamentally a system of philosophy, a lifestyle, a program for social change, or even a path of spirituality. Christianity is most fundamentally knowing this glorious person Jesus Christ. Perhaps you’re skeptical; is he really that glorious? Today many try to see through things–you see a king in all his regalia and think, “Sure, that looks glorious, but in reality, he’s just another guy like us whose ancestors grabbed power for him through oppression of others.” And look, in many cases that’s right and wise. But C.S. Lewis once pointed out that the point of seeing through things is to see something on the other side. The point of a window is to see what’s outside. If you also saw through what’s outside, though, eventually you’d see nothing. The one who sees through everything sees nothing. Might it be that through all the manufactured, counterfeit glory of man, at bottom there is actually an original glory, something truly glorious that we can see, rather than seeing through, and what if it’s not a thing, but a person? That’s what Christians have come to see in Jesus Christ, and part of his glory is that he offers himself to any who would depart from their sins and come to him for salvation. If you’d like to consider what that would mean for your life, talk with me or one of our members here after the service.

 

We must choose to set our minds on the glories of Christ because his glories aren’t where our mind naturally gravitates. In game 1 of the Western Conference finals of the NBA playoffs this year, I could see the glories of Victor Wembanyama’s basketball performance because I’ve been trained to recognize great basketball. I’ve played a lot of it in my life, and I’ve watched even more. If you weren’t used to watching basketball, you could have seen that 3-pointer he hit from about 10 feet beyond the arch when his team was down 3 in overtime and thought nothing of it. It’s like when I look at a Mark Rothko painting of three rectangles that sells for hundreds of millions of dollars and I just don’t get it, because I haven’t been trained to see the glory. Or when a music critic and an average American can both listen to a piece of classical music while one is stunned and the other has no idea why anyone would spend their time on such things. But when someone becomes a Christian, one of the ways the Bible describes that is as God shining in their hearts to give the light of the knowledge of his glory in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6). When you become a Christian, God gives you a taste for the glory of Christ. And as we then set our minds on the glory of Christ and prayerfully ask for the Spirit of Christ to work in us, that taste implanted in us by God at conversion continues to grow.

 

Granted that’s harder than scrolling your phone or watching YouTube, but the depth of joy and peace available to us on the back end of it is so much greater. Are you struggling to believe that today? Here is the battle of faith for you, then: Will you give in to your flesh and feed it with the quickest, cheapest hit available, or will you believe that there is an ocean of glory in Christ into which you’ve barely dipped your toe, and dive further in? With that, a warning as well: If you keep choosing the phone or the YouTube or the drink or whatever it is for you, you will develop more of a taste for those things, and less of a taste for the glory of Christ. Give that enough time, and that’s a path toward falling away from Christ entirely. Recall Jesus’ warning about the seed that fell among the thorns, in which the cares and riches and pleasures of life choked the word, so that its fruit did not mature. A plant whose fruit does not mature is a plant that eventually dies.

 

If you don’t cultivate a taste for his glory now, you won’t even want the real heaven, because it is his glory that the saints and angels behold eternally in heaven. Listen to how Jesus prayed for us in John 17:24 – “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” The glory of Jesus is the glory of heaven; it’s what makes heaven great! I’m guessing it’ll be great to see the saints who have gone before us as well, especially those we knew and loved in this life. Who knows if we’ll enjoy the hobbies we like here then, but who cares? We’ll see Jesus! What Peter, James, and John saw here, we’ll see forever. 

 

Except when we see it, we’ll also be transformed into that same image. So John, the same John who saw the glory of Jesus that day, writes later: “We know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2). Throughout scripture we get this hope and expectation that God’s people will one day shine (e.g., Dan 12:3). How? We’ll shine when we see him as he is, when we behold the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, no longer by faith, but by sight.

 

So what’s the application to us now if we see Jesus’ glory clearly? God tells us after declaring him his son, his chosen one in verse 35: “Listen to him.”

 

Listening to him (35c-36)

 

Here the allusion is to Deuteronomy 18, where Moses said, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers⁠—it is to him you shall listen.” Now the Lord is saying that Jesus is the prophet to whom they should listen. And verse 36 tells us that once the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. There was no question at that point who it was to whom we should listen. With Jesus on the scene, Moses and Elijah exit stage right. Though they were each significant prophets in their own right, their job as prophets was to point to this final prophet. So now God says, “Listen to him.”

 

Jesus has done some teaching so far in the Gospel of Luke, but the teaching will take up a much more prominent place in the book from here until the cross. Now that Jesus has revealed that he must suffer, and that anyone who would come after him must follow him into similar sufferings, he’s going to continue teaching on the nature of what it means to follow him, and that will include some hard sayings. But the more clearly you see his glory, the more willing you will be to listen to him, even when what he says is hard to hear.

 

You probably already have someone you find glorious on earth. Maybe it’s a professional athlete like I mentioned earlier. For me it would probably be a few pastors whose ministries I really admire. One time I got to hang out with one of them in his study with a few other men, and occasionally he’d ask one of the other men to do something for him: Grab him a drink, take out the trash–reasonable stuff. I don’t think he asked me because I was more like his guest, but if he had asked me to do anything like that for him, I wouldn’t have batted an eye. I think I’d have been excited to do it! And when he gave his perspective on just about anything, I wanted to hear it! Maybe there’s someone in your field like that. You find them glorious, so you listen well to them. 

 

Consider how much energy we do in fact expend listening to those we find glorious, and trying to do what they say. How much of our obedience to Jesus, how much our faith in him, is hindered, because we fear what someone else will think of us, or what someone else can do to us, if the way of Jesus violates their norms? And how much of our anxiety comes because we aren’t just listening to Jesus and doing what he says, but we’re also trying to listen to others and do what they say? Serving two masters is not only impossible; it’s exhausting. But don’t you know those moments of clarity, brothers and sisters, where the clouds part, and you sense how glorious he is? Is there anything you want more in those moments than to listen to him?

 

How, then, do we listen to him? For the disciples who walked with him in his earthly ministry, that was obvious: They would continue following him, and when he spoke, they’d listen, they’d ask questions to try to understand what he was saying, and then they would do what he told them. Now that Jesus has entered his glory, how do we listen to him? Well we saw a couple weeks ago that Jesus’ plan for how his word would get to us was through his apostles, and what they did is they wrote down the words of Christ, or they passed them on to others like Luke, who then wrote them down. And in the book of Acts, the sequel to Luke, we see Jesus sending the Holy Spirit, who not only enabled the words of scripture to be written, but who now opens our minds to understand the scriptures as they are read. We listen to Jesus today by listening to the Bible. 

 

This is why the Bible is so central to the life of a Christian. It’s in the Bible that we behold the glory of Christ by faith, and it’s in the Bible we hear what Jesus wants to say to us. Beholding his glory, listening to his words–that’s a pretty good summary of what you should be trying to do when you listen to a sermon or read the Bible privately. It’s certainly a better vision than, “I need to complete this task for my day because I heard I’m supposed to.” Try instead, “I need to be at that church service because I need to see more of the glory of Christ, and I need to know what he says to me.” This is why we think it’s worthwhile to even gather twice on a Sunday like today–we know we could always use more time to behold the glory of Christ and listen to his words. 

 

We call the books of the Bible written before the time of Jesus the Old Testament, which includes the writings of Moses and the books where we have the words of Elijah. We still listen to those books, but we listen to them as the words of Jesus, and so interpret them in light of their fulfillment in Jesus. When we hear Moses saying you shall love your neighbor as yourself, we listen to that in light of Jesus saying we should love even our enemies. When we hear Moses saying we should offer a bull from the herd as a sacrifice, we listen to that in the light of Jesus offering himself as the perfect and final sacrifice for our sins, and with gratitude for his sacrifice, offer ourselves to God as living sacrifices. And we don’t just listen to the Old Testament; we listen to the New as well because in it Jesus tells us about himself, his work, and about what life under his Lordship means for us now. And in addition to his written word, Jesus has given the office of pastor, elder, or overseer as an ongoing office in his church to teach and preach his word to his people. So we listen to Jesus by listening to the reading of scripture, and to the preaching of scripture, insofar as that preaching is a faithful application of the written words of scripture.

 

As we do, we find, like the disciples did, that it has some hard sayings for us. Sometimes Jesus tells us to do things we didn’t already want to do, and he tells us not to do things that we wanted to do. Jesus is not an artificial intelligence programmed to tell us what we want to hear. We don’t assign him a persona or decide which version of him we want him to address us as. If we did, the counterfeit could only be less glorious than the real Jesus! He comes to us as he is, and he says what he says. And the more clearly you see his glory, the better you’ll be at listening to him. 

Doing what he says will often not feel or appear glorious. Deny yourself. Take up your cross daily. Lose your life for my sake. Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either. Give to everyone who begs from you, and from one who takes away your goods do not demand them back. Judge not, condemn not, forgive, and give. When Jesus was hanging on the cross, it didn’t feel or appear glorious. He looked like a convicted criminal under the curse of God. But this story is here to show us his true glory. It’s here to show us where his exodus ultimately leads, and it’s here to show us where we will go if we will listen to, and follow him, for we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.