The Transfiguration: Jesus's Enlightenment Experience

Have you ever been to a mountaintop? Have you ever had a mountaintop experience where you reached some important peak and in the process things become clearer and lighter and brighter? Jesus’s mountaintop experience has its own Sunday. It comes just before Lent every year. Of course, I’m talking about the Transfiguration which I just shared from in Luke 9. It’s quite a moment! We might call it Jesus’s enlightenment experience. As is often the case, for Jesus, this enlightenment begins with prayer and, I’d like to think, some kind of meditation. The transfiguration happens eight days after Jesus lets his disciples know how all of this will end – with him on a cross. He will deny himself, take up a cross, and lose his life to save. He says follow me in doing that in your own way. The disciples have 8 days to mull this over. Jesus takes Peter and the brothers of thunder, James and John to the top of a mountain. Mount Tabor, scholars believe. As Jesus was praying, something s...