Sunday, February 15, 2026, The Transfiguration of Our Lord
“It’s Good, Lord, to Be Here”
Scripture Readings: Psalm 2:6-12; Exodus 24:8-18; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9
Service Order: Divine Service IV with Holy Communion, Lutheran Service Book
Hymns: “Come Follow Me, the Savior Spake” #688; “Tis Good, Lord, to Be Here” #414;
“Let Us Ever Walk with Jesus” #685
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father, and from Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jesus brought His disciples up on a mountaintop and showed them His glory – a foretaste of the glory that would one day be theirs. This blessed Sunday, here in this Church, is our own mountaintop. Here we get a “foretaste of the feast to come,” a glimpse of His glory, before we have to walk – as Jesus and His disciples did – back into the ornery world. May the glory we encounter here give us the strength we need to walk with Jesus in the world.
“After six days,” says our Gospel, “Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John the brother of James, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.” “Six days after what?” is the first question that comes to my mind. Back in Matthew 16, Jesus had told His disciples where He was going, and that He was going to Jerusalem to suffer and die.And Peter took Jesus aside and tried to talk Him out of it. That’s where Jesus told him, “Get thee behind me, Satan! You don’t have in mind the things of men, but the things of God.” And then Jesus told them all, “Pick up your cross and follow if you wish to come with Me.”
Simon Peter, God bless him, would sometimes give just the right answer to Jesus’ questions: “Yes, Lord, You are the Son of God, the Christ of Israel.” And other times he’d miss the mark altogether and blurt out something really dumb. Peter could say, “I’ll follow you, Lord” one minute, and “No, we’re not going there” the next. Peter, and James, and John, and the rest of the group, were still only disciples, after all. They had some difficult days ahead, and they were going to need to be strong to make it through them. What Jesus is doing in our Gospel today is giving them the ultimate “faith object lesson,” one they’ll remember for the rest of their lives, to reinforce and fortify their faith for when they’ll need it. I don’t know about you, but I’m a hands-on learner myself. I need to see sometimes, as well as hear, before I can understand things.
So, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John with Him. They were the first of His disciples, and the leaders of the twelve, and they’d be the principal witnesses to Him later on. (People have different ideas about which mountain it was they went up on, but no one really knows for sure; we’ll have to ask about that when we get to heaven.)
But there up on that mountain, object lesson of all object lessons, “He was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became as white as the light.” The Greek word for “transfigured” is metamorphos, or “metamorphosis” – like what happens to a butterfly inside a cocoon. (We don’t call this “metamorphosis Sunday,” though, because that would sound weird; but you get the idea).
This metamorphosis, this transfiguration, this change, happened to Jesus for His disciples to see. The difference between Jesus and a butterfly, though, is that the butterfly is changed from a lesser thing – an ugly, unattractive worm - to something more beautiful, and the change is a permanent one. Jesus came from being something indescribably beautiful – the holy Son of God from heaven - down to this earth, to have His beauty covered by a veil of ordinary-ness. “He had no stately form, no majesty, that we should desire Him,” prophet Isaiah wrote. And for just those few moments on the mountaintop, the disciples got to see behind the veil, to see Him as He truly was - all so they’d know without a doubt who He was, and remember always who it was they’d been walking with.
There’s a passage in Revelation 1 where St. John sees the Son of God again, and here’s how he describes Him there: “I turned around to see the voice that was speaking to me. And when I turned, I saw seven golden lampstands, and among the lampstands was someone ‘like a son of man,’ dressed in a robe reaching down to His feet and with a golden sash around His chest. His head and hair were white like wool, as white as snow, and His eyes were like blazing fire. His feet were like bronze glowing in a furnace, and His voice was like the sound of rushing waters. In His right hand he held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance.”
That’s the same Jesus he’d once seen on the mountain, with His face shining like the sun, and His raiment as white as the light. Jesus couldn’t have walked around Galilee and Judea looking like that; He’d have frightened the people to death, and they’d have been afraid to come to Him. He was fully God on the inside, but a man like us on the outside. At least, until this day up on the mountaintop.
And then, if that wasn’t enough of an object lesson for these poor disciples, “Just then there appeared before them Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus.” Were Moses and Elijah really there, or were they only visions? They were real, not spirits or ghosts.
They were standing right there, for the disciples to see (and somehow the disciples knew exactly who they were). And they were talking with Jesus, in audible voices, and having a holy conversation with Him.
So if they were real, where did they come from? They came from timeless and eternal heaven, wherever that is, down here to time-bound earth. Elijah, you’ll remember, had been taken to heaven in a fiery chariot, “and was seen no more.” And Moses died in the land of Moab, and nobody knows where God buried Him. They’d both been gone from the earth for years. Yet here they are, Moses and Elijah, still living as living can be. This, if it tells us anything, tells us that heaven, wherever it is, is a real and solid place, not some cloud you can stick your hand through.
Each of these prophets knew Jesus already, by the way; they’d both met and talked with the Son of God before. Moses first met Him face-to-face up on Mt. Sinai, while receiving the books of the Law. Elijah encountered Him under a broom tree, in 1 Kings 19, at a time when he was ready to give up and die; it was Christ who said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” How they came to be there on this mountain with Jesus, that we can’t know. Did they come down Jacob’s ladder? Did God rip a hole in the fabric of time for them? Who can say? That’s another question we’ll have to ask when we get there.
So while all this is going on - Jesus, all heaven-bright and shining, God’s holy prophets talking with Him - Peter, God bless him (and we can’t really blame him, given the circumstances), opens his mouth to talk, instead of doing the sensible thing and keeping it shut. He says, “Lord, this is great, this is awesome! It’s good that You and me and Moses and Elijah are all here together. Let’s stay a while; let’s make it a party; let’s all of us camp out and never leave this place. I’ll pitch tents for the three of you; one for You, Lord, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
Peter, of course, is being ridiculous, and on more than one point. For one thing, he should have been down on his face, instead of standing there running his mouth. And also, did Jesus, Moses, or Elijah have any need for an earthly shelter? Jesus was showing Himself to be the God of the Psalms, the One who “spreads out the sky like a canopy as a shelter for Himself.” And Moses and Elijah had been living in heaven for years, the place where “God Himself is its temple and gives it light.” And also, Peter was assuming this moment on the mountaintop was going to last forever, or at least go on for a good, long while; and that just wasn’t so. Jesus wasn’t offering a permanent campground; this was just an object lesson, given for Peter and the others to see.
And if Peter and his companions were frightened before, what happened next must have been just over the top. While Peter was still talking nonsense, along came a bright cloud to overshadow them. That’s the glory cloud of God, what the Hebrews called the shekinah; the same cloud that covered Mt. Sinai, so the people wouldn’t look upon the unfiltered glory of God and die; the same cloud that settled on the Tabernacle when the Lord wanted Israel to halt, and lifted up again when He wanted them to move on; the same cloud that filled the temple with glory and made Isaiah cry out, “Woe is me, my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty!”
There the disciples were, wrapped in a glory cloud, surrounded by the impossible glory of God. And then God the Father Himself spoke to them, from out of that cloud that was all around them; and what the Father says to them is the point of His object lesson, both for them and for us: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him!”
This defines, for the disciples and for us, what the relationship is between the Father and the Son. God our Father in love, love in its essence, everything love is or could possibly be. The Son is the full expression of God’s love, God with a hand to hold and arms to embrace us, a God with sinews and flesh and skin. The Father is pleased with the Son, because Father and Son are inseparable, both in their love for each other, and in what their will is for the human beings they’ve together created. God is love. God in His love sent His Son to us, to walk in the world covered in flesh, and to die a flesh and blood death on a cross for the sake of our sin. That’s why Jesus, who is truly the Son of God, can also call Himself the Son of Man. And that is why, instead of talking on and on like Simon Peter, we should listen to Jesus and do what He says. “Be still and know that I AM God”, the Psalm says.
The disciples, seeing the glory of God and hearing the Father’s voice, were finally face down on the ground, where by all rights they should have been in the first place. What will you say when you stand before God? What can you say? Old Job, after all his complaints, once he’d come face-to-face with God, said, “I’m going to shut my mouth and quit talking now; I repent in sackcloth and ashes.”
So Jesus has driven the lesson home. The disciples have seen His glory, and been frightened out of their wits and put down on their faces, where every sinner belongs in the presence of a holy God. Now, do you see how Jesus responds to their fear? He comes and touches them; not as a God of unapproachable glory, but as the flesh-and-blood Jesus they’d always known. In His mercy, He’s put the veil back on. And He tells them what He’s told them many times before: “Do not be afraid.” “And when they looked up, they saw no one but Jesus and Him alone.” And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus instructed them, ‘Don't tell anyone what you have seen, until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’”
Why are the disciples told not to tell anyone yet? As we said, the point of this transfiguration object lesson was to prepare them for what was coming for them, and to bring them through it all with their precious faith intact. They were going to have to face the horror of the arrest in the garden, and the trial before Pilate, and the cross. Simon Peter did some foolish things then, too; he even denied he knew Jesus at all. James and John and the rest of them abandoned their Master and ran away. That Saturday they spent in hiding was all terror and fear and disappointment and despair.
Yet they were blessed to hear His blessing of peace, and to touch Him and find Him to be very much alive again.
If Jesus appeared in all His glory in this place today, in all His shining, heavenly glory… “O Lord, who could stand?” “Our God is a consuming fire,” the Book of Hebrews says. That He does not come to us in that way is mercy; the veil He wears is mercy for us. Jesus, Almighty God that He is, did everything He did to make Himself a God who is accessible to sinful human beings like us. Jesus said, “The Son of Man came not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.” And St. Paul writes in Romans, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
So, rather than in all His shining glory, how does He come to us instead? St. Peter, remembering that moment on the mountain many years later, says it’s by “the Word of the prophets made more certain.” He comes to us in His Word, and in His Sacraments, and by faith, and by the Holy Spirit. Not brighter than the sun, to blind us or burn us or make us afraid, but like “a light shining in a dark place” - like a candle set up to shine in a dark world - “Until the day dawns and the morning star rises,” and we get to see Him face-to-face.
Dearest Lord Jesus, we have seen Your glory, the glory of God’s one-and-only Son, who has “come from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Keep us in Your light, O Lord, and work a continual transformation of faith in our souls, that we may grow closer and closer to You, until You come for us again at last and take us home to glory. We pray in Your holy name, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Rev. Larry Sheppard, M.Div.
Trinity Lutheran Church, Packwaukee, WI
St. John’s Lutheran Church, Oxford, WI
pastorshepp@gmail.com