Mark 9

What Peter, James, and John see on the mountain cannot be neatly packaged for resale.

Minister and veteran David Peters invites us to consider our own post-traumatic identities in a new light. 

Maybe the shock of Jesus’ words is the point.

The monarchy, celebrity, and true greatness

Peter wants to capture that mountaintop experience forever.

God’s presence transfigures here, now, in the familiar.

Last year I was told I needed to be on a high-sodium diet for medical reasons.

Mystics experience the holy—an experience that enlarges their interest in their fellow humans.

Jesus is pretty clear: we should mind our own spiritual business.

Perhaps the disciples have been captivated by the kind of power embodied by Augustus and Herod.

Strange things are happening on this mountain.

According to Jesus, chances are good that there's not going to be much left of us once we've admitted to just how often stumbling blocks stand in our way. Whether others put them there or we find ways to place them ourselves, they trip us up, keep us from moving forward, get us off track.

Our proclivity for greatness is rather embarrassing, isn’t it? No wonder the disciples keep their mouths shut when Jesus inquires about the topic of their conversation on the road. We want it, and we want it big time—recognition, sway, importance—but we also get that we shouldn’t admit this out loud.

At this point in Mark, stumbling blocks seem a necessary point for conversation. We are good at placing them in others’ paths, and even better at setting them before ourselves.

This week’s Gospel may be the second Passion prediction, but being told that Jesus will be killed is no easier on the second hearing. Maybe the disciples don’t ask questions because they’re afraid it could be true.

For there to be a heresy about the cross, there would have to be an orthodoxy about it. Michael Gorman argues that contentions over how Jesus saves lead to an inadequate grasp of what the Passion means and does.

I love a good mountaintop experience. It’s a moment when everything changes. Insight flares up in the mind, illuminating the moment, the experience, the problem in a whole new way. You’re never quite the same again.  

One such moment for me happened in prayer when I was on a three-day silent retreat.

Let’s build shrines, Peter says. He doesn’t know how to respond to a mystical mountaintop experience, and he’s afraid.