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S. Transfiguration.26 Matt. 17:1-9

And coming down the mountain Jesus commanded them, ‘You may tell nobody the vision until the Son of Man may be raised from the dead’.

And that’s the point of the Transfiguration right there: it makes no sense until Jesus may be raised from the dead. And yes, Virginia, the Greek is a subjunctive passive “may be” not is or will be. All our translations hide that Jesus, on the way to the cross, leaves everything up to the Father…

Because Jesus emptied himself of his divine power and prerogatives, as Philippians 2 says. But Reformed Protestants don’t believe divine power is perfected in God’s death! For them, God can never make a rock too big to lift, and they don’t see that by that insistence they’ve made something God can’t do…(!)

But evangelical-catholics like Luther know that God can do anything he wants to do! So if God wants to take on our flesh, he can hide his divine power, live 33 years on earth in “human mode”, become like us in our suffering and dying so we may become like him in his resurrection.

Yet the divine power is there all the time in Jesus, but he never uses it for himself. Jesus knows from scriptures that he must rise from the dead, but leaves it all up to God the Father.

Calvinism (which really dominates all Protestant churches in the world to some extent including our own Missouri Synod which fuses many Calvinist and Arminian elements into the Lutheran faith) finds the biblical teaching on the deity of Jesus both too much and too little, weirdly…

It’s too much to say this man is God, full stop! and that God rules the universe through this man Jesus—always has, always will, because the incarnation (from our non-Reformed perspective) happens in time, yet God is beyond time, as we see it is the man Jesus who appears in the flesh to Abraham and eats and drinks with him and with the elders on Mt. Sinai! If you pulled up his long sleeves, Moses and Abraham would have seen the nail wounds in his hands.

READ MORE SCI-FI! Time travel, people! Time travel! You think God can’t do that?! Well!… the Reformed Protestants do not think this!, as a matter of fact. At least they say they don’t in their confessions. But, maybe, secretly some of them actually might?

Still: not granting, on the one hand, that the man Jesus simply is God, it makes no sense to the Reformed Protestants for Paul to say “Christ Jesus, who (being already in the nature of God) did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the nature of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.”

The ESV, like all Calvinist translations, hides the gravity of what is said here by translating “being already in the nature of God” as the Greek literally says as “though he was in the form of God”.

Three huge mistakes, here: 1) the Greek word μορφη is not “form” but literally nature as the Chalcedonian Creed confesses Jesus is 1 Person in 2 Natures!, and mistake 2) they translate υπαρχων as “was” not “being already” which is what it literally says. Mistake 3) Jesus did not take on the “form” of a ῾servant῾, but the nature of a slave! (sin has made slaves of all humanity, BTW!) Chalcedon is simply quoting the scriptures literally (being native Greek speakers, those 5th century church fathers) that Jesus is 1 Person with 2 Νatures—divine and human!

This is why I rip on all the Calvinist majority translations (KJV, NKJV, NASB, ESV, NRSV, all we have, sadly 🙁 because many such things they do, but in this key Christological confession of holy scriptures they intentionally mistranslate simple Greek words to hide the Chalcedonian confession that the man Jesus is fully God as if that truth is something made-up and not plainly stated in the holy scriptures!

Someone really needs to do something about this. If no one else will, may I should? If you want it done right, you gotta do it yourself, it seems? Though who would publish it? Rome and Constantinople all use the Calvinist English translations and are no help in correcting them…

Anyway, not believing Jesus is fully God at the same time as fully human, Calvinists can’t make sense of him operating only in “human mode” during his earthly ministry, because they think the whole point of Jesus is that an inspired man uses alien, divine power to help those who believe in him. Never using, hiding Divine Power under our human slave nature just doesn’t seem to accomplish much for those who don’t find God in Jesus only. God showing omnipotence by making a rock too big to lift seems… foolish, to them!

So the Reformed Protestants say both too little (not confessing Jesus is by nature God!) and too much (that Jesus’ ministry is always a direct communication and use of divine power to overwhelm us into submission to him—that more’s always more better)!

The Transfiguration story is making a very simple point: that the man Jesus Christ who dies on the cross in human weakness is GOD HIMSELF! so his death has infinite power to really ff… foul up sin, death, and hell!

But this is only obvious if you believe—as bible-believing catholic Christians—that Jesus is 1 Person in 2 Natures who operates in 2 STATES: 1) the state of humiliation—from his conception to his resurrection on Easter Sunday when he never uses his divine power for himself, and 2) the state of Exaltation—all the time before and after 4 BC-30 AD when Jesus always and fully uses the power of his divine nature through his human nature to make us over like him, to make us one with him… 😉

Jesus TRICKED the devil! (so well, that it’s fooled most of Christendom) into thinking the Godhead is not really, completely ONE with the humanity of Jesus Christ because God can’t die—duh! Everyone knows this! It’s like GOD 101!, so Jesus musta just been a Great Prophet or Teacher as the Muslims also insist 🙁

But… swallowing Jesus up into death and hell, the devil bit off more than he could chew!!! By dying, Jesus BROKE sin, death, and hell so they don’t work anymore on those who are in Christ Jesus. Jesus’ dying—because IT IS THE DEATH OF GOD HIMSELF!!!—has made sin, death, and hell nothin’ but a thang!—made it works backwards to destroy the sin, death, and devil in those who’re in Christ Jesus!

This is why the Transfiguration—the divine glory shining through the face and body of Jesus—made no sense to the apostles, and why they couldn’t say nuthin’ ‘bout this to nobody until Jesus had risen from the dead. Only knowing, going in, that this is God himself dying on the cross does the power of Jesus’ death and resurrection make sense to those who are in Christ.

We are in Christ, when we share Jesus’ glory by sharing his dying, through the non-rejection of faith, by his word and sacrament, where Peace, surpassing all understanding, guards and transfigures us, too! in Christ Jesus. Amen.