27. Matthew 17:1-27: The Mountain-top to the Valley
Jesus’
Transfiguration (Mt.17:1-8)
Here we have one
of the great scenes in the gospel story. Yet it is routinely misunderstood. His
transfiguration is often thought to reveal something of his divinity, a glimpse
of his deity, his true reality the disciples are privileged to catch sight of for
these few moments. Presumably, after all the talk of death and cross-bearing
Matthew lets us see what the end game or pay off of these struggles will be – a
glimpse of the glory of God!
Yet this common
view fails to pay careful enough attention to Matthew’s literary artistry and
typological insight. Matthew bookends the rest of his story, Jesus’ journey to
Jerusalem to his death and resurrection with this scene and that at the end of
the story – his crucifixion. Consider the parallels[1]:
-on this mountain, we see glory; on the
hill of Golgatha we see shame.
-Jesus is decked out in bright, shining white
clothes here; there he is naked.
-two figures flank Jesus in each place, Moses
and Elijah (law and prophets) here; there, two thieves (Israel in rebellion against
God).
-a bright cloud envelopes the scene here;
darkness there.
-here Peter speaks when he should not,
overwhelmed by the glory; there he doesn’t speak the truth when he should
hidden away in the shame of denying Jesus
-God’s voice affirms Jesus’ is his Son here; a
pagan soldier astonishingly
speaks the same truth there.
All these parallels can hardly be
coincidental. Matthew intends us to read the one in light of the other and vice
versa.
“Learn to
see the glory in the cross; learn to see the cross in the glory; and you
will have begun to bring together the laughter and the tears of the God
who hides in the cloud, the God who is to be known in the strange person
of Jesus himself. This story is, of course, about being surprised by the
power, love and beauty of God. But the point of it is that we should learn
to recognize that same power, love and beauty within Jesus, and
to listen for it in his voice–not least when he tells us to take up
the cross and follow him.”[2]
This is Matthew’s version of a theology of the cross. It is in the
shame and suffering of the cross that we see the godness of God revealed in
Jesus. Matthew has shown him in his acts of power (restoring God’s
image-bearers to their primal identity and vocation). Now we see him in his
struggle and pain and humiliation. A Declaration of Faith says it well:
“We recognize the work of God in
Jesus' power and authority. He
did what only God can do. We
also recognize the work of God in Jesus' lowliness. When
he lived as a servant and
went humbly to his death the
greatness that belongs only to God was manifest. In
both his majesty and lowliness Jesus is the eternal Son of
God, God
himself with us.”[3]
In the first part of Matthew we have
seen the former. In the second part we will see the latter.
Matthew also creates a collage of
typological resonances in this passage as well.
-on a mountain, where God planted that primordial garden where the
first Adam was to share and reflect the Creator’s glory is fellowship with him;
so on this mountain the New Adam reflects that intended glory.
-on another mountain Moses enters God’s presence and leaves face
alit with God’s glory; so here Jesus radiates that same glory.
-as the high priest entered the temple (architectural mountains)
to do his service decked out in beautiful and lavish robes, on the Day of
Atonement he wore a simple white robe, so Jesus, the new high priest, enters
this mountain temple in white, shining garments to do his service to God.[4]
-Moses and Elijah, two great Israelite prophets, both went up on
Mt. Horeb to confer with God, so Jesus, the great prophet for whom Israel was
to wait, ascended this hill to meet God.
Leithart
explains the significance of this clustering of typological resonances and that
significance is of extraordinary importance:
“All of these typologies and more are
clustered here, and all of them point in one direction: Jesus is the man who
ascends and shares in the glory of Yahweh. What the transfiguration shows is not
that the divinity of Jesus is seeping through the veil of His humanity. Jesus
shows the destiny of humanity, the destiny of being conformed and filled with
the glory of God.”
From the
beginning of this commentary we have seen that God’s ultimate plan was a world
filled with humans who would live with God and God with them and as one of them
on this planet created to host that fellowship. Jesus is then both Emmanuel,
“God with us,” and the human being “filled with the glory of God.” In him we
experience God’s personal presence and share in Jesus’ glory-filled human
existence as well. This is the mystery, made known to us in Christ, that
resides at the heart of human life with God.
Jesus had
begun to lay out his “through the looking glass” project, its costs and
prospects. Those costs are real and painful, for us and for God who bears them
in Jesus, including even our deaths in living it out. Yet in this strange
economy of God those very costs are the royal way of victory, the defeat of sin
and the powers of evil, of living out the reign of God.
The divine
voice repeats what it said to Jesus in his baptism: “This is my Son, the
Beloved, with him I am well pleased, listen to him!” This whole experience
drives the three disciples prostrate with fear and reverence, as we might well
imagine it would. Jesus comes to them and with a prefiguring of his
resurrection to come, bids them to “Get up (or “arise”; same Greek word as used
of God’s raising Jesus) and do not be afraid.”
The three
obey and find themselves alone on the mountain with Jesus.
Down into the Valley (Mt.17:9-21)
Jesus’
transfiguration is intended, then, to reveal not that Jesus in his deity is
something other or better than he is in his prophesied humiliation and death
but that it is just in that humiliation and death that he is most divine. Jesus
orders the trio to keep mum about all this until after his resurrection.
Peter,
James, and John are still trying work all this out as they descend the
mountain. “Okay,” they say, “where does Elijah fit into all this?” (v.10). “He
is my precursor,” Jesus says, “and he has already come. The people as a whole
did not recognize him and treated him with despite. And they do the same to the
Son of Man (as I’ve already told you). The “penny drops” for the three
disciples and they understand Jesus is talking about John the Baptist.
In C. S.
Lewis’ Narnia story The Silver Chair two children are called into Narnia
by magic for a particular purpose. The children get separated and only the
girl, Jill Pole remains on the mountain with Aslan the Lion (the Christ-figure
in the stories) in his country (think Heaven)to receive instructions for their
mission. Aslan gives Jill the four signs she must remember for she and Eustace
to do their job. Before sending her on down to Narnia to reunite with Eustace
the Lion gives her this warning.
“I give you a warning. Here on the mountain I
have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the
mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into
Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your
mind. And the signs which you have learned here will not look at all as you
expect them to look, when you meet them there. That is why it is so important
to know them by heart and pay no attention to appearances. Remember the signs
and believe the signs. Nothing else matters.”[5]
Jesus too
spoke and acted clearly on the mountain of transfiguration. Peter, James, and
John got the point of the typological resonances (even if we do not so easily).
They probably understand about as much as Jill did of what was coming. And that
is enough . . . if they pay close attention and realize that down in the valley
all sorts of hindrances and ambiguities will cloud their sight and insight. And
they must exert themselves to keep the lessons of their mountaintop clarity
close at hand in the world. It is too easy to confuse or misunderstand the
instructions if our attention and focus wanders.
That
reality is evident immediately. Reaching the crowd at the bottom of the
mountain, a man kneels before Jesus and pleads for his epileptic child who
suffers terribly from this disease (v.15). He has sought out the disciples for
help but they could not effect a healing (v.16). Nor could the three who had
been to mountaintop offer any assistance from their recent experience.
Had either
the three whom Jesus had taken up the mountain or the nine left below truly
understood what Jesus was up to at this point they could have helped this poor
child and his desperate father. But they did not – yet. Jesus had taught them,
and the three with particular emphasis coming down the mountain, that Elijah
has come. The New Exodus is underway. God’s kingdom has arrived. A regime
changed in the rule of the world. The disciples themselves had experienced this
earlier on their mission trips where they taught, healed, and cast out demons
with Jesus’ own authority.
Whether
they forgot this or tried to heal this boy in their own power based on that
earlier success we can’t say with certainty. But we know they were operating
outside the new regime change because of Jesus’ rebuke: “You faithless and
perverse generation” (v.17).
A
typological correspondence may help here. Jesus, like Moses has gone up the
mountain leaving most of his people at the bottom. We know what happened when
Moses was gone too long for the peoples’ liking, don’t we – an idolatrous orgy
broke out among those anxious folk who had not yet learned to trust either God
or Moses. Here to, Jesus has been absent for a short time. But long enough for
his followers to grow anxious when confronted by this man needing help for his
son. Their failure or inability to help, while not on the order of the
idolatrous worship of the people in Moses’ time, nonetheless betrays a lack of
the faith Jesus clearly expected them to have at this point.
Exasperated,
Jesus effects the cure and upbraids his followers for their “little faith”
(v.20) and counsels them to exercise a “little faith,” a mustard seed-sized
faith (13:31f.) in a clever play on words (“little faith” means no faith, on
the one hand and enough faith to, move mountains on the other, v.20). Some
manuscripts have a v.21: “But this kind does not come out except by prayer and
fasting.” While probably not original to Matthew this scribal addition
indicates the kind of little, mustard seed-sized faith Jesus means and has
already expounded in the Sermon on the Mount (6:5-18). An unself-conscious
giving of oneself to God, that is, to the regime change signaled by Jesus’
public ministry. And the power that attends such “faith” is extraordinary
indeed!
Leithart
writes about this “mountain-moving” power,
“. . . the moving of mountains is associated
with the un-creating of the world, an un-creating that prepares for a new
creation (cf. Jer. 4:23-25; Zech 14:4-8; Rev. 6:12-14). Faith to move mountains
is faith to take the world apart, to undo the most solid thing in God’s world,
to tear down a world in preparation for building up. This fits the context. In
the context, the thing that will not be impossible for the disciples is the
restoration of all things already begun by John, brought to a completion by
Jesus, and fulfilled in all its glorious reality by the disciples.”[6]
Living
from the reality of the regime change Jesus announces and enacts bears this
kind of power. And we know that by power we are not talking about the ability
to coerce or impose our way on the world but rather to take up a cross, gets
crucified on it, and let this world-deconstructing, new world-constructing
power loose in our world.A Second Passion Prediction (Mt.17:22-23)
A just so
we don’t miss that last point Matthew narrates for a second time Jesus’
prediction of his coming abuse, suffering, death, and resurrection in
Jerusalem. Apparently the disciples still did not know what to make of the
resurrection bit for it brings them no comfort. Instead, Matthew tells us,
“they were greatly distressed” (v.23). And, truth be told, so too are we!
To Pay the Temple Tax or Not? (Mt.17:24-27)
We have
seen that Jesus has already launched what we called a Counter-Temple movement.
As we will see later his actions in the last week of his life portend the
judgment and destruction of the temple. Jesus clearly does not believe in the
continued legitimacy of Jerusalem’s temple in the purposes of God. Paying the
temple tax, then, cannot be a matter of prime importance to him. Yet, as Peter
tells the collectors of this tax in Capernaum, Jesus does pay the tax.
Why then
does he bring it up to his disciples now and tell them a riddling parable about
the tax?
-in ch.21
Jesus speaks of prayer removing “this mountain” referring to the temple on the
mount in Jerusalem. Could his similar prayer just a few verses above have that
as a secondary reference here making this parable subversive speech about the temple?
-this
open-ended story about fishing for a fish with a coin in its mouth to pay the tax
with will mystify those whose eyes and ears are closed to Jesus’ message but to
those committed to Jesus’ counter-temple movement its playful dismissiveness
would become clear.
-this parable,
then, is strategic in purpose.
“. . . the tone of the whole story implies that for Jesus this was
a way of making light of the whole system, maybe even making fun of it. 'Oh,
they want Temple money, do they? Well, why don't you go fishing . . . I'm sure
you'll find something good enough for them.' It was a way of not saying, on the
one hand, 'Oh yes, of course, we'll certainly pay - here, take a coin from my
purse!', or, on the other hand, 'No, certainly not, the whole system is corrupt
- go and give him a punch on the nose!' It was a way of biding time . . . The time
would come when he would speak more openly, more directly, more threateningly .
. . yes, precisely when he was in Jerusalem, turning over tables and driving
out traders. This story looks forward to that moment, but it also says that the
moment isn't here yet.
“The point of the story, then, isn't that Jesus had the power to
make a coin appear in the mouth of a fish - though that is certainly implied.
Nor is it that Jesus is simply a good citizen, finding ways of paying the
necessary taxes. The point is that he was a master strategist. He was himself,
as he told his disciples
to be, as wise as a serpent while remaining as innocent as a dove
(10. 1 6).”[7]
The children of the kingdom are free from such taxes, Jesus
claims. But it is not time to flaunt that freedom. Take it seriously to go
fishing for a catch with a coin in its mouth and pay the tax with that! But the
day is coming when all that will come to an end.
[1] See Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 27-28.
[2] Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 28.
[3] Ch.4, par.3.
[4] Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew: 1115-1124.
[5] C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (Chronicles
of Narnia Book 6), pp. 25-26. HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
[6] Leithart, The Gospel of Matthew: 1248-1253.
[7] Wright, Matthew for Everyone: 25.
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