February 11, 2024 Mark 9:2-9 Series B Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God, our Father, and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, who loves you with his very life. Amen
I want to try something a little bit different for the sermon today. Today, I want to walk through a process to give you another tool when you come to a difficult part of the Bible, when you are reading through it. We will be using the pew Bibles today, we are on page 1074 in Mark chapter 9.
Today the church celebrates Transfiguration. As we read a few minutes ago, transfiguration is the time when Jesus too Peter, James and John onto a small mountain, large hill kind of thing and Jesus revealed to them the Glory of God. So Jesus is there, he starts shining as God, because he is God, and suddenly Moses and Elijah are there too. And it’s a wonderful event, a truly amazing event, but it’s not without questions.
When I read through this text, I come up with a bunch of questions. Some of them are easy to answer and some of them are not. This time, as I read through it, I had a few “why questions. Why? Why was Jesus transfigured? Why were Moses and Elijah there? Why did God confirm the identity of Jesus to his disciples, who we later learn were also at Jesus’ baptism when God declared Jesus his son? Like, what is the purpose of this text?
In those moments of reading through scripture I am reminded of a saying I heard a long time ago, “the bible isn’t a collection of verses, it’s a telling of the story of Jesus.” And I think that in order for us to work through the questions of this passage we need to step back and look more around it. When you approach a difficult passage, something you don’t understand, looking at other nearby passages, trying to learn the whole story, really can make a big difference. More than that, researching and learning about the history of the book itself can also be helpful.
To do that, turn in your Bible to page 1063, we’ll come back here in a moment, but turn to 1063. Most Bibles have this. At the top of the page there is an introduction to the book, and this will help us understand this passage. I’m not going to read this whole section for you, just the last couple lines, “He may have based his Gospel on Peter’s preaching”
To summarize this paragraph. It is widely believed that Mark was a scribe for Peter and wrote down this account of Jesus based on what Peter said happened. Peter, being a fisherman by trade, was not a writing expert in a time when writing was expensive, so the Gospel of Mark is written by Mark as told by Peter.
That means, when we read through Mark, we have insights from the mind of Peter, such as back in our text, back on page 1074 when the text says, “they did not know what to say for they were terrified.” How does the text know this? Peter was there, he offers his insight, his memories about this life changing experience. So we have before us the account of the transfiguration in Mark. It is the only account of the transfiguration from one of the people who was there. Peter
Great, back to the why questions. Why was Jesus transfigured? Let’s keep going. Back to Mark 9. Mark 9 starts in the middle of a paragraph. The paragraph that it interrupts is Jesus first prediction of his death and resurrection. So, Chapter 8:31 Jesus says, “The son of man must suffer many things, be rejected, and killed, and after 3 days rise again. And he said this plainly.” Then Peter rebukes him for it, Jesus calls him out, and it’s a very very intense passage in scripture, full of things to talk about.
Six days after that event, they go to the mountain, on their way back down, Jesus tells the disciples again that he will die and rise. The text continues and we read that, and then this is what it says, Chapter 9:10, “So they kept this matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead might mean.
We’ve come to the answer for the why. On one side of this text, Peter denies, aggressively to the point of trying to prevent Jesus from going to the cross. And on the other side of this even, Peter has changed. The disciples have changed. They now trust that what Jesus has said is true, but they don’t know what it means.
And that happens a lot in our lives. When we read through this book, we will come to places where passages are easy for us to understand. I always point to John 3:16. For God so loved the world that he gave his only son…” and so on. But sometimes passages are harder for us to understand. Like when God says, “everything works together for good.” Or when he says, “You are saved by grace through faith, not of your works” and also, “faith without works is dead.”
We have these tensions that we must walk in, and it’s hard. It was hard for Peter to. We have the benefit of knowing how the story ends. Many of us already have plans for Easter. Peter, James, John, they didn’t know easter was on the horizon and they kept it to themselves. They didn’t understand. But they trusted in Jesus Christ, God’s only son.
And that’s what we are called to do too. Not in some unquestioning way, but in the way the apostles did. Looking at Jesus. Heeding the word of God. “This is my SOn, Listen to him.” And so we do. We have faith. We trust that God knows what he is doing, that Jesus knows what he is doing, so we listen to him. And that means listening to him even above our own voices, our own thoughts about how we wish God would do things.
We listen to Jesus. We hear him speak words of judgement, “Go and sin no more.” “Be perfect as your father in heaven is perfect.” “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” And we listen to Jesus when he speaks words of comfort, “Come to me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” “Don’t worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” “Go, your sins are forgiven.” “It is finished.” “I am the resurrection and the life, whoever believes in me will live even though he dies.”
When we come to a challenge in scripture, we turn to more scripture. We turn to the word of God. The word made flesh in Jesus. And we listen.
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