February 18, 2007
(Last Sunday after the Epiphany)
Jesus' Exodus
by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer
Exodus 34:29-35 • Psalm 99
• 2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 •
Luke 9:28-36, [37-43a]
(From
The Lectionary Page)
Surely the guys must have had an inkling of what would happen on the mountain. Maybe not the specifics as they would unfold, but these were nice Jewish boys, reared in the stories of their faith. Surely they would have known that when you climb a mountain, you’re not on a pleasant afternoon hike. Mountains are where you go to encounter God, with all of the grandeur, awe and (yes) terror that an encounter with the divine would bring. The stories of Abraham on Mt. Moriah, Moses on Mt. Sinai, Elijah on Mt. Carmel and Mt. Horeb would have made all that pretty clear.
Then, too, much had happened to them by the time this trek began. As chapter nine opens, Jesus has given the disciples power and authority over demons and diseases and sends them out to heal as he has healed. And they do. He has taught the crowds and when the multitude needed to be fed, Jesus has done so with five loaves and two fish. He has asked the disciples who people say that he is and who they say he is, and when Peter identifies him as the Messiah of God, he tells them all in no uncertain terms what Messiahship means – suffering, rejection, death, and resurrection.
And 8 days later, Peter, James and John accompany Jesus to the mountaintop. And they are treated to a theophany to beat all theophanies. The two great heroes of their faith, Moses and Elijah appear with Jesus. Moses, the giver of the Law, the one who led their ancestors out of bondage in Egypt into the Land of Promise. Elijah, the prophet who healed and restored, and gave new life to those who suffered, who endured the fury of rulers in order to preach God’s reconciling truth. Together with them, Jesus discusses his departure – his exodus, as it appears in Greek – which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.
Peter, the spokesperson for the befuddled disciples, makes the ironic suggestion that they build 3 booths, or tents, as it can also be translated. It’s ironic because of course there is no need for more tenting. God himself pitched a tent among us when his Son took on human flesh. The task for the disciples is not to veil the sacred in yet another tent, but to listen to God’s beloved son, God incarnate living among us, tenting among us that we might be most fully restored to God.
That task of listening has not changed in 2000 intervening years for Christ’s disciples. We, too, are called to listen to God Incarnate as he discusses his exodus.
Exodus. Of all the gospel accounts of the Transfiguration, Luke alone uses this word, and I believe there is nothing accidental about it.
The first Exodus, the one we hear about in the second book of the Hebrew Bible, is one of the defining moments for God’s Chosen People. They were providentially led into Egypt to escape a famine. There they thrived and multiplied, there they ultimately were enslaved by the Egyptians. From there they were led out of bondage back to the land of promise. Four hundred years had elapsed between their immigration into Egypt and their departure, their exodus. And so their 40 years in the wilderness was not a time of aimless wandering. It was a time of formation and re-formation. As one preacher cogently put it, it didn’t take 40 years to get the Israelites out of Egypt. Rather, it took 40 years to get Egypt out of the Israelites. In order to leave behind an ethos of slavery and enter into a Covenant with Yahweh, in order to learn to listen to God and to put their whole trust in God’s gracious love, they had to embrace a new way of being, one in which they were entirely dependent upon God for food and water. In order to be the chosen people in the land of promise, they needed to be a different people than they had been in Egypt.
That was the Exodus that Peter, James & John would have known. Jesus, in his journeying to Jerusalem and to the cross, is about to engage another Exodus. It, too, will be a defining and transformative moment. Through his death on the cross, Christ will take away the power of sin and death to hold the final word. He will undergo violence without doing violence in return. He will pronounce forgiveness and not exact vengeance. The Son of God will embrace the role of scapegoat so that all children of God need never scapegoat again. The power of God’s love will triumph over the power of fear and hatred. Resurrected life will triumph over death. Such is the transformative power of the exodus Jesus will accomplish in Jerusalem.
We modern-day disciples do well to listen. The exodus which Jesus will accomplish in Jerusalem, we are still in the midst of. Ours is a continual journey through the sometimes seeming wilderness of transformation. And as with our Hebrew ancestors in the wilderness, we too spend a lifetime learning a new way of being. Our baptismal covenant provides the template for that. Some days we get it. Some days we fail as miserably as the disciples did when they came down the mountain, when they were not able to deliver the boy of the demons that possessed him, when fear or befuddlement or misplaced pride or God knows what gets in the way of doing the ministry that is ours to do. We don’t always get it right, but we need never fear that Christ will abandon us in exasperation. We know by faith that Christ will be with us always to the end of time itself. It is our earthly lives that are limited – far too limited to spend them bogged down in misguided attempts to protect the sacred from the profane – in all the many ways in which we tend to do that – far too limited to let anxiety of any sort impede the ministry we have been given.
Jesus accomplished his exodus in Jerusalem. We are living in to that exodus in our own baptismal journey. Time is short and there is much to do. Are we listening?
Two Beams for the Cross
by The Rev. Dr. Michael Johnston, Scholar-in-Residence
There is a Roman Catholic colleague of mine who says repeatedly that he tries to remind himself –- and tries to remind his congregation in teaching and preaching –- that there are two beams to the Cross, one vertical, the other horizontal. And both are needed as symbol.
The vertical beam directs us upwards, making contact with the divine realm that is outside time and space. But the horizontal beam reminds us of the outward reach of Jesus into the lateral world, the one we live in now. “If,” he says, “the living of our faith were just about that vertical reach toward heaven, we could simply hang the figure of Jesus on a telephone pole.”
I find that metaphor arresting; I’ve probably mentioned it to you before. I also find it an image for the Feast of the Transfiguration. There is no question, in the first instance, that the Transfiguration is about the Transcendent, reaching vertically to make contact with the Divine Realm, outside time and space. In fact, what you’ve got in this text is a salvation history summit conference: Jesus, Moses and Elijah, gathered together on a hilltop, for an Epiphany of the Divine. That much is agreed upon by all the evangelists -- including the altered facial countenance and the dazzling white garments.
The Transfiguration is an apocalyptic incident in the Jesus narrative, a moment when God breaks-in on the story and connects to those who have made the effort to ascend to His presence. The history of Israel is recalled, and the future anticipated: The Law and the Prophets flank the beloved Son, and his radiance speaks of the transformation to come, arcing across the Passion and promising Easter. In fact, most scholars agree that the Transfiguration is an isolated Resurrection Narrative--a spare note card, if you will, in the Evangelists’ files that they’ve inserted back into the life of Jesus.
And this is precisely where Peter would like to stay. “Lord, it is well that we are here. Let us build here three booths; one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” I love that line. Peter is trying to hold-on to some ecstatic vision he’s glimpsed of the divine presence and continuity. He wants to make safe-houses for Jesus. In an latter day, I suspect Peter would have been happy to sit quietly in Church, kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament and telling his rosary: religion being a largely private and vertical affair between the believer and the Divine. And that brings me to the horizontal beam.
One of the most fascinating things about the Transfiguration narrative is that in all three synoptic Gospels it is placed immediately before the story of the Epileptic Boy. Quite frequently, the evangelists will fiddle around with sequence, locating different texts in different places. But not here, and I think that’s significant.
We have just read that the boy with epilepsy is in the midst of a fit, and his distraught Father brings his son to Jesus. The child is possessed by a destructive spirit that “convulses him until he foams at the mouth; it mauls him and will scarcely leave him.” The disciples have tried to cast it out, but with no success. So Jesus is the last resort. And, of course, Our Healing Lord restores the boy to health.
If I were putting together the lectionary cycle, I would make sure that the story of the Healing of the Epileptic was always read right alongside the story of the Transfiguration. Not just “suggested” as it is by the Revised Common Lectionary by being placed in brackets. Because the pair of stories together reminds us that we, like Peter, can’t stay on our Mountains of Transfiguration. We are meant to move, as Jesus does, from Epiphanic Presence to the next bit of Healing Business. Epiphanies are meant to empower for ministry. Jesus, in this narrative sequence, abdicates his heavenly throne in favor of the throes of the world--and bids his disciples do likewise. And that is what is meant by the lateral beam of the Cross.
The renaissance painter Raphael understood about the two beams when he painted this pair of stories together on a single canvas. Most of you know the painting; it’s in the art books. Very famous. I call it a vertical diptych of the Life of Christ and the Life of Discipleship. Life of Christ above; life of discipleship below.
In the upper half of the painting, Jesus is suspended above the Mount of the Transfiguration, wrapped in radiant white light and wearing an expression of beatific detachment. Everything is celestial and serene. Below, at the base of the hill, however, everything is a swirl of color and chaos: the crowd; the convulsing boy, mouth agape, eyes rolled back, twisted torso supported by an anguished father; the disciples frantically gesturing--some in the direction of Jesus, perhaps indicating the source of a cure they had not been able to effect.
Art historians have long puzzled over this work, thinking that
Raphael juxtaposed victory above and defeat below. But there is a
fascinating article by a professor of medicine--and amateur art
sleuth--who argues that the boy in the painting is in the final
phase, not the onset, of a seizure.
His divergent eyes and his open mouth indicate the confusion
following the spasmodic episode of an epileptic incident. Thus,
instead of depicting the boy in the midst of an attack, the artist
shows him coming out of his convulsion.
In short, Raphael renders him cured--victory over victory, not victory over defeat--which is what the power of God, working through Jesus, always accomplishes. And if through Jesus, then also through us. Gospel and canvas agree on this point. Discipleship is not the building of booths for worship, but the tending of the bruises of the world. Godly presence creates transforming power for this life.
Several years ago in Turkey, I visited a region in Central Asia Minor called Cappadocia. It is a wilderness place with rugged terrain wherein the Fathers of the ancient Eastern church hung out in caves, pondering the mysteries of the Holy Trinity –- Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Naziansus.
Cappadocia is volcanic turf, rugged and massive, projecting out of the soil. And there are hundreds of churches, monasteries and entire villages carved out of the tufa. Christians probably began to built them in the 8th century, to escape Islamic invaders. In fact, until 1955, a village of 15,000 Turks still occupied one of the warrens of massive, stone apartment houses, with doors and windows perched high on the volcanic ledges. Your first thought on siting the ruins is “How did they get the groceries up?”
Our first stop in Cappadocia was the so-called Dark Church, and underground monastery dating from probably the 11th century. It cost an extra five bucks above the price of the tour, but the interior was worth every nickel. Once inside, you discover that every surface is covered with the most spectacular Byzantine wall paintings. Not frescoes, like in Italy, but paintings right on the surface of the volcanic rock. Among the most stunning is a depiction of the Transfiguration. In stylized, Eastern form, Jesus stands erect and powerful on the rock of Mt. Hermon.
He is clothed in white and looks serenely down on the viewer. Radiating from him in four directions are four beams of light, pointing to the four corners of the world. He is at the epicenter of a diamond-shaped, brilliant star –- as if the Incarnate Word has become the Star of Bethlehem, which now shines across time, through Lent to the brilliant light of the Empty Tomb. The painting is stunning and the theology is brilliant.
Below the Transfiguration, a little lower and to the right, is the story of the Epileptic Boy, convulsing in the arms of his father, surrounded by the disciples. And Jesus is pointing at the child, calling the demon out. It’s not a part of composition of Transfiguration above, as it is in the Raphael, but it’ on the same wall, clearly done by the same painter. And it took my breath away.
“My God,” I thought, “these stories have been preached –- and painted –- together for centuries. The artists know their texts.”
Christian life, of course, is not just about basking in the moment of the sublime. If not for Peter, then also not for me. Vertical contact may enrich our individual spiritualities, deepen our lives of prayer, and provide transfiguring times of being fully outside ourselves –- as the mystics of Christian tradition will tell us. But it is the horizontal beam of the Cross that calls us back to the world, out into the struggles of being community to a broken humanity.
