Last Epiphany B February 19, 2012
1 Kg 19:9-18 Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9
What if we for the purposes of this sermon were to call life in the external world, the life of our landscape. And the life inside of us our inscape. How is our landscape related to our inscape? We really cannot ever see inside of us; only surgeons get the most literal physical view of our inside. We can now put mini-cameras everywhere including inside of our bodies. But there is a non-physical inside; the places of feelings and emotions and thoughts that we cannot see. So we inherit from our cultures, religions, societies and families ways of talking about our inscape. We use feeling words and we try to locate seats of feeling and thinking: The head for thinking and the heart for feeling.
In religious language one can find the use of terms from geography, climate and physics to characterize spiritual insights or happenings that occur in our inscape. A mountain top, clouds, light, and space travel are all metaphors that we can find in biblical literature to relate interior events.
In common parlance one might say, “I had a mountain top experience” to characterize an exhilarating moment of the sublime. A view from higher elevation gives one a greater panorama and a different perspective than what one sees in the valley. When one speaks about the experience of mystery and not knowing or not seeing, one uses the metaphor of clouds. The experience of being in the midst of fog or clouds on a mountain is the experience of a loss of perspective because of the loss of visibility. Though we moderns think we invented space travel, space travel of other sorts has been a metaphor for crossing over into the afterlife. Elijah’s chariot of fire ride to heaven stands as the most dramatic way in which a person was Assumed or raised into the afterlife and unlike Jesus, he did not even have to experience a death.
Let us look at the metaphors from our biblical lessons that were appointed for our reading today.
What do we fear when one someone very important leaves this world? We fear the loss of some irreplaceable goodness, genius or excellence. Don McClean’s American Pie song laments about the “day that music died,” referring of course to the plane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa that took the lives of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Richie Valens. And more recently, can we say that music has died with the passing of Whitney Houston? Did it die when Mozart or Beethoven or Bach died many years ago? Indeed we fear the death of genius. Will there is an iphone 16, now that Steve Jobs is gone? Do any of us doubt it?
Elisha was the prophetic protégé of Elijah and he was not sure that there would be prophetic excellence after his mentor was gone. Elijah assured Elisha that the prophetic spirit would remain and be passed on to him and he said as a proof of this Elisha would be able to see his departure from this earth. And after Elijah was gone Elisha began with confidence to exercise his prophetic gifts to prove that the prophetic gifts, like all really good things, cannot die out of this world.
The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were related to the event upon the Mount of Transfiguration. How does the Gospel reading end? “As they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen, until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead.”
The event of the transfiguration of Jesus was before his death and resurrection, but it could only be understood by the Gospel writer in hindsight. And of course, all of the Gospels are about understanding Jesus and his life in hindsight.
What did the Gospel writers understand about Jesus? They understood that he had a type of human genius that surpassed their great heroes of Moses and Elijah. Moses went up a mountain to receive the law from God. His experience on Mount Sinai made his face shine. The prophet Elijah did mighty things upon mountains. The Mount of the Transfiguration is about the disciples trying to sort out their understanding of Jesus. Their encounter with Jesus represents the summit of their life experience. It is an experience of clouds and fog; they are baffled by the mystery of this man Jesus. Peter stammers with perhaps an uncomfortable ignorance. And then there is light: Light on Jesus and light that shines from Jesus. Jesus is an experience of revelation of things hitherto unknown.
But there is also a voice from heaven that says, “"This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” And when that happened, Moses and Elijah had departed. If the disciples had any doubt as to whether Moses and Elijah and their Judaic tradition should keep them from following Jesus, this event was to dispel them of any doubts. And also in this heavenly voice is a message for Gentiles and it would also prove to be a serious political statement as well. God the Father said about Jesus, “This is my Son, the beloved.” People in the time of Jesus knew that Emperor’s son was called a son of a god, divi filius. If people believed that Jesus was the Son of God, this title and belief would be a challenge and an affront to the emperor-worship cult of the time and so it would be a dangerous political confession as well. The resulting persecution of Christians attests to the politics of believing that Jesus was the supreme Son of God.
Beyond the context of the time of Jesus and the times when the Gospels were written, we have to deal with our own time. The trouble in the world threatens us with doubt about the loss of a type of genius that can save and preserve our world, both on the global level and on the personal level. We certainly don’t doubt the loss of genius; what we doubt is how the genius in the gifts of humanity are being used.
How do the gifts of the world get transfigured so that they bless us and the life of the world? How do our gifts get discovered and developed so that we can receive insight to live our lives with wisdom and use our gifts to bless this world?
The lesson for us is to seek transfiguration and walk upon the path of metamorphosis. Repentance is metamorphosis; always seeking to surpass our self in excellence. How can we progressively change ourselves to be more Christ-like and realize more fully what was proclaimed about Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration? How can you and I listen well enough to hear the voice of highest insight tell us, “You are my beloved child.” And isn’t that the purpose of the Gospel, to know ourselves to be sons and daughters of God and go forth and act in a way that shows that we are a member of God’s family with Jesus as our most illustrious sibling? Amen.
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