Mountaintop Moments and the Valley of Sacrifice

Have you ever had a mountaintop experience where you didn’t want to leave it? It was such a spiritual high you just wanted to tarry, enjoy it, revel in it? Peter had that experience on the Mount of Transfiguration. He says, “This is time for a celebration. Let’s make a booth, and we’re going to make a little house for Elijah, little house for Moses, little house for Jesus. And we’re all going to stay up here and have a ‘bless me’ party for the rest of our days” (Matt. 17:4). Isn’t it sad that in that moment of transfiguration, where the glory of Christ burst through and God’s voice itself is heard from on high, that the disciples themselves were still thinking strictly in terms of glory and not in terms of suffering? They still had not come to peace with the mission of Christ. They forgot where they were headed, and they were reluctant to go to Jerusalem.

They wanted to stay on the mountain. They didn’t want to be involved in ministry. They didn’t have to work out the concerns of the church, or the ministry of redemption, or a ministry of compassion. They wanted religion for what it would do for them, so that they could bask in spiritual joy and delight on this mountain without any intrusion of duty. But the purpose of the mountaintop experience for them is the same as the mountaintop experience is for us: to send us out of the church and into the world to be participants in the death and in the humiliation of Christ.