Have any of you had a vision of God? Have you ever had a deep sense of God’s presence with you? Have you ever felt, more deeply than words can express, that Jesus truly is Emanuel, God with us? Have you ever felt that you could see, if only for a moment, through the veil of your ordinary life, into the world as it truly is? In the poem “Snow Geese,” the poet Mary Oliver shares with us one of those moments of extraordinary insight.
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask
of anything, or anyone,
yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was
A flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun
so they were, in part at least, golden. I
held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us
as with a match
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,
but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.
The geese
flew on.
I have never
seen them again.
Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won’t.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
As through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.1
Well sure, you might say, poets have such visions, especially in natural “thin places.” People in the Bible have had such visions, especially the prophets. St. Paul had a profound sense of Jesus’ reality on the road to Damascus. Saints have had visions. Hildegard of Bingen had wonderful visions of God and Jesus. Francis of Assisi founded his order after Jesus came to him in a vision. Julian of Norwich spent twenty years meditating on the visions she had had during a nearly fatal illness. Even Kent Annan, the founder of Haiti Partners, had a vision of building a house in Port au Prince and helping to make life better for today’s Haitians. But we, we ordinary people, we rational, modern, scientifically educated, dull people, we don’t have visions, we don’t sense God’s presence with us that deeply. No? I wonder. Maybe some of us do.
Certainly Peter, James, and John were as ordinary as we are, just as rational, perhaps not as well educated, but just as dull as we are. And yet, led by Jesus, they had a most extraordinary vision on that mountain, a most extraordinary vision of Jesus as he is, a most extraordinary sense of God’s presence. Since Matthew’s Gospel was written more than forty years after the events that it recounts, it’s hard to know exactly what happened to the disciples that day. We do know that the week before this event, Peter had avowed that he believed Jesus to be God’s anointed, the Messiah. When Jesus then began preparing the disciples for what lay ahead of him in Jerusalem, condemnation, death, and resurrection, Peter refused to believe Jesus’ words. Perhaps to confirm Peter’s confession, perhaps to allay Peter’s and the other disciples’ fears, Jesus led the three of them up a mountain where they had an experience that must have defied words – defied words at least until Jesus was raised from the dead. As the story of that event has come down to us, we hear clear echoes of similar events in the Hebrew Bible: the six days, the three witnesses, the white clothes, the cloud, and the mention of tents or tabernacles are all part of Hebrew Bible stories. What is most important, the presence of Moses and Elijah, remind us that, for his disciples, Jesus was the new lawgiver, the new Moses, and the fulfillment of all the visions of the Hebrew prophets.
More than a deeper understanding of Jesus as the new Moses and fulfillment of the old prophecies, the disciples also glimpsed for a moment Jesus’ divine nature. They had a vision! Impulsive Peter, trying to hold onto this vision, began to babble about building dwellings. Then the disciples had an even deeper sense of God’s presence. They felt as if God had surrounded them, interrupted Peter, repeated what had been said at Jesus’ baptism, and commanded them to listen to Jesus. And what was their reaction to this intense experience of God’s presence? What would your experience be? They fell down in terror! But then something truly extraordinary happened. Jesus had compassion on them and touched them. Putting his hand on their shoulders, he told them to stand up and to not be afraid. Then he graciously led them back down the mountain, to Jerusalem, to witness to his death and resurrection, and to create a new community bonded to him.
I believe that for many of us Jesus does leap off the pages of Scripture as God gives us brief glimpses of Jesus’ true nature. I believe that many of us do have intense experiences of God’s presence with us. We may disbelieve such experiences, just as Ebenezer Scrooge did when Marley’s ghost visited him. Do you remember his reaction to Marley? When the ghost asks, "Why do you doubt your senses?" Scrooge scoffs that "...a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheat. You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!" Or we too may be terrified at the prospect of truly encountering God and so stay as far away from God as possible. Martin Luther, the initiator of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, endured profound spiritual anguish in his younger years. The story is told that in the midst of this crisis, he celebrated his first mass as a priest. When he lifted up the bread and wine towards God, now become Christ’s Body and Blood, he was so terrified that he nearly fainted.2 To help him overcome his fear, his mentor removed him from the parish and let him return to study of the Scriptures.
We may disbelieve our senses and discount our visions or our intimations of God’s presence. We may be so terrified of truly encountering God that we too keep as far from God as we can. But we too may also be gifted by God with deeper understanding of who Jesus is, we too may be offered a deeper experience of God’s presence in our lives. And God offers us these gifts for the same reason that God graciously offered them to Peter, James, and John. Visions of Jesus and experiences of God’s presence transform us. When we truly know Jesus as Emanuel, God with us, then we begin to get a deeper sense of how much God loves us. I recently discovered a book called Living Loved by Peter Wallace. It’s a series of meditations on God’s love based on the Gospel of John in Eugene Peterson’s version, The Message. I was going to start working through the meditations as a Lenten discipline, but I decided to start sooner. As meditations like these make God’s deep love for us more and more real, we can hope to be better able to share God’s love with others. And that’s the second reason for God’s gift of visions to us. As we appreciate God’s reality and God’s love for all humanity, we are strengthened for God’s service to others, and we will be better able to appreciate that God’s love extends to all humanity. Most important, our deepened understanding of Jesus as God with us, our deeper sense of God’s nearness and presence in our lives strengthens our trust in God and our hope for the future. The glimpse of Jesus’ true reality that God gives us in the vision of his transfiguration is also a glimpse of what we ourselves might become. This is the core of our hope as Christians: that God in Jesus became what we are, so that we might become what God is.
Any such vision we might have of Jesus, any deeper sense of God’s presence with us, are always gifts of God. Although we can allow ourselves to be open to God in silence and prayer, we cannot compel such deeper experiences of God. God must lead us into them, just as Jesus led the disciples up the mountain. Nor are these experiences ends in themselves. They are always given to us to deepen our faith, uphold us during difficult times, and enable us to draw others into the circle of God’s love. And so we pray for continued vision of Jesus as God with us and continued transformation into Jesus’ likeness. “Lord, change us and we shall be changed, transform us by your love, redeem us by your grace, strengthen us by your presence, that we may move from glory to glory; through Christ our Lord, who with the Holy Spirit reigns with you, O Father, in glory everlasting, Amen.”3
1. Mary Oliver, “Snow Geese,” New and Selected Poems, Vol. 2 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 82-3.
2. Recounted by Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 163-4.
3. David Adam, Clouds and Glory (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 2001), 43.
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