Lectionary Reflection for Transfiguration A on 2 Peter 1:16-21

So, what did it mean when first-century Christians affirmed that Jesus would come again? It was an expression of their conviction that what had begun in Jesus would be completed and come to fruition.
—Marcus J. Borg

THE NATURE OF FAITH

It may seem strange to be making a big deal out of this, but I am convinced that one of the most important questions of our time is this: What does it mean to believe? We are often told by televangelists and megachurch preachers that all we need to do is believe, and we will be saved. But what does it mean to believe in this way? Usually this kind of faith is contrasted with “works”, which, we are told, cannot save us. The prooftext to support this perspective is Ephesians 2:10: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast.” (NIV). Of course, the additional and clarifying words of the Letter of James are seldom mentioned: “faith is dead when it doesn’t result in faithful activity.” (James 2:17 CEB).

For many Christian believers today, believing is something that goes on in their heads. It is about being convinced that certain ideas about God, Jesus, the Bible, salvation, and the future of the world are factually true. These believers are convinced that their doctrines come directly from God and are the absolute and final word about reality. To question or even seek to interpret these ideas is to be accused of unbelief, rebellion against God, and being deceived. But as long as we remained convinced of the literal truth of these concepts, we can be assured of God’s love and our eternal salvation—which means having our sins forgiven so that we can go to heaven (and not hell) for eternity.

If faith is only about believing in this way, then as long as we have made the correct profession of faith, we are good, and we do not have to worry too much about our actions, especially as they relate to others (and more especially, to the “sinners” who do not believe what we do). As we have witnessed in recent years, this kind of faith is fairly easily recruited to support Christian nationalism, deportation, killing of protestors, and the dismantling of democracy, as long as those who do it share the “correct” profession of faith.

But this is not the kind of faith or believing that the biblical writers are speaking about—even though this understanding is often imposed on the Biblical texts, as we will see. Rather, for the writer of Scripture, believing is something that involves the whole person, and is less about what we think than about who we become. As Marcus Borg points out, before the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, believing and beloving were synonymous, and Christian faith, rather than being about believing that some idea is true, was about believing in the person of Jesus Christ and the God revealed in him.^¹

This brings us to the Lectionary Epistle reading from 2 Peter 1:16-21 for the Feast of the Transfiguration. For the writer of this letter, faith in Jesus was not just about accepting certain ideas about him. It was to belove the person of Jesus and his way. The nature of Jesus, for Peter, was revealed in the Transfiguration, which gave a glimpse of Jesus’ future return, and to belove this Jesus, was to lead lives that embraced the same ethics as Jesus.

WHO IS PETER AND WHAT IS HE SAYING?

There is a wonderful irony to this section of 2 Peter. The writer insists that his message is true, based on his own firsthand experience of the Transfiguration. But it is not Jesus’ Apostle Peter who is writing these words. As Eugene Boring explains, the evidence that shows that Peter was not the author is compelling. It includes stylistic and theological factors, and indications of a date beyond Peter’s lifetime, like the mention that Paul’s writings had already been collected and regarded as Scripture (3:15–16), and on references to the Letter of Jude (eg Jude 3–18).² Boring notes that “Writing in the name of one’s authoritative teacher in order to extend his teaching into a new situation was a common and respected practice in the ancient world.”³

Dwight Peterson suggests that this letter belongs to the Jewish literary genre of the “testament”, in which the professed author writes as though they are close to death and leaving a final word for their people. These testaments were generally understood to be “exercises in historical imagination in which words are put into the mouth of some now-dead historical figure.”⁴ In this case, the writer, composing the letter in Peter’s name, seeks to answer the question, “Where is the promise of his coming?” (2 Peter 3:4) in response to false teachers who are denying the return of Christ.⁵ In support of his claim that Christ’s return is assured, the writer points readers back to an experience of Jesus on “the holy mountain.” Most scholars understand this to be a reference to the Transfiguration (which is why the Lectionary includes this among the readings for Transfiguration Sunday in Year A)⁶, in which the disciples received a momentary glimpse of the glory Jesus would display at his return. Writing as an eyewitness to the Transfiguration, then, the writer states that the message about Christ’s return does not consist of “crafty myths” but is based on what the first disciples actually heard and saw.

At this point, we need to exercise some caution so that we do not impose on the text our contemporary understandings of both the Transfiguration and the return of Christ. As Tom Wright notes in his commentary on Matthew’s Transfiguration account,⁷ the Transfiguration is not the writer’s attempt to prove that Jesus was divine. Rather, we can consider the experience of Jesus and his disciples on “the holy mountain” to have been much like the mystical experiences that spiritual seekers have tasted through the ages.⁸ As Joel Green notes:

Recent study of visionary experiences underscores the wisdom of taking more seriously reports of this nature, of setting aside modern prejudice against the plausibility of such experiences. Accordingly, the pivotal question is no longer one of veracity—Did it happen?—but of significance: What does it mean?⁹

Part of what it means is that the Transfiguration is not a revelation of Christ’s glory in the ways we usually assume: domination, victory in warfare, and dramatic cosmic events. The apocalyptic language in which God’s glory is described in the Scriptures is symbolic—see, for example, Peter’s sermon in Acts 2:17-21 (quoting Joel 2:28-32), in which he refers to blood, fire, smoke, the sun darkened, and the moon turned into blood, none of which was actually happening at the time. Rather, as Tom Wright puts it:

If you want to see Jesus’ divinity, the early Christians would tell us, you must look, however surprisingly, at Jesus’ suffering and shameful death. If that seems puzzling, it’s a puzzle the first Christians insisted we should live with.¹⁰