Joel Snider's Sermons from FBC Rome
February 3, 2008
Some Day You’ll Understand
Matthew 17:1-7
Today’s passage of scripture is the story of Jesus’ transfiguration as told in the Gospel of Matthew.
Our older daughter is Rachel and it has been ten years since she left home. When Rachel was just a year or two away from middle school, we were out as a family one night driving. She was in the backseat and she leaned up between the two seats and very emphatically said, “I want to know what you have to do to be a Christian and I don’t want you to tell me, ‘We’ll talk about it when I’m older.’” We were a little taken back and there were, obviously, two things she had picked up. (1) It wasn’t simply enough to be born into a Christian family, and (2) all of us have a tendency on certain subjects to tell people, “Someday you will understand what we are talking about. If you will just wait until you are older or if you will wait until you have experienced A, B, C, or X, Y, or Z, you will know a little bit more about what we mean.”
All of us have heard someone say that. “Unless you have had so and so happen to you, you don’t really know what we are talking about. Until you have been through what I have been through, you won’t really understand.” When you are on the receiving end of someone saying, “Someday you’ll understand,” or “Someday when you are older you will get this,” it feels a little bit like an insult. It feels like people don’t trust you to think you are able to imagine what they might have experienced or that you somehow can’t comprehend or you are not mature enough. It is a little frustrating when people say, “Someday you will understand this. Just wait until so and so happens to you.” It sounds like a put-down.
If you are a teenager in love, it is a powerful thing. Some well-meaning family member says, “Just wait until you get engaged, then you will know. Wait until you get married. Wait until you have children.” And you think, “This is love now.” It feels like a putdown to be told “to wait.”
You start a new job and someone is taking you around and showing you either the facilities or introducing you to new co-workers and they say, “You won’t understand this right here until you have been working here for a while. You can’t really understand what is going on in this department until you have been here as long as I have.” When we are on the receiving end of that, we find ourselves frustrated, just like Rachel was that night in the car. “Don’t tell me I have to wait. I want to know this right now.”
In the story today, Jesus and his disciples are on a mountain. Matthew says, “After six days.” Something happened six days before. Jesus had taken the disciples. They had left the area of the Sea of Galilee and they had gone even further north into Galilee. Jesus and the disciples are at a place called Caesarea Philippi, which is like saying Caesar’s Town in the Region of Philip. There were other Caesareas. But at Caesarea Philippi, in the moment of teaching, Jesus asked this very pointed question to the disciples. “Who does everybody say I am?”
They start to give the list. “Some people say you are Elijah. Some people say you are one of the prophets.”
Finally, Jesus turns to them and says, “But who do you say I am? Who do you understand me to be?”
Peter is the one who is always jumping out. Have you ever taught a class and there is that person who is always going to answer the question first? That’s Peter. “You are the Christ, God’s son.”
Six days after Peter has made this confession, Jesus has taken the inner circle of disciples up on the mountain, and there the disciples experience the triple crown of miracles. There are three pieces to it, and it is undoubtedly overwhelming.
First of all, Jesus’ appearance is transformed. Matthew says, “He shines like the sun.” Mark says, “His clothes were whiter than any bleach could get them.” Then Moses and Elijah appear, and after that, this voice. Was it a whisper or was it the thunder? This voice comes out of heaven and confirms who Jesus is. They have had a three-part miracle. Probably, any one of them would have been enough to WOW us, but they have had all three of them together.
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.”
When you see something this dramatic, when you are a witness to something that everyone would like to hear about and you would really like to tell, for someone to say, “You can’t tell anybody,” really feels like a wet blanket.
If there is an apartment fire in Atlanta, a wreck, or something else going on, they have no trouble finding people who say, “I was right there when it happened. Let me tell you what I saw.” Everybody wants to be the person to say, “Let me tell you what I saw. I was right there, and this truck just came down the street.” Everybody wants to be the person to tell. You can imagine if Peter, James, and John have seen this three-part miracle, they have heard the voice, they have seen Moses and Elijah, and Jesus has just shone like the sun in front of them, they want to go back and tell the rest of the disciples, and anybody else who will listen. “Let me tell you what I saw. I’m special. I want to tell you this because I really want you to know how special I am. I was up on the mountain when all of this took place. Whatever you hear from everybody else, I am the one who is telling you the truth.” But Jesus said, “Don’t tell anyone. Someday, disciples, you will understand this. Wait. You don’t quite get it yet, but one day you will understand. One day, you will be able to tell.”
As much as we don’t like being told to “wait” or “someday you will understand” or “someday you will get all of this,” we have all had experiences where we have been the one who said that to somebody because we know in our own experience that you really don’t get it until you have been here or there or until you have had so and so happen.
When Rachel was about two or three months old, we lived in Louisville. One day, we were in the mall. My wife, Cherry, had gone into a store and I am sure I was just looking dreamily into my baby girl’s face. A woman I had never seen before walked up out of the blue and said, “You didn’t know how to love until you had that little girl, did you?” I loved my family. I loved Cherry. You don’t have to have a child to know love, but I learned something about having a child. I learned something about love that I did not know before. For me, a day had come when I understood love better because of looking into that little girl’s face.
I was talking to an Iraq war veteran. The veteran said, “If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t understand.” I think about people I have known who were at Normandy, Iwo Jima, and Kaison and they all said the same thing. They all said, “If you weren’t there, you really don’t get it.” I may not be real smart, but I am smart enough to know they are right. As much as I don’t like people telling me that I don’t get something or won’t get it until later, I have had experiences where I know that I have learned something or experienced something that another person won’t know until something very similar happens to them. There are days that come where, all of a sudden, things we thought we once knew we now know at a deeper level. I knew it in my mind, but now I know it in my gut. When Jesus tells the disciples, “Don’t tell anybody,” it’s because they have already said, “You are the Christ. You are the Son of God.” They have already gotten the words right, but the truth is they really don’t know yet who Jesus is. They really don’t know yet what those words mean. He says, “Wait. Someday after the Son of Man is raised from the dead, then you can tell it because that is when you will understand. It is only when you come to that day that you will have seen what it means for the Son of God to be rejected, for the Son of God to be despised, for the Son of God to be crucified and raised from the dead. Only then are you really going to understand who I am? This is Jesus speaking. “Only then will you really know who I am.”
We have heard the Sunday school lessons since we were little that, in the Gospels, Jesus is always trying to combat this idea that he is a military or political figure. They were all looking for the person who was going to come and overthrow Rome. Jesus is trying to tell them that he has come to seek and to save that which is lost, that he has come to reach out and to gather the lambs of God into the fold, to call the children home. We all know that he came and would be willing to suffer for this and to sacrifice himself and go to the cross. We think, “They didn’t get it,” but we got it because we are reading the scriptures, we have been to Sunday school, and we know all this stuff. But the truth is the battle between those two understandings of what it means for Jesus to be the Son of God still goes on.
A lot of times, we want all the promise of Jesus without any demand. That’s just like Jesus being the conquering military hero. “Yes, Jesus is on my side.” Sometimes, we treat Jesus like he is inside information and we know who to pray to and, therefore, all of our prayers are going to be answered. Anything we have prayed about is guaranteed, therefore, to be successful. We are looking for all the benefit without it costing us anything. It is the same thing as those who were looking for Jesus to lead a mighty army to overthrow Rome and set them free. It’s the same thing. They wanted the benefit without any cost.
Jesus tells the disciples, “You have seen all these things. You have seen Moses and Elijah. You have heard the voice. You saw the transformation, but don’t tell anybody about this because they will just want me to do another miracle. All they will really want is victory, and they won’t be willing to consider surrender.” That is what Jesus does. In this time between here and when he is finally raised from the dead, Jesus surrenders to the will of God to do whatever is necessary, even to suffer defeat on the cross so that the ultimate victory of Easter can come.
We always want to jump to Easter and forget Good Friday. We always want to talk about the promise without thinking about the demand. We all like to say, “I know who Jesus is,” without having to think about Jesus on the cross. This is what Jesus is saying, “You’ve got the right words, but you really need to understand what this means. Someday after you have seen me whipped, someday after you have seen me nailed up to that cross, someday after you have seen them roll the stone across the entrance, then you will be ready for Easter. You will finally understand what it means when I say, ‘I am the Christ.’”
May each of us not look past what Christ went through to get to what Christ provides without understanding that there is a path for us to follow. Hopefully, we will understand that it is in our service, in our own sacrifice, in our surrender to the will of God that we understand who Jesus is.
Copyright 2008. P. Joel Snider. All rights reserved.
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