Visions That Haunt and Inspire: Reflection for a Silent Saturday

Seeing something real and true and how it should be can change a person forever. I take it that is what happened to the disciples who went with Jesus up the mountain that day, that day of the Transfiguration.

“Follow me” on that day meant an appointment with the brilliance of transcendence and immanence powerfully met in Jesus and standing real in their midst. Jesus was revealed as he was and is. 

It was an unimagined-by-human-minds metamorphosis, and for all of them.

It was an experience that demolished whatever images of Jesus they had carried in their minds to that point in their relationship, and left them dazed, amazed, and never the same. Once you’ve been to the mountaintop and met the Maker of the mountain, nothing else but the journey through the world toward the vision of transcendence and immanence powerfully met in His footsteps will do. 

Imagine if you had been there.

Imagine what it would have been like to be visited by this inside view of the luminous mystery of heaven come near. 

Imagine living the rest of your life with this vision that inspires you, haunts you, and, sometimes, yes, in those times when the darkness is so strong and the memory of that interlude on the mountain so dim, even depresses you. Once you have touched and tasted the glory of God, nothing else compares. You’ve had your high, your brilliant moment, and now all you have is faith — which, as we learn as we grow up in Jesus, will be enough. Even the darkness can be our friend when it pushes us to yield finally to the life of faith.

Faith when it is faith in Jesus is enough. Faith in the person and presence of God-in-Christ is enough. Faith in Jesus, in whose presence the disciples had stood amazed, was enough to keep them going and doing what Jesus had taught them, practicing His “In-remembrance-of-Me” faith, telling the good news of God-come-among-us.

Faith kept them going through long journeys, difficult trials, and kept some of them enduring through persecution and crucifixions. It was faith in Jesus, fueled by memory of his presence, his luminous presence, his everyday dusty-sweaty from long walks down ancient roads and intensely compassionate presence, that blazed in them like fire from heaven at times, then flickered only to be rekindled by obedient attention to His “Follow me.”

It kept them going when all was going well and when they stayed awake wondering what in the world had happened to their lives.

They had simply been living their lives, been doing their own thing, simply been minding their own businesses when He showed up. He showed up and said, “Follow me.”

That “Follow me” led them up the mountain where they’d seen beyond their imagining the glory of God in the person of Jesus.

It led them to confront the reality of another mountain, one called Golgotha, too. It was enough to launch them toward incredible journeys embodying His call to become carriers of God’s grace and love to the world, to proclaime with every cell of their beings that Jesus was more than we thought he was, and so are we, children of the Spirit of God being made fit for life beyond life in the kingdom of heaven, a household of love beyond imagining. 

It was vision enough to carry you sorrowing through a Good Friday and a Silent Saturday to a Resurrection Sunday morning full of joy. 

Grace and peace,

B Guffey

(c) 2025