In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The Transfiguration of Jesus is one of those events from the life of Christ that doesn’t always get talked about nearly as much as it probably should. Lots of people remember how our Lord healed the sick, raised the dead, and walked on water, but my guess is that not too many of them could tell you about the time when He was transfigured in front of His disciples and what that was even about. And yet, Saint Peter, who was there and saw it happen, tells us that this was a pivotal moment in Jesus’ earthly ministry and a basic building block of our Christian faith. As he writes in our Epistle lesson today from 2 Peter chapter 2, “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made know to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitness of His majesty. For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to Him by the Majestic Glory, ‘this is my believed Son, with whom I am well pleased,’ we ourselves heard this very voice borne from heaven, for we were with Him on the holy mountain.” According to Saint Peter, the Transfiguration of Jesus was a very big deal.

So, why did it even happen, and what was the point of Him even doing it? I think our hymn of the day sums it up for us really well: “O wonderous type! O vision fair of glory that the Church may share, which Christ upon the mountain shows where brighter than the sun He glows.” When Jesus transfigured Himself in front of His disciples, He did it to show us the future glory that awaits us as God’s people. He changed His appearance and gave us a glimpse of His majesty in order to remind us of what is waiting for us in heaven and how it is that we get there.

People speculate all of the time about what heaven is like. But we don’t figure any of that out through speculation, we do it by paying close attention to the written Word of God. And in the account of the Transfiguration, God’s Word gives us several important details.

First, it reminds us that in heaven our bodies will be glorified. What happened to the body of Jesus when He went up on the mount of transfiguration? Our text tells us that His face shined like the sun, and that His clothes became white as light.  If you remember, that’s the exact imagery that the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation use to describe the saints of God in heaven. They stand before the throne of the Lord clothed in white robes and shine like the brightness of the stars forever and ever. Saint John even tells us explicitly that on the Last Day, when Christ returns in glory, we will be like Him. He writes in 1 John chapter 3, “What we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as He is.” 

Jesus showed Himself “as He is” for a brief moment during His Transfiguration. For just a split second He didn’t hide any of His glory, but revealed all of it completely to His disciples. And when Jesus did that, He showed us the glory that awaits us too.

Eternal life in heaven will not be just a spiritual existence. We won’t float around on the clouds in some dismembered reality like a phantom or a ghost. Rather, the same bodies that God gave us in this life, He will raise again to new life. The only difference is that He will restore our bodies and make them entirely new. God will glorify our bodies just like He glorified the body of Jesus.

Think about what that means for your body. Are there things that you suffer from in this life that make it very difficult on you? Do you have high blood pressure, diabetes, or cancer? Do your knees and joints not work the way that they used to, and do you pretty much hurt all of the time? Do you struggle with depression, anxiety, or feelings of loneliness and despair. Whatever causes you pain in your body or mind, Jesus will take away from you, when He restores your body and mind in heaven. That’s what He showed you when He transfigured Himself in front of His disciples. When He changed His body, He was making a promise about what He would one day do for your body too.

Another thing that the Transfiguration of Jesus reminds us about heaven is who will be there with us. We won’t just be there by ourselves, but we will enjoy the full company of God’s elect. In the Creed, that’s what we call the “communion of saints.” It goes hand in hand with the forgiveness of sins and the resurrection of the body. Peter, James, and John, weren’t the only ones with Jesus on the mount of His Transfiguration. Moses and Elijah were there too. Besides demonstrating to us that everything in the Law and the Prophets points us Christ, their presence also showed us what it would be like for us when we are with Christ in eternity. We will know one another and they will know us. We will be able to recognize each other and tell exactly who everyone is. Not only will that be the case for our own loved ones who died in the faith a long time ago, but also for other Christians that we’ve never even met before. 

The apostle Peter had never seen Moses and Elijah before in his life. He had no idea what they looked like. But at the Transfiguration of Jesus, he was able to tell who they were immediately. That’s how it will be for us too. When we are raised from the dead, and experience the fullness of the communion of the saints, we will be united with all those who died in Christ in such a way where we will have perfect knowledge of who they are. The same people that we have fellowship with now through faith, we will see face to face. We will meet Abraham and his son Isaac. We will greet Mary and her husband Joseph. We will visit with King David and get to talk with Saint Paul. There will be a happy reunion for us with every believer whom we’ve ever known and loved. From our parents and grandparents who first taught us the faith, to those little children that we committed to the Lord through prayer and lost before we could ever watch them grow in their faith. The full family of God will be present. And we will be able to tell who everyone is. Just like Peter, James, and John knew Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration, Jesus promises that we will know one another in the Resurrection.

And lastly, everything that we need to know about heaven is summed up for us in the words that God the Father spoke to Jesus from the cloud. He said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” There are lots of things about eternal life that we don’t know, because God hasn’t revealed them to us. But what we do know is that we will have God’s never-ending blessing and favor. The Lord will look at us, and we will look at Him, and both us will be happy with what we see.

The reason why we aren’t always satisfied with what we see in this life is because this life is filled with sin. We do things that hurt one another and ourselves and that causes us pain. Even the way that we think has been distorted by our sinful nature. But when we are with the Lord someday in heavenly bliss all of our sin will gone. The sin that Jesus already forgave, He will remove from us completely. We won’t even be able to fall into sin anymore, because our sinful nature won’t even exist. We will be the way that God intended us to be from the very beginning, the way that He already promises to treat us now because of Jesus. His Divine image, which was lost to us in the Fall, and renewed within us partially at our Baptism, will be restored to us fully, and we will live perfectly as His beloved children with whom He is well pleased. That’s what Jesus showed us on the mount of Transfiguration. When He changed His appearance, and made His face shine as bright as the sun, He gave us a picture of the future glory that awaits His Church. He made a promise to us, and to all believers, of what things would like be for us in heaven. 

But not only did Jesus show us what heaven would be like at His Transfiguration, more importantly, He also showed us how to get there. It wouldn’t do us any good to know what things are like in heaven, if we didn’t know how to get there. Lots of people still don’t. If they even believe in heaven at all, they usually think that getting there is a reward for being a good person. They think that we earn it by the nice things that we do for others. But that’s not how the Bible says you get into heaven. You don’t get there by the good works that you do for God or for other people. You get there by trusting in the perfect work that Jesus Christ did for you.

Again, what did the voice from heaven say at the Transfiguration of Jesus? It didn’t just say, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” It said, “listen to Him.” That’s how you get to heaven. That’s how you obtain all of the wonderful things that Jesus showed us at His Transfiguration. You get them by listening to the voice of Jesus and believing His Word. As Jesus Himself tells us in John chapter 10, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them… I give them eternal life and they will never perish.” We receive salvation as free gift of God through faith in what Jesus accomplished on our behalf.

Yes, heaven is wonderful place. But it would not be possible for us to go there, if Jesus did not first go through hell. That’s why our Lord did not let Peter build those tents for Himself, Moses, and Elijah. Even though Peter was right when he said, “Lord, it is good that we are here,” he wasn’t right about how that happens. It doesn’t just happen automatically. People don’t just go to heaven and get to live with God forever just because. In order for us to have the things that Jesus revealed on the mount of His transfiguration, He had to go down from that mountain and carry His cross up another. He had to suffer and die for our sins and make atonement for them. And because Jesus did that, now, we can stay in God’s presence forever. Now, we can go to heaven.

The very last thing that we are told about the Transfiguration is that after it was over the disciples lifted up their eyes and saw Jesus only. That’s the most important detail from our text today. It gives a perfect summary of how we should live our lives on this side of glory, if we want to live someday in the never-ending glory of God. We keep our eyes fixed on Jesus. We don’t trust in our own merit. We don’t rely on our own works. We put our faith in Christ. When our sins trouble us, and our consciences accuse us, we look to the Lord for mercy and grace. We bring our guilt and our shame to Jesus, fall down before Him in humble repentance, and He says to us the same thing that He once said to His disciples, “Rise, and have no fear.”

You don’t need to be afraid of whether or not you’ve done enough to go to heaven. You haven’t. But Jesus has. Through His Transfiguration He foreshadowed your salvation. Through His death and resurrection, He accomplished it. And through the preaching of His Word, He promises it. So, keep your eyes fixed on Christ. Keep looking at Jesus only and the glory that He showed will be yours to share one day too. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.