Ex. 1:13-21 Ps.99
2 Peter 1:13-21 Luke 9:28-36
2 Peter 1:13-21 Luke 9:28-36
The history of the Bible includes a long history of misreading the Bible and building piety and doctrine, and dogmas around such misreadings.
The misreadings of the Bible has led to inconsistent and incoherent thinking. One might say that much of the professed atheism of our world is due to the bad behaviors and the impoverish thinking of many people who proclaim their belief in God the loudest and with great certainty about their precise understanding.
I think that the misreading of the Bible is based upon some wrong perceptions about the biblical writers. And what might those be? Some Bible readers treat the ancient writers as those who did not know the difference between commonsense reality, naive realism, and the perceptions that come from an aesthetic presentation of reality. Ironically, some modern Bible readers unwittingly assume the superiority of scientific empirically verifiable data, and then claim that for the Bible to maintain this superiority of truth value, each of the narratives in the Bible must necessarily be events which could have been empirically verified. This perspective involves denying the equally meaningful truth status of the aesthetic events of music, theater, literature, and not to mention the poetic mystical faith discourses which comprise the greater portions of the writings found in the Bible.
The correction to the misreading of the Bible is to assert the equal meaningful truth values of discourses of love, vision, beauty, faith, and justice to the discourse which produce the best form of actuarial wisdom, namely, the scientific method, and statistical approximations based upon processing sensorial data. Biblical misreaders have wrongly pitted the poet against the scientist which means denying the comprehensive meaningful truths which are generated in our human experience by us, the language users.
When we read about the event of the Transfiguration, we need to receive the meaningful truths found for us coming from the writer of this visionary event. The writer is writing within the visionary code of the community which includes the writings of the Hebrew Scriptures. The Hebrew Scriptures use figures of speech to relate seminal and superlative events for their communities.
Elevation or height is used to denote the highest and best of human experience. How excellent is it? It is the best and the highest. In the spiritual code of the Bible, superlative experiences happen on mountains. Why? Mountains designate the highest place in the meeting between earth and the sky. The Greek word for heaven and the skies is the same word. But in spiritual code, elevation is a metaphor for the inward meeting place with one's highest. It is the event of enlightening which informs the rest of one's life.
Clouds, an atmospheric condition is also a metaphor in the spiritual code of the Bible. Clouds signify the limitation of human understanding in the face of Plenitude. Clouds represent the darkness that we live in as the contrast with the light that we come to see. Clouds represent the mystery of what we cannot yet see; the perpetual conditions of humility of being but merely human in the face of the so much more EXTRA-HUMAN. In humility of the clouds, we are invited to accept that more lives and moves and has being through us than what we ever can entertain or control with our minds and our actions.
Light, is also important in the spiritual code of the Bible. It is the first created condition, "Let there be Light." It signifies the ability to see or have consciousness of anything at all. But in the spiritual code of the Bible there are lights of lights. There was the pillar of fire signifying the special guidance of God's people through their dark wilderness. There was the light of the law given to Moses who shone in its reception on the mountain of divine presence. And in the Transfiguration, the followers of Jesus understood him to a be a Light of lights, surpassing for them the lights which came from Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the law and the prophets.
Heard Voices without any visible source of their sound, is also a spiritual code in the Bible. The Hebrew Scriptures includes persons who "heard" the voice of God in various states of being. T.S. Kuhn, in his seminal work on paradigm changes within science, cited that scientific insights were accompanied with inspired states including dreams, and these states are tinged with mystery. Hearing voices of Plenitude within our specific situation is how the what is MORE gets funneled into a particular event of insight to inform our lives into creative advance in love, justice, and knowledge. Human being as open receptors are always taking in more than we can consciously process and from the abundance of what we have taken in, insights can come back to us in mysteriously delicious ways. And the Transfiguration voice without visible sound sources symbolizes the events of insightful communication.
Human being are children of God, and this is an important item of the spiritual code of the Bible. Men and women are made in the image of God. We are God's offsprings and children. The voice of the One who was the divine parent proclaimed Jesus as the uniquely divine Son. Jesus as the one revealed as uniquely God's child, had this happen to him and for us so that each person could come to the recovery event of oneself as one who bears the image of the divine. This mystical insight of the early followers of Jesus is encoded within the Transfiguration event.
So, what are you and I to make of the account of the Transfiguration? We are invited to recognize the continuous beckoning of the Superlative. We live in the clouds of what we don't yet know with eyes that are not yet adjusted to more shiny events of surpassing insights. We are given the Christ within us as the interior meeting place with what is highest and which continually beckons us to surpass ourselves in future states of becoming better children of God.
Let us accept the divine image upon our lives as the energy of metamorphoses in ever-being changed into the likeness of Christ. Amen.
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