Last Epiphany A
March 2, 2014
Ex.24:12,15-18,
Ps.99
2 Peter 1:16-21 Matt.
17:1-9
Did you
ever wonder how values in life are formed?
What is it that makes gold a valuable substance? Is it due to the artificiality that arose in
cultures to form the social and psychological value of gold? If an infant has the choice between gold and
bottle of milk; which is more valuable to the infant? But you say, the infant is not educated to
know or appreciate the value of gold. So
value is very contextual and the context also includes the intelligence levels
of the participants.
When we read the words of Holy Scripture we
are reading traditions of how people and events came to have value. Reading the Bible in a serious way involves
understanding some of the symbolic order found therein.
If a man goes up on a mountain called Sinai
and receives laws written by the hand of God and if he returns from the
mountain and his face is shiny bright from being in the presence of the divine,
then you have a story of how and why Moses and Law were important to the people
who received and practiced these laws.
The law within the literary tradition which
derived from the people of Israel was so important to them that the people have
to believe these profound laws had come from some source of inspiration beyond
this earth. And so there is the
tradition of Moses on Sinai receiving the law from God and getting very close
to divinity. Sometimes values arise in discovery of something new and useful and
those who experience such values develop a program to try to explain to
themselves and to others why things are valuable.
The practice of the Law was so marvelous for
the Hebrew people that they needed a story for its genius and the Mount Sinai
story is the story about where heaven meets earth and something of heaven is
given to a mediating agent Moses who then is popular, heroic and remembered because
he is a special contact person with the divine to help deliver the genius of
the law.
The people who had their lives affected by
Jesus of Nazareth did not plan for that to happen. It just did; and the effect of his live upon them did not stop. He and his life and his message were so
significant that the life of Jesus had a domino effect. The successful impact of Jesus upon the lives of his followers was being
passed on and promulgated. The reason for this success had to be explained.
And so the writers used the symbolic ordering
system that was present to them from the Hebrew Scripture. And how could the early followers of Jesus account
for the success of Jesus? Why did Jesus
have the impact that he did? Why did he
become the most supremely valued person in the lives of so many people?
Well, Jesus went up on the Mount one day and
his face shone. And the members of the church was there represented by the presence of Peter, James and John. And the representatives of two strains in the
Hebrew/Judaic traditions were also present in this mountain top vision. Moses represented the Hebrew tradition of the
Torah, the only tradition accepted by the Sadducees. Elijah represented the tradition found in the
other Hebrew writings and the Pharisees accepted the Prophetic writings and the
other writings in the Hebrew Scriptures.
This great visionary meeting on the Mount of
Transfiguration is story about why Jesus had become valued by so many
people. He was a great person; he was a
genius; he was in the company of Moses and Elijah and even in the company of
Moses and Elijah, the heavenly voice of God the Father said about Jesus, “This is my Son, the
beloved; listen to him.”
This story of the Transfiguration event is a legitimization
story for explaining why Jesus had become so important to the lives of so
many. If Peter, James and John were to
actually meet Elijah the Prophet and Moses the Law giver, would they not be
expected to listen to them? But here
they are with Jesus, Moses and Elijah and the voice of God the Father is
telling them to listen to Jesus.
The transfiguration event is a story to
indicate that Jesus is definitely within the traditions of Moses and Elijah but
Jesus is given a higher affirmation than Moses or Elijah by the heavenly voice
of God the Father.
One can understand this story of the
Transfiguration vision to be like so much of the Gospels as the early
Christians establishing Jesus as the person of supreme value in their
lives. Was Jesus great because of the
story of the transfiguration or did the story of the transfiguration happen
because people were experiencing Jesus as a truly great person? We can understand how the transfiguration
story functions in the Judaic tradition of proclaiming and establishing the
surpassing greatness of Jesus.
On another level the story of the
transfiguration is the figurative story of all of us who embrace our lives as a
journey with metaphorical events of going up and down mountains, travelling on
flat ground and crossing rivers and seas. Like Peter on the mount of the transfiguration, we would prefer to build dwellings and do impossible of living only in the times of mountain top experiences.
The word transfigure refers to transformation
and metamorphosis. The goal of all of
salvation history within the Bible is personal metamorphosis, personal
transformation. We are given creative original
life force energy of our lives and we are to work this energy to the surfaces
of our lives so that we shine with glory.
The goal of life is to let the eternal
Spirit of life rise in us and re-create and reorganize and reconstitute our
lives with an art of living to bring us into progressive excellence.
One of the misuses of the Bible and the
Gospel stories is to make them so legendary and fantastic to the point of
irrelevance for our lives. We make
ancient times special and legendary and in this special religious literary
genre we allow that the laws of science did not prevail back in ancient times
like they do now. People embrace the
stories of the Bible today almost as a category of what we would call
entertainment. If we do not understand
the connection of the Bible stories for the transformation of our lives, we can
limit the Bible to being simply fantastic entertainment, not unlike the
fantastic entertainment of science fiction or mytho-poetic discourse.
If we miss the Gospels as literature which
invites us to the continual transformation of our lives, we have missed the
purpose of the Gospel and the Bible.
Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, John and Jesus
did not have life experience for us; we have to embrace and accept our own
experience. We have to be writing in our
own lives personal Gospels of transformation.
We have to discover how the values which constitute our lives have occurred
to make us who we are.
Today, I would invite us to open our eyes to
see how transfiguring events have occurred in our lives to lure us to
excellence. They are happening
everywhere at all times because we live our lives in a completely worded
environment so there is significant communication opportunities impinging our
existence at all time.
Today, let us read the transforming and
transfiguring events of our lives because the Spirit of God is the life force
within us who will arise within us to the surface of our lives to shine in our
words and deeds. May God help us to find
ways for the arising of God Spirit to make our lives shine with creative
advance towards excellence. Amen.
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