“For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, so that you may lead lives worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light.” (NRSV)
The apostle Paul’s prayer in this passage can be outlined as follows:
As is generally the case with Paul’s letters, he begins by letting the church know he is praying for them. He really believed in the vital importance of prayer. Prayer is at the foundation of all church renewal.
We are regularly encouraged to pray. “Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.” (Ephesians 6:18 NRSV). We are given the examples of Jesus and Paul, who made prayer and intercession priorities in their lives and ministries. Before we need new ideas and quick fix solutions, we need prayer. Prayer is at the heart of Christian ministry and at the heart of the life of the Church.
This part of the letter is very important, and it’s going to take me a while to fully discuss this. I need to begin by pointing out something about this prayer that seems odd at first. So, first some brief introductory remarks, and then some personal reflections.
“O Lord, who may abide in your tent? Who may dwell on your holy hill?”
We are invited into relationship with God: into the presence of God. A question is addressed to the God of Israel, using his personal name יְ֭הוָֹה: (which may have been pronounced”Yahweh”) who can live in Your presence?
People sometimes get idyllic notions of what the early Church was like. It is imagined that the early Church was more Spirit-filled, more unified, free from many of the problems the Church has today. It’s just part of that instinctive yearning people have for “the good old days.” I don’t know why people believe in this notion. It seems to be intuitive: sometime, way back when, people didn’t have the problems we have today. But, a careful reading of the letters of the apostle Paul in our New Testament will quickly disprove this notion.
The letters of Paul were often written to correct false teachings and false practices that had arisen in the churches to which he wrote. We owe much of the New Testament to the problems in the early Church.
Some of the unique features of Paul’s letter to the Colossians can be explained by the fact that the apostle Paul is replying to a type of false teaching (or false teachings) that were circulating in the Colossian church. This concern comes to the surface, for example here:
First, I want to revisit a quote from Wolfhart Pannenberg that appeared toward the end of that blog post. It deserves a closer examination. And, I’d like to give it a little context.
The idea that humans have a special place in the world because of their rationality has pre-Christian origin. He mentions Cicero’s statement of this idea. He goes on to say:
Yet, Cicero did not link this dignity, as modern usage does, to the idea of the inviolability of human life in each individual. This thought arose only with the idea that we are under a supreme authority that releases us from obligation to other powers, and especially from being controlled by other people or by society. Rightly, then, the Christian tradition sought the basis of personal dignity in our creation in the image of God. Our destiny of fellowship with God forms the indispensable premise of the function of human dignity as the content of a supreme legal principle and a basis for individual human rights, e.g., in modern declarations of such rights.
It was characteristic of Paul to begin his letters with words of encouragement and congratulation. As we read further in this letter we will discover that he wrote it to correct false ideas that were current in the congregation. He was certainly concerned about the false teaching at Collosae — but, it did not approach his anger and outrage over the false teaching at Galatia. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he leaves the encouragement paragraph out altogether and launches immediately into his angry words of correction. But, here he wants his readers to hear a good word first. He takes time to give them encouragement and praise.
I’m not sure how I first got interested in Paul’s letter to the Colossians, but it is a part of the Scriptures to which I keep returning. When I began my Christian life as a young man, I set myself to reading the Scriptures. No one taught me how to begin. No one gave me any advice. I don’t know whether that is good or bad, since I probably would not have taken anyone’s advice anyway. But, there were many parts of the Bible that surprised me. There were many parts that bored and confused me. And, there were many parts that fascinated and spoke to me. I was enthralled, for example, by the prophecies of Ezekiel. When I got to the Song of Solomon, I was surprised to find a book erotic love poetry (odd-sounding though it was) in the Bible. On the other hand, the voice of Jesus in the Gospels called me again and again to re-examine my life.
And, for some reason, Paul’s letter to the Colossians was one of the books that spoke to me and intrigued me. It still does. Part of the fascination is the strong Pauline polemic against legalism. Part of it was the polemic against “philosophy.” Part of it is the fact that Paul discusses holy living — what I had come to refer to as “Spirit-filled living” — without much of any explicit reference to the Holy Spirit. The book has a strong Christological emphasis. And, the call to holy living found in Chapter 3 is a call to “let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts….”
In the early part of his 2012 book How God Became King: The Forgotten Story of the Gospels, N. T. Wright remarks on how the Church has not always allowed itself to hear the full witness of the Gospels to Christ. I won’t attempt to reproduce the argument here: read the book.
Wright begins by discussing some ways that the Church’s teachings unintentionally got off track. And, as he is discussing how these various theologians of the past attempted to defend orthodoxy in a way that misconstrued some of the Bible’s teachings, he says on page 37 that “the eighteenth century saw great movements of revival, particularly through the Methodist movement led by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield.” and, he goes on to say:
The story of Jesus’ transfiguration dovetails with a persistent theme in all the Gospels: Jesus’ prayer life.
The Gospels let us know that Jesus often sought out times and places for private prayer. In this, Jesus stands out from the other Biblical characters. Yes, other Biblical characters are portrayed as people of prayer — Moses, Elijah, and others — but no one more than Jesus. This runs contrary to a naive theology: as the Son of God, it seems as if Jesus would be the least in need of prayer and solitude, and the other Bible characters, being mere mortals, the most. And, maybe they were. But, Jesus was the one who sought out the place of prayer the most.
Here is the fountainhead of all subsequent teaching on the life of prayer in the various Christian traditions — the prayer life of Jesus.
“Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” (NRSV.)
It was while he was praying that “the appearance of his face changed” (τὸ εἶδος τοῦ προσώπου αὐτοῦ ἕτερον). In Exodus 34:29-35, we are told the story of Moses coming down from the Mount with the two tablets of the covenant in his hand and it says: “Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” (Exodus 34:29 NRSV.) This is a similar case.
I can’t state it better than H. D. M. Spence did, as he waxed eloquent in the old Pulpit Commentary:
“The marvellous change evidently passed over Jesus while he was in prayer, probably because of his intense prayer. Real, close communion with God ever imparts to the countenance of the one who has thus entered into communion with the High and Holy One, a new and strange beauty. Very many have noticed at times this peculiar and lovely change pass over the faces of God’s true saints as they prayed — faces perhaps old and withered, grey with years and wrinkled with care. A yet higher degree of transfiguration through communion with God is recorded in the case of Moses, whose face, after he had been with his God-Friend on the mount, shone with so bright a glory that mortal eye could not bear to gaze on it until the radiance began to fade away. A similar change is recorded to have taken place in the case of Stephen when he pleaded his Divine Master’s cause in the Sanhedrin hall at Jerusalem with such rapt eloquence that to the by-standers his face then, we read, “was as the face of an angel.” Stephen told his audience later on, in the course of that earnest and impassioned pleading, that to him the very heavens were opened, and that his eyes were positively gazing on the beatific vision. Yet a step higher still was this transfiguration of our Lord. St. Luke tells us simply that, ‘as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered.’”
Jesus appears transfigured before them. Christ appears now in his true glory. Christ appears now in his end-of-time glory. This story is quite different than the resurrection stories — for there Jesus’ ordinariness is emphasized: he is mistaken for the gardener, he meets with the two disciples traveling to Emmaus as a conversation partner — only to be recognized for who he is in the breaking of the bread. And so forth. The resurrection Jesus is not an overwhelming presence. But, the transfiguration Jesus is: his clothes are dazzling white.
Jesus is here identified with the Shekinah glory of God. This kind of thing brought later generations of Christians to speak of Christ as: “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God….” (The Nicene Creed.)
And, with Jesus — talking to him actually — are Moses and Elijah. They represent the Law and the Prophets. Moses and Elijah are talking to Jesus about his “departure” (ἔξοδον = exodus). They are talking to him about the events of the Cross, and resurrection, and ascension (“They… were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.“) Jesus’ mission is spoken of here in terms of his giving of himself to redeem humankind.
The implicit claim here is that everything in the religious traditions of Israel are now culminating in Jesus’ death and resurrection. For us, this points to a progressive unity of the Old and New Testaments. As Jesus says in the Gospel of Matthew he comes not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17). Faith in Christ challenges us to see the Bible record as a progressive but continuous story, culminating with the account of Jesus Christ.
“Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” — not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud.” (NRSV.)
The text implies: they almost slept through it! They were tired, but they saw it all since they had (as it happened) remained awake.
An old and unanswerable question here is: how did Peter know these were Moses and Elijah? I’ll leave you to speculate on that one….
But, it is clear that Peter is overwhelmed by this experience. Luke lets us know that he blurts out something stupid: “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings….” Then the cloud overshadowed them. Remember: clouds are often associated with the visible glory of God throughout the Bible. So, this is the Shekinah (שְׁכִינָה) glory of God, and they are terrified (ἐφοβήθησαν) as they enter it. While this is a form of the common verb for “fear” (φοβέω) — the verb is sometimes used to mean “reverent fear” (Mark 6:20; Luke 1:50; Acts 10:2; Ephesians 5:33; Revelation 11:18).
This, of course, is the quintessential Mountain Top Experience — a term preachers love to use. Notice: it was not sought. They were tired, but it so happened they were awake enough to experience this. And: it is not an end in itself. It is designed to impress them with the revelation of God in Christ — and their need to heed it.
“Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.” (NRSV.)
Christ’s voice is the voice they must heed above all. As Christians we come to understand the preparatory messages of the Law and the Prophets in the light of what God has done and said through Christ. Christ is the key. We interpret all that has come before in the light of Christ.
The whole point of this overwhelming encounter is to cement in their minds the need to heed Jesus Christ. “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” True discipleship is more than a mountaintop experience — it is a day to day following after Christ — giving heed to his example and teaching.
John Nolland remarks in the Word Biblical Commentary:
It is not possible—and it is not right — to freeze this moment of glory. The aftermath of the voice speaks as eloquently as had the voice itself. The moment of glory has vanished. Jesus is alone. The mountaintop experience has passed and what remains is the way of the cross as the way to permanence of glory. They have seen the glory that by right belongs to Jesus, but it belongs to him the other side of death and resurrection.
The Revised Common Lectionary gives preachers the option to include Luke 9:37-43. This is the story of Jesus delivering a demonized boy — after the disciples could not help. The contrast is sharp, and this has led to the common rhetoric about “Mountain Top Experiences” versus service “in the valley.”
Prayer and service go hand in hand.
A FREE GIFT TO PREACHERS: Here is a PPTX file for a sermon based on this passage . You can use this, edit this, change this however you wish — it is free for you to use (or not). Click this link: With Christ on the Mountaintop.
