CRITICAL NOTES
Luke 9:28. About an eight days.—I.e. including the day on which the words were spoken and the day on which they were fulfilled. St. Mark says “six days,” reckoning the intervening time. Took.—“Took with Him” is a better reading (R.V.). A mountain.—Rather, “the mountain” (R.V.). It is probable that this was Mount Hermon, as it is the only place within the neighbourhood of Cæsarea Philippi that satisfies the requirements of the case. The summit of Tabor, which is the traditional site of the Transfiguration, seems to have been occupied by a fortress at this time. Besides, Tabor is in Galilee, while from Mark 9:30 we would understand that Jesus and His disciples went into Galilee after this event. To pray.—This is peculiar to St. Luke.
Luke 9:29. White and glistering.—The “and” is not in the original: the phrase might be rendered “sparkling white.” There is perhaps a reference in the word translated “glistering” or “sparkling” to the lightning-flash.
Luke 9:31. Spake of His decease.—Lit. “departure” out of the world—a word which probably includes His resurrection and ascension. The other evangelists say that Moses and Elijah “talked” with Jesus: St. Luke alone tells the subject of their conversation.
Luke 9:32. Heavy with sleep.—This seems to indicate that the vision took place at night: in accordance with this, we read in Luke 9:37 of their descending from the mountain “next day.” And when they were awake.—R.V. “when they were fully awake,” or “having remained awake” (margin). The idea seems to be that they struggled successfully against the inclination to sleep.
Luke 9:33. As they departed from Him.—I.e. Moses and Elijah. A better rendering would be, “as they were parting from Him” (R.V.); or, “as they were being separated from Him.” Good for us.—Good, delightful, pleasant. Tabernacles.—Or, “booths.”
Luke 9:34. A cloud.—Matthew, “a bright cloud”: probably we are to understand the Shekinah—the symbol of God’s presence.
Luke 9:35. My beloved Son.—Another reading is, “My Son, my chosen” (R.V.): this is a very probable reading, as, apart from MS. evidence in favour of it, it is more easy to imagine “beloved” (which occurs in Matthew and Mark) being substituted for “chosen,” than “chosen” for “beloved.”
Luke 9:36. Was past.—R.V. “when the voice came,” with “was past” in the margin. Lit. the phrase is, “when the voice had been,” i.e. had ceased. They kept it close.—According to the command of Jesus (Matthew and Mark).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Luke 9:28-36
“In the Holy Mount.”—All the accounts of the Transfiguration carefully date it with reference to Peter’s great confession and Christ’s subsequent plain announcement of His sufferings. “These sayings” made an epoch in our Lord’s life both as regarded Himself and His followers, marking for Him a new step towards the cross, which was henceforth perceptibly nearer and still more familiar, and for them a new pain, which might easily become apostasy. The Transfiguration seems to have a bearing both on Him and them.
I. The change in our Lord’s appearance.—St. Luke’s special contribution to this part of the narrative is the mention of Christ’s praying. It connects His prayer immediately with the glory shining in His face. Prayer and communion with God will imprint a glory on a homely face yet, which, though it be nowise miraculous, does none the less show where the man has been. If we lived more habitually in the secret place of the Most High, our faces would oftener seem like those of angels, and a pure and quiet heart would make itself seen there. The glory that shone on Christ’s countenance and whitened even His garments did not fall on Him from without, but rose, as it were, to the surface from within. “The veil, that is to say, His flesh,” became partially transparent for a moment, and revealed not only the glory of grace and truth, but the lesser glory, which could be made visible, at least by symbol. It was a gleam of Deity, like a stray sunbeam through a rift in a clouded sky. So could He always have walked among men; and that brief flash increases our sense of the continual voluntary humiliation of His humble manhood, and tells us that “there was the hiding of His power.”
II. His converse with the mighty dead.—They came before the apostles were awake, and that mysterious colloquy had lasted for an indefinite time before human ears caught some fragments of it. St. Luke gives the fullest account of this incident. He alone tells us that our Lord’s companions were “in glory,” robed in like lustre to His, and “walking with Him in white.” He alone tells us the subject of their speech. They did not come as to tell Him that He must die; for His plain declaration to that effect preceded this event. Did they come to learn it from Him, and so to bear back to the dim regions whence they came the glad tidings that the long-waited-for hour was ready to strike? They stand there surely rather as learners than as teachers. The legislator and the great prophet represented all the earlier revelation, and fitly stand at His side to whom it had all pointed. The “departure which He should accomplish at Jerusalem” was the goal of law and prophecy. The loftiest organs of revelation in the past were His heralds and servants, honoured by being allowed to attend on Him. The depths of the worlds of the dead were moved at His coming, and “the people that walked in darkness” saw “a great light.” Jesus, too, needed strengthening, and the presence of these two may have been for Him what the angel from heaven was in Gethsemane. The continued conscious existence of the dead, the purpose of all “the sundry times” and “divers manners” of the past speech of God, the sovereign completeness and supremacy of the message in the Son, the central place of His death in His work—are all set forth in that wondrous interview between these three.
III. The attesting voice from heaven.—Peter’s foolish speech was, according to this Gospel, called out by seeing the two majestic forms in the act of “parting from Him.” The apostle was half-awake, stunned, and bewildered, and would fain have kept them there. There is something very naïve and childlike in the proposal to make the three tabernacles, as if these might be an inducement for the strangers to stay awhile. Inconsiderate as the speech was, it was very full of love to Jesus, and it said something for Peter’s loyalty and reverence for Him, that he put the Lord first, before Moses and Elijah. His preposterous proposal was interrupted by the descent of the cloud. One reading of St. Luke’s words makes all six to have entered into it, whilst another, more probably, leaves the disciples without. The remark about the voice coming “out of the cloud” seems to imply that the hearers were not within its folds. If so, then that visible symbol of the Divine Presence, which had dwelt in the first Temple between the cherubim, and had been absent for long ages, now again appeared. The disciples saw with terror Jesus and Moses and Elijah lost in its folds. They were alone, and might well wonder whether they were ever to see Jesus more. The Divine voice was meant altogether for the disciples, both in its first part, which declares Christ’s dignity, and in its second, which commands their attentive acceptance of His word. In them the whole world is spoken to, and the command is for each of us. The strange light had faded from His face when He came to them, the mysterious two had vanished, the cloud had melted into the blue, the silent, bare hillside was as it had been, and “Jesus was found alone.” So all other teachers, helpers, guides, are lost in His sight, or drop away as the ages roll on, and He only is left. But He is left, and He is enough and eternal. Happy are we if in life we hear Him, and if in our experience Jesus is found alone, the all-sufficient and unchanging companion and portion of our else lonely and restless spirits.—Maclaren.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Luke 9:28-36
Luke 9:28-29. The Transfiguration Prayer.—This great scene left its mark for ever on the three chosen witnesses of it. The evidence of the Transfiguration must of necessity have been more impressive to the three spectators than it can be to the readers of their account of it. Marvellous, miraculous revelation! What mysteries gather round the scene! Jesus had gone up into the mountain to pray. It was as He prayed that He was transfigured. Can we at all interpret this prayer? We cannot. We know not what that prayer specially asked. But we may know some of the Divine intercessions specially needed by us in seasons of which the Transfiguration is for all time the august and solemn type.
I. Seasons every life has of a brighter experience than the common. Seasons of natural or spiritual exhilaration, in seclusion or in company. How natural to wish to prolong these seasons, neglecting every-day duties, heedless of other men’s sorrows! Is it wrong for us to think at such moments of the gracious intercession above, which would ask for us to use as not abusing, even if it be the Christian intercourse or the spiritual happiness? These things must come and go; duty before pleasure, even in the soul.
II. How sorely do we all need the Transfiguration view of Christ—were it but for once—never to fade again out of the memory, the soul’s memory, of the beholder! St. Peter thought of that one night when he was drawing near to his own “exodus,” and said that it assured him of the truth of his preaching, and of the truth of his Gospel, on to the very end. Which of us does not want just that something, if it might be so, to turn faith into sight and hope into knowledge? It would perhaps come to us—or something of its kind—if we watched for it as men watch for the morning—if we had the patience and the earnestness to say to the Divine Visitant, “I will not let Thee go, except Thou bless me!” Shall we use the record of the Transfiguration prayer as giving us hope that the heavenly intercession may ask that indeed beatific vision, the spiritual sight of Christ, even for us?
III. Do we not all need that firm hold of the two revelations, the cross and the glory of Jesus Christ, which He enforced so strongly by the teaching and the prayer of this memorable moment? May the prayer of Christ in heaven reconcile us to this twofold condition: a Divine Lord dying to save, a Divine Love humbling itself to suffer—a cross uplifted to draw all men to Him who hangs upon it, a cross to be borne now by all who would enter into the glory!—Vaughan.
An Answer to Prayer.—The Transfiguration was an answer to prayer. We do not say that Jesus was praying for this alteration in. His countenance and raiment, or even for the privilege of talking with these wise and sympathetic spirits about the work which He was to accomplish at Jerusalem. But yet all this was in answer to the prayer He was offering when it came. To lift up the soul to God calms and ennobles it.
Luke 9:28-36. The Meaning of the Transfiguration.
I. The Transfiguration is an illustration of the efficacy of prayer.
II. It demonstrates the perfect holiness of Jesus Christ.
III. It brings into clear view the voluntary character of His submission to sufferings and death.
An Aid to Faith and Patience.—The Transfiguration was an aid to faith and patience, specially vouchsafed to the meek and lowly Son of man in answer to His prayer, to cheer Him on His sorrowful path to Jerusalem and Calvary. It supplied three distinct aids to faith.
I. It gave a foretaste of the glory with which He should be rewarded after His passion for His voluntary humiliation and obedience unto death.
II. It gave assurance that the mystery of the cross was understood and appreciated by saints in heaven, if not by the darkened minds of sinful men on earth.
III. A third and chief solace to the heart of Jesus was the approving voice of His heavenly Father.—Bruce.
Luke 9:28. “Peter and John and James.”—Those now chosen to witness His glory on the mountain of transfiguration afterwards witnessed His agony in the garden of Gethsemane.
Luke 9:29. A Light from Within.—It would appear that the light shone not upon Him from without, but out of Him from within: it was one blaze of dazzling, celestial glory; it was Himself glorified. What a contrast now to that “visage more marred than any man, and His form more than the sons of men”! (Isaiah 52:14).—Brown.
Luke 9:30. “Moses and Elias.”—The two who appeared to them were the representatives of the Law and the Prophets: both had been removed from this world in a mysterious manner—the one without death; the other by death, indeed, but so that His body followed not the lot of the bodies of all; both, like the Greater One with whom they spoke, had endured that supernatural fast of forty days and nights: both had been on the holy mount in the visions of God. And now they came, endowed with glorified bodies before the rest of the dead, to hold converse with the Lord on that sublime event, which had been the great central subject of all their teaching, and solemnly to consign into His hands, once and for all, in a symbolical and glorious representation, their delegated and expiring power.—Alford.
Moses now admitted to the Land of Promise.—Moses had not been permitted when alive to enter the land of promise; but here we see him brought into it to do homage to Christ.
Preparation for Death.—When, in the desert, He was girding Himself for the work of life, angels of life came and ministered unto Him; now, in the fair world, when He is girding Himself for the work of death, the ministrants come to Him from the grave—but from the grave conquered—one from that tomb under Abarim, which His own hand had sealed long ago; the other from the rest into which he had entered without seeing corruption. There stood by Him Moses and Elias, and spake of His decease. And when the prayer is ended, the task accepted, then first since the star paused over Him at Bethlehem, the full glory falls upon Him from heaven, and the testimony is borne to His everlasting Sonship and power—“Hear ye Him.”—Ruskin.
Witnesses to Immortality.—Here we have two thoroughly trustworthy witnesses, in Moses and Elias, that the dead are not dead, and that those who die in faith only pass out of this poor, wretched life into a better.—Luther.
Recognition in Another World.—St. Peter knows and recognises Moses and Elias, whose features he had never before seen. Perhaps we have here an intimation of the fact that saints in glory will know each other.
Luke 9:31. “Spake of His decease.”—
(1) The adoring gratitude of glorified men for His undertaking to accomplish such a decease;
(2) their felt dependence upon it for the glory in which they appeared;
(3) their profound interest in the progress of it;
(4) their humble solaces and encouragements to go through with it; and
(5) their sense of its peerless and overwhelming glory.—Brown.
“Decease.”—The striking word “departure” which St. Luke uses, and which is here translated by “decease,” suggests ascension rather than death. It is doubly significant, as being both an appropriate term in the case of the Son of God, and as alluding to the new exodus in which He delivers all who believe in Him from worse than Egyptian bondage. There is something deeply tragic in the allusion to Jerusalem—“the city that slays the prophets” (chap. Luke 13:33).
Luke 9:33. “Good for us to be here.”—The words contain an admixture of truth and error.
I. Truth: a recognition of that wherein felicity consists—in a vision of the Redeemer’s glory, and in hearts aflame with love and joy.
II. Error: a certain tinge of carnal self-love, and great ignorance of that which is needed to fit us for everlasting happiness. The vision is a means, and not an end; it is given to prepare for tribulations, and to sustain the disciples under them—to strengthen them for self-denying service.
“Three tabernacles.”—His desire was foolish, because—
I. He did not comprehend the design of the vision.
II. He absurdly put the servants on a level with their Lord.
III. He proposed to build fading tabernacles for men who had been already admitted to the glory of heaven and of the angels.—Calvin.
Luke 9:33; Luke 9:40; Luke 9:45. Three Incapacities.—
1. Speech without knowledge.
2. Action without power.
3. Hearing without understanding.
Luke 9:34. Fearing as they entered the Cloud.—Men are impatient of clouds, and are slow to learn their uses, until they get a period of unbroken sunshine. Men do not see much in the clouds; they are generally unwelcome visitors. They are not ready to learn that clouds are often the bearers of blessings, and harbingers of good.
I. They are slower still to learn the revealing power of clouds. Job said, “Men do not see the bright light that is in the clouds.” “In the clouds”; not fringing the clouds, but in them. We look for light by the dispersion of clouds; God’s greatest sons have looked for it in the heart of clouds. When God gave the law, He did it amid clouds and thunderings. At the heart of the densest cloud was God Himself, and it was from the midst of that cloud that Moses came with his face reflecting a glory greater than the glory of the sun. These three apostles on the mount were not afraid of the glory of the Transfiguration and the brightness of that light that touched the summit upon which they stood: they were only afraid of the darkening cloud into which they were called to enter. They had no idea that there was a burden of glory, but had a very keen conception of the burden of darkness. Paul exclaimed, “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.”
II. In such circumstances as this the cloud very often reveals more than the glory. I know it is hard to believe it. You will remember that in Eden it was in the cool of the evening that our first parents heard the voice of God—just when the shadows were lengthening, and the brightness of the day was departing, and the darkening hour was drawing near, so full of solemnity, because so full of subdued light suggestive of mystery. And we may follow that a little further, and sometimes find that when the darkness is thickest round us, and we can see nothing, God often reveals Himself to us as He does not when our vision is distracted by the beauties of creation around us. We have seen Jacob ascending the hill as the night gathered and the darkness descended, and laying his head upon a stony pillow to sleep, and when asleep having a grander vision than he ever could in his waking hours. We see too much sometimes to see at all. The world with its thousands of objects, while all given to us that we may see them, very often fail to give us the truest sights; and the night must come and the darkness gather round us, so that, closed in with God, we may have some revelation we had not in the glaring and blinding day.
III. They, however, feared simply because they did not know the capacity of the cloud to teach them the lesson they needed to learn. It was in the cloud that they learnt to give undivided attention to what Christ had to tell them; and His first command was to keep the memory of that revelation to themselves, and meanwhile to come down, in the inspiration of it, to the foot of the hill, and there heal one of the world’s sufferers. The people at the foot of the hill should be better for the Transfiguration at its summit.—Davies.
Luke 9:35. “My beloved Son: hear Him.”—Two titles bestowed on Christ.
I. Beloved Son—as distinguished from servants like Moses and Elijah.
II. The supreme and only Teacher of His Church.
Luke 9:36. “Jesus was found alone.”—Moses and Elias vanish. Christ is left alone. The law and the prophets were for a time, but the gospel remains for ever to the end.