SKENE 19: "Let us make three tents"

“It is good for us to be here”, Peter said, and this suggests that his motive in offering to make “three tents” was to preserve this unique and amazing experience, terrifying though it was, and to make it permanent. The irony, though, is that, as we have seen, the fundamental feature of a tent is its impermanence. The disciples were called not to live on the mountain-top bathed in God’s glory, but to go back down and take the gospel of the glorified Christ to a dying world – whose most immediate representative was a man with a demon-possessed son. The impulse to build tents, or booths, perhaps stemmed from the Feast of Tabernacles, which we looked at earlier, intended as a yearly reminder to the Israelites of the 40 years they spent in tents as they wandered in the wilderness. Here, then, is another irony, verging on the comic, that Peter should suggest building a tent for Moses to remind him, in case he should have forgotten, of his home in the Sinai desert. No less ironical is the idea that Moses and Elijah, who were presumably present in their resurrection bodies, freed now from the limitations of their physical, earthly ‘tents’, would appreciate being housed in one again. But the profoundest irony concerns the transfiguration itself. Both Matthew and Mark say that “Jesus was transfigured in front of them”. The Greek verb used here could be translated, and almost transliterated, ‘metamorphosed’. This verb is formed from the noun ‘morphe’, which means not only ‘outward appearance’ or ‘form’, but also someone’s ‘inner reality’ or ‘nature’. The word is used twice in Paul’s great passage on the incarnation in Philippians 2 (perhaps a quotation from an early Christian hymn or creed). First, he says that Jesus was “in the ‘morphe’ of God” (v.6), that is, God in his very nature, in his inmost essence; but he goes on to say that “he emptied himself and took the ‘morphe’ of a servant” (v.7) – the suffering servant prophesied by Isaiah – and the “outward appearance”, or “likeness” (two different words in Greek) of a man. It is, perhaps, worth noting that ‘morphe’ itself can be, slightly, metamorphosed: the variant form is ‘morphosis’, and this, too, Paul uses twice (Rom 2.20, and 2 Tim 3.5), each time referring to an ‘outer appearance’ (of “knowledge and truth”, and “piety”) which is deceptively different from the inner reality. Paul’s use of a different word in this context gives added point to his use of ‘morphe’ in Philippians 2: Jesus’ outer appearance, his human character, and his essential deity were in perfect harmony – his servanthood a wonderful expression of his Godhead. At the transfiguration, then, what we might call his ‘servant morphe’ was transcended by his divine ‘morphe’, and something of the awesome light of his deity shone through the ‘tent’ or ‘veil’ of his human form. So “his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matt 17.2); “his clothes became glowing white – too much !” (Mark 9.3); and in Luke’s version (9.29) “the appearance of his face was different, and his clothing white like a shaft of lightning”. This last phrase is just a single participle in Greek. Luke uses the same basic verb (to ‘lighten’, as in ‘lightning’) to describe the clothing of the two angels who greeted the women at the tomb on resurrection morning; their clothes, too, ‘shone like lightning’ (Luke 24.4) – but in our passage he compounds the verb with the preposition ‘ex’ to give it ‘extra’ emphasis, for, as Hebrews tells us (1.4) “Jesus is much superior to the angels”. Luke also gives us the valuable detail that the transfiguration happened “while he was praying”: Jesus had, as it were, gone through the veil into his Father’s presence in the heavenly sanctuary, and so was reflecting his light; perhaps this is one of the reasons that he normally “went off to a solitary place” to pray, as in Mark 1.35. But, as we have seen, where Jesus our ‘forerunner’ has gone, we too may follow: we, too, can be ‘transfigured’, or ‘metamorphosed’. Paul uses this word, too, twice. In Romans 12.2 he tells us not to be “conformed to this world”, but to be “‘metamorphosed’ by the renewing of the mind”; and in a passage more directly relevant to the transfiguration and to Jesus at prayer, he states that, unlike the Israelites at Sinai who could not endure the divine radiance of Moses’ face on his return from the mountain, we Christians, as we gaze into the mirror of Christ through the ministry of his Spirit “are being ‘metamorphosed’ from glory to glory” – the glory of the transfigured Christ (2 Cor 3.18). So Peter’s offer to make a ‘tent’ for Jesus is ironic in at least two ways. A remark is unconsciously ironic when the speaker does not realise the full significance of what he is saying, as Luke remarks of Peter here (9.33). Firstly, he is unwittingly aligning himself with the Israelites at Sinai, who could not endure the radiance of Moses’ face, so that he had to put a veil over it. Jesus has, momentarily, lifted the veil separating the ‘first’ and ‘second’ tents, so that something of the glory of his Father can shine through; it is as though Peter is suggesting that he should go back into ‘his’ tent, and let the veil down again. He has just acknowledged Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt 16.10), but the full significance of this insight has not yet worked its way into his thinking: Jesus as human friend and teacher is easier to live with and respond to than Jesus as God in all - or even some of – his glory. Still less has he realised that, just as God lived among his people in the wilderness in the Tabernacle, so now he is living among them in the Tabernacle that is Jesus: to offer to build a tent to house a tent shows that, indeed, “he did not know what he was saying”. In the fullness of time, however, and through the illuminating ministry of the Spirit, the apostles came to understand these truths, so that Peter’s words are recorded in the synoptic gospels from the perspective of hindsight. John does not record the transfiguration, but perhaps both his memory of it and his deeper understanding of the ironic significance of Peter’s words are reflected in the verse with which we began this section: “The Word became flesh, and pitched his Tabernacle among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only-begotten Son, who came from the Father full of grace and truth” (John 1.14).