Beloved, let us ascend the mountain together. Let us ascend, although our feet are tired from traveling, our hearts heavy with sleep, our souls weary from the world’s incessant demands. Let us ascend. “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go up to the House of the Lord. And now our feet are standing, within your gates, O Jerusalem.” Here, in the thin air of divine encounter, we stand on holy ground, we witness a glory that defies our expectations; that explodes our carefully constructed notions of worthiness and striving.

Suddenly, we awaken. We gaze on Christ Transfigured, His face ablaze with celestial light, His garments shimmering with otherworldly radiance. In seeing His face transformed, we find ourselves transfigured. His Let us pause. Let us breathe. Let us allow the suffocating tendrils of our own expectations to fall away, withering in the presence of Love incarnate.

Oh, how long we have labored under the illusion that we must earn love! But here it is, burning before us. How long we have toiled, believing that our acceptance hinges upon our performance, our adherence to rules, our ability to present an unblemished facade to a God we are oddly eager to imagine as a stern taskmaster. But here, in the dazzling light of the Transfiguration, these misguided notions dissolve like mist before the rising sun.

Beloved, hear the Father’s voice echoing across the cosmos: “This is my Son, my Chosen One. Listen to Him!” Not “Strive harder!” Not “Prove yourselves worthy!” Not “Bow before Him!” Not even, “Believe!” But simply, “Listen.” Listen! In this divine proclamation, we find rest, we find identity, we find unshakeable belonging.

Peter, James, and John awoke from their slumber to behold Christ’s glory, and we too are invited to awaken. To rub the sleep of legalism from our eyes and behold the breathtaking reality of grace. This awakening is not a striving, but a surrender. Not a climbing, but a falling. A falling into the arms of Love.

In the light of the Transfiguration, we see our own transfiguration – not a change we effect through herculean effort, but a metamorphosis birthed by beholding. We gaze on the radiant face of Christ, and – in ways we can’t explain, understand, or account for – we find ourselves changed. We find our hearts expanding, our burdens lifting, our shame dissipating in the warm glow of His unfailing love, His unwavering, unconditional acceptance.

Beloved, let us lay down the heavy yokes we’ve fashioned for ourselves. The ceaseless striving, the anxious performing, the relentless self-improvement projects – all these we release at the feet of our transfigured Lord. For in His Light, we see light: the Light that shines upon us to reveal the fact that we are already loved, already accepted, already enough, already held in an embrace that will never let us go.

This is the exodus that Christ accomplishes – not a journey from one place to another, but a radical liberation from the tyranny of self-salvation projects. He leads us out of the Egypt of our own making – out of the desperate attempt to prove our worth, to earn our belovedness, to win our place – and brings us into the promised land of grace.

Yet we know, from the scope of the Gospel, that the Mount of Transfiguration is the beginning of the Way of the Cross. In the valley of life, beloved, suffering and pain will come. Darkness will threaten to engulf us. The weight of the world’s brokenness will press upon our shoulders, and we may find ourselves crying out, “Where are you, God? What did I do wrong to deserve this?” The temptation will be great to search our lives for some failing, some misstep that has brought this pain upon us. We may be inclined to interpret our suffering as a sign of God’s absence or displeasure.

But having glimpsed the transfigured Christ, we carry His light within us. This light does not blind us to the reality of pain, nor does it offer glib answers or easy escapes. Instead, it illuminates a deeper truth: God’s love for us remains steadfast and unchanging, even in our darkest hours. The light of the Transfiguration shines backward and forward, encompassing both the glory of the mountaintop and the agony of the cross.

In our deepest anguish, in our most profound confusion, we cling to this unshakeable truth: we are beloved. Not because of what we’ve done or failed to do, but because of who He is. The God who spoke from the cloud, who shone with unearthly brilliance, is the same God who enters into our suffering, who weeps with us, who bears our griefs and carries our sorrows.

This is the mystery and the wonder of the Gospel: that the God of glory is also the God who suffers. In Christ, we see that our pain is not a punishment, nor is it a sign of God’s absence. Rather, it becomes the very terrain upon which grace blossoms in resurrection power. Our wounds become windows through which the light of divine love shines most brightly.

We need not seek out suffering, for life provides enough of that on its own. Nor do we need to paste on a smile and pretend that all is well when it is not. Instead, we are invited to bring our raw, unvarnished pain into the presence of the transfigured Christ. To allow His light to penetrate our darkness, not to erase it, but to transform it. In this light, we find the strength to echo the apostle Paul’s bewildered yet hopeful cry: “We do not know why we cannot do the good we want to do, or why we do the very thing we hate. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ!” This victory is not an escape from suffering, but a profound assurance of God’s presence and love in the midst of it.

Beloved, in our pain, in our confusion, in our doubt – we are not alone. The light of Christ’s transfigured face shines upon us, revealing our unshakeable identity as God’s cherished children. This is the light that the darkness cannot overcome, the love that suffering cannot diminish, the grace that failure cannot exhaust.

So let us descend the mountain changed, our hearts ablaze with the wonder of grace. Let us move through the world as awakened ones, our eyes open to the glory that surrounds us, our hands open to receive and to give this inexhaustible love. For we have seen His glory, full of grace and truth, and from His fullness, we have all received grace upon grace.

Beloved, in Christ, we are transfigured. We are beloved. We are free. Let us rest in this radiant grace, and watch as it illuminates every corner of your existence, transforming you from glory to glory.

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

John 6:35

The Bread of Life has come down from heaven.

The Bread of Life has come down from heaven!

Oh, let us hear it again: the Bread of Life. Has come down. From heaven.

Can you feel it? Can you grasp it? Can you let it take hold of you? The very sustenance of the universe, the bread of angels; a supersubstantial nourishment that can feed our eternal souls and bind up our broken hearts, has taken on flesh and dwelt among us. This is no mere metaphor, no poetic flourish – this is the raw, pulsing heart of reality itself.

From the whispered promises in Eden, rising up like a mist from the ground, to the manna falling like dewdrops in the wilderness; from the widow’s never-empty flour jar to the Bread of the Presence that sustained David’s rebel band; from miraculous feast for five thousand to the eternal wedding feast of the Lamb; the story is always, has always been the same. God, in His relentless, reckless love, is about the business of feeding His people. But now – oh glorious now! – the symbol has become substance, the shadow has given way to light, and the Bread of Life stands before us with arms outstretched.

In Him, we find a feast that never ends, a table that’s always set, a welcome that never wavers. In Him, all the families of the earth are blessed, drawn in, from the East and from the West, from the North and from the South, because He has been lifted up from the earth; because this Grain of Wheat has fallen to the ground and died; because it has grown up and borne much fruit, and been ground afresh and baked into this One Bread that is his One Body. This is grace upon grace, love heaped on love, mercy flowing like rivers in the desert. With every morsel we taste, every crumb we gather, we are drawn deeper into the heart of the Divine.

And here’s the beautiful paradox: as we are fed, we become bread for others. As we are nourished, we become nourishment. Like the food which a nursing mother eats, which is transformed within her into the feast of love that sustains her suckling child, the love that fills us to overflowing spills out of us, spalshing wastefully on an irredeemably parched earth; yet all at once feeding a hungry world. We who were once scattered like grains on the hillside, are gathered and ground by grace, kneaded by mercy, and baked in the fiery love of God to become one loaf – the very Body of Christ in the world.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Come to the feast, you who are weary and heavy-laden. Come, you who hunger for righteousness. Come, you who thirst for love that will never run dry. The table is set, the bread is broken, and the cup overflows. Here, in this holy meal, heaven touches earth, eternity kisses time, and we are remade in the image of Love itself.

Let us marvel at this mystery, let us revel in this grace. For in the breaking of the bread, we find ourselves made whole. In the sharing of the cup, we find our hearts expanded. And in the simple act of eating and drinking together, we find ourselves caught up in the very life of God – a life of unending love, of radiant grace, of astonishing, world-transforming power.

This is the feast that never ends, the love that never fails, the grace that never runs dry. This is the Bread of Life, come down from heaven. Take, eat, and be forever changed.

Grace is a great and terrible paradox. Although hidden, it is ever-present. Beyond our grasp, it is intimately close. Being unearned, it is not right to presume or expect it, and yet it is poured out with a reliability that exceeds our receiving even of what we do justly deserve. Like a game of divine hide-and-seek, grace invites us by the troubling fact of its present absence to engage more fully, look deeper, and experience the thrill of discovery; to seek with wonder and awe, rather than with anxiety or shame. “If with all your hearts you truly seek me, ye shall ever surely find me,” saith our God.

The playfulness of grace is not trivial. It speaks, rather, to the nature and depth of God’s desire for relationship with us. Like a parent playing peekaboo with a child, delighting in the joy of each “revelation,” so too God seems to delight in our discovery of His presence in a world around us where he seems to be absent; to be found by us, shrouded in “clouds and thick darkness.” There is no glory – no fun! – for Him in being revealed in the merely glorious. He delights in being discovered in ruination and disaster. He shrouds Himself in a form in which there is no beauty nor comeliness that we would desire Him, indeed, a visage nearly too terrible to look upon.

Grace permeates existence. Even in moments of doubt or darkness, when the Divine seems most distant, grace is there. It is the very air we breathe, the ground beneath our feet, the steady rhythm of a beating heart. It doesn’t require earning or performance. It simply is, hidden in plain sight, waiting to be noticed and received. In it, we live, and move, and have our being.

The Gospel, viewed through this lens, is not a set of doctrines to be believed or propositions to be accepted, but an adventure to be embarked upon. It is an invitation to dive deep into the mystery of divine love, to lose oneself in the unutterable, immeasurable riches of grace. No one needed to tell the man who had found a treasure hidden in a field to go sell all that he had to buy it. He went with joy. With joy! His feet were carried on wings of desire. His heart pounded with all the passion of a lover, whose instincts attach themselves to the possible impossibility that there might somehow, some way be a way to attach himself, to unite himself to the object of his love, if he only throws himself into it with utter self-forgetfulness and abandon. 

But such is our forgetfulness, that we forget it is His idea, and we (being fools) think that WE must pierce in into the veil, that WE must run, WE must persist, forgetting that He has hidden Himself for the sheer delight of His Love. This is the strangeness of it! That even His hiddenness is a pursuit of US! O what wonder, what strangeness is this! But this is the length, the breadth, the height, the depths of His love, that is beyond any boundary or boundlessness. “O where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence?”

We have a strange way of transforming everything into a law. But how can there be a law in this? That God is so delighted to delight in us? That He laughs, whose throne is in heaven; that He desires to play thus with us? That it is He who pursues us, with the vigor of a Lover whose Love is spelled in stars and galaxies, in the ceaseless dance of quarks and atoms, hidden in every strange dance of love and loss, desire and discovery? Every strange motion of reality is His, and every cadence, a part of this one, secret ineffable poetry, whose theme is our Belovedness, a Belovedness so deep and so secure that He has fully poured out His Blood for it, turned Himself inside out, given Himself over to destruction, and defeated death and hell and all the terrors of nonbeing to transform our mortality into ever being capable of ever-receiving the ever-unending, molten magnitude of all the rapids and cataracts of the sweet ceaseless tides of HIs all-creating, all-sustaining ominamor.

To be sure, it’s discomfiting to think that we are “toyed with” by God. These are not encouraging thoughts when we find ourselves in our deepest pits and lowest hells, when we are perched upon the dungheap of the destruction of all our dreams and desires. Often we feel ourselves the victim of fate or circumstance – at best! if we are able to crawl out from under the suffocating intuition that we might in fact be directly and immediately under the flame of some sort of sadistic Divine persecution; our troubling suspicion that God – for some reason – likes to watch us squirm. “Like a moth, you eat away all that is dear to us! … O turn your gaze from me, that I may be glad again, before I go my way and am no more.” And again, “Why do you hide your face and consider me your enemy?”

But these are exactly the words we are given to cry out! We are given – it is a gift!! – groans unutterable; a grief that seizes, our heart, our mind, our soul, our whole being. The invitation is not to some project of self-improvement, or even peacemaking with the terrors of existence. In fact, the impulse of terror and the impulse of love are one and the same, one torrent, one ecstasy, one experience of being utterly torn apart and reconstituted by the all-suffusing, incomprehensible, and unbearable Beauty that hides itself in the heart of existence.

In this way, even atheism itself is a gift from God – that we would be graced to descend to such a place of utter meaning-evacuating, reality-bending depths of paradox, as to deny that the life with which we curse our life has source or cause. God loves us, not only in our unlovability, but in our unloving, when we rail, with every fiber of our being, against Goodness and Truth and Beauty itself; when we with fervor deny, not only that these things exist, but that they are even possible; when we swear in our anger, that even if they did exist (which – just to be absolutely clear – we do not believe), we would mercilessly and recklessly and with full, ruthless abandon pursue them and tear them apart. 

There we are, in the midst of the storm, struggling all night, in our little tempest-tossed boat (for it is shortly before dawn) against the wind and the waves, bearing His terrors with a troubled mind. We are not comforted – we are terrified! – to see that figure walking upon the water; His familiar face, luminous and serene. It must be a ghost! It must be a demon! A lie! A delusion! He comes to us: and we cannot stop our struggles, even to look up and contemplate this coming vision; if we let go, even for a moment, we will be submerged in these darkcrashing terrors; the thunders, and the lightnings of this darksome night will tear us full apart. 

He comes to us, and it is as though He is going to pass us by. As though He would add His impassivity to the impassivity of all nature, and all humanity: no one cares about our little storms, and our struggles. This is not a global flood, but a tempest, as it were, in a teapot; a little weather system, over a little lake, in a little corner of the world, appearing in no almanac, unknown and unnoticed. And God is in it, and God is through it, and God is present to us here, in spite of all this? In spite of both the struggle, and the smallness?

Yes. Yes, Beloved. Yes. The Lord is here. Here. Even here. Especially here. His Spirit is with us.

This is precisely the full playfulness of theophany. That the Lord is not in the wind nor the earthquake. That he would hide us in the Rock, and pass us by, and allow us to see the backside of His Glory as it recedes, in its strange, unknown, and unknowable majesty, before which we remove our shoes and veil our faces.

What actually IS good news is this: Jesus Christ will reign! If He even reigned for 5 minutes, that would probably be historically good news.