“No Handrails on the Transfiguration”
Genesis 12:1–4a | Psalm 33 | 2 Timothy 1:8b–10 | Matthew 17:1–9
I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Action Park.
Action Park, more commonly known as Class Action Park, was an amusement park in Vernon, New Jersey, that operated from 1978 to 1996 on a safety philosophy best described as optimistic. The State of New Jersey tried to shut it down multiple times. The owner kept reopening it. This continued in roughly the same manner as the Hundred Years’ War, with neither side gaining decisive advantage and everyone accumulating injuries.
The rides were rumored to have been designed by someone who had once read about physics but found it merely a recommendation.
The Wave Pool was known locally as the Grave Pool. Lifeguards rescued an average of thirty swimmers per day. The town purchased additional ambulances to handle the park accidents. That tells you everything you need to know about a place.
Yet people went. Every summer. By the hundreds of thousands.
They went for the same reason people slow down at highway accidents: danger is magnetic, especially when you are fourteen and biologically incapable of believing that statistics apply to you personally. Action Park was one of the last places in the civilized world where you could test yourself against gravity without an adult materializing with sunscreen and a signed waiver.
It felt forbidden. Unsupervised. Slightly illegal.
Which, to a fourteen-year-old, is essentially the definition of sacred.
I visited Action Park once as a teenager. My memory may be a bit hazy, but I’m certain: it was the most magnificent place on earth.
I know this because I was fourteen, and the wonder one has at fourteen has not yet been crushed by insurance premiums, building codes, or meaningful contact with consequences. At fourteen, you do not read warning signs. You do not wonder how competent the fifteen-year-old running the ride actually is. You do not ask why the liability waiver is longer than Leviticus and printed in a font size reserved for pharmaceutical disclaimers that end with the phrase “including death.”
My friend Crazy Eddie’s parents drove us there with the serene disconnection of people who had been sampling the special brownies. Mrs. Potts had packed Band-Aids. This was adorable. The people exiting the park looked like survivors of several rounds with Mike Tyson in his prime. They limped. They bled. Their smiles had more gaps than the Olympic hockey team. They wore the expressions of people who had recently been introduced to electric shock therapy and were still forming opinions about it.
We found this inspiring.
The Alpine Slide was first. A concrete chute down a mountain. You sat in a small wheeled cart and controlled your speed with a lever offering two practical settings: reckless and splat. Splat like a bug on a windshield.
The teenage attendant, whose authority derived solely from being one year older than us and still possessed most of his original skin, delivered his instructions with the resignation of someone who had watched too many ambulances arrive:
“Slow on the curves. Fast on the straightaways.”
I heard: Fast.
The mountain and I had a disagreement shortly thereafter. I lost skin. My elbow and the concrete wall of the third curve reached an understanding that did not favor me.
At the bottom, bleeding modestly but with what I choose to remember as dignity, I did what any sensible fourteen-year-old would do.
I got back in line.
I had evidence. Data. Fresh elbow-based empirical research with a sample size of one and a margin of error of zero. My choices had produced consequences. The consequences were visible. Stitch-worthy.
And yet, back in line.
Not entirely because I was foolish, though foolishness had a significant and perhaps starring role, but because something in me knew that the flight down that mountain, that wind-in-your-face, I-might-meet-God-today descent, was worth the elbow.
Worth the concrete. Worth the blood. Worth every word of the story.
All for fleeting earthly pleasure.
Our first reading offers the story of risk for a greater reward.
God approaches Abram, a man living in Haran with his family, his flocks, and a perfectly adequate set of household gods, and says:
Pack up. Leave everything. Go to a place I will show you.
No address. No itinerary. No Yelp reviews.
And Abram goes.
“Abram went as the Lord directed him.”
One of the most astonishing sentences in all of Scripture. Abram trusted a voice he had no prior relationship with. He left what he knew for what he did not. He walked into the dark with nothing but a promise for a lamp.
Lent begins here. Not with ashes. Not with the desert. But with departure. With the willingness to go. With the transformation that begins the moment we stop negotiating with God and simply move.
In today’s Gospel, three disciples follow Jesus up a mountain, and there he is transfigured before them. His face shines like the sun. His clothes become white as light. Moses and Elijah appear. And the disciples fall on their faces.
Matthew places this scene near the center of his Gospel. Jesus has just told the disciples he must suffer and die. Peter objects and is informed, in terms that would end most dinner conversations, that he is thinking like Satan. Confusion reigns. And then God pulls back the curtain.
They see who Jesus really is.
Moses, the Law. Elijah, the Prophets. All of Israel’s story converging in one radiant person. He is faithful Israel. The new Adam.
And the voice from the cloud says: This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.
Not our fears. Not our expectations. Not our preference for a Messiah who avoids Jerusalem and the cross.
Peter wants to build tents. To stay. To get the glory organized and under administrative control before it does something unpredictable. Peter, like all of us, reaches for the liability waiver on the mountaintop, trying to install handrails on the Transfiguration.
God is not interested.
The cloud comes. The voice speaks. And then it is over. The mountain is just a mountain. The road to Jerusalem is waiting.
They go back down.
Back to confusion. Back to conflict. Back to the cost.
Why? Because knowing God is greater than any thrill ride, any mountaintop moment, any fleeting pleasure. He is worth the cost because he is the greatest prize.
We cannot remain on the mountain. We must get back in line, back into lives of love lived within a world obsessed with power and a narcissistic version of self-actualization. Faith is not pretending the elbow isn’t bleeding or that suffering is unreal. Faith is knowing the cost is real and stepping forward anyway, because we have seen something glorious, and once we have seen it, we cannot pretend the concrete is the whole story.
We are all in Abram’s position.
We have heard the voice, in Scripture, in the Eucharist, in prayer, saying: leave the numbing addictions of this world and its fleeting comforts. Trust what you cannot yet see. Go where I tell you, so that you may discover not the culture’s thin self-actualization, but authentic happiness.
Lent asks a simple and uncomfortable question:
Are we going?
Abram heard a voice and started walking.
Peter saw the glory and still had to descend.
Paul met the risen Christ and still bore the scars.
And we, too, have been called.
Called out of comfort.
Called out of narcissism.
Called out of couch potato Christianity that never leaves the sofa.
Called to follow.
When the road is unclear, follow. When obedience is costly, follow. When the valley is dark and the memory of the mountain feels distant, follow.
Because the One who calls is faithful. The One who shines on the mountain walks beside us in the valley. The One who commands us to listen gave his life so we could hear his voice.
And if we have him, we have enough.
Enough light for the road. Enough mercy for the failures. Enough grace to outlast the grave.
So don’t stay at the top of the mountain wishing for tents. Don’t stay at the bottom nursing old bruises. Don’t stay where you are.
Walk like Abram. Descend like Peter. Trust like Paul. Follow like disciples.
Because the road ends where the glory began.
The Joy of the Gospel 