1 Kg 19:9-18 Psalm 50:1-6
2 Corinthians 4:3-6 Mark 9:2-9
Lectionary Link
People who often are referred to as "fundamentalists," are people who prefer a particular form of interpretation of the texts of Scriptures. But such fundamentalists are selective in applying their method of interpretation, and they would say that they are not totally locked into one form of interpretation. For example, when the words attributed to Jesus indicate that he is light, life, resurrection, shepherd, door, gate, way, vine, bread of heaven, or the words about him such as lamb of God, fundamentalist interpreters would says that such uses of words are metaphorical and figurative, but not literal. By not being literal, it would mean that Jesus could not be empirically verified to be actual light, life, shepherd, lamb of God, door, gate, vine or bread from heaven. Fundamentalists, then are not people who interpret everything in the Bible as though they are events that have to be able to be empirically verified to be meaningfully true. But they will then regard events presented by biblical writers which truly defy natural law and the laws of science as being empirically verified. Such things like biological actual virgin birth, chariots carrying people into heaven, walking on water, and other impossible natural events which are done by Jesus and the biblical heroes, are not seen as figurative, teaching, visionary events, but as events which were empirically verified.
What is lost in such inconsistencies in biblical interpretation is the nature and purpose of the biblical writers and how the nature and purpose of the writers chose to present their sublime message within the style of their preaching and writing.
What governed the writings of the writers of the New Testament? It was the mystical experience of the Risen Christ. Jesus who was dead and gone, was being experienced in a different way by many people, and the people who had these experiences joined together and invited others to be facilitated into this experience of the Risen Christ. Experiences of the Risen Christ were different for different people, and so they could not be related in the way which science replicates the experiments of natural science.
The biblical writers were pushed into the moving language of aesthetics to try to express the sublime experiences of their lives. Sharing these experience were less like boiling water in beakers in a laboratory with fellow lab mates, but more like being with a group of concert goers in being moved by the sublime presentation in a work of art. Literal language of science is too drab to express the sublime experiences which happen because of art, the experience of being loved, the experiences of seeing justice realized, and the mystical experiences of a human superlative which gets confessed poetically as God and Son of God.
The very practical, didactic and very poetic tradition of St. Paul, and the Pauline traditions, pre-date the writings of the Gospel. The mystagogy or instructions in the spiritual mysteries of the Risen Christ came to different presentation in the Gospel form of writing which came to promulgation after the writings of St. Paul.
The Gospels are a different kind of mystagogy than the writings of St. Paul. They re-present the experience of the Risen Christ within a narrative of Jesus as parable, a figurative writing encoding the mystical practices of the church.
By taking the narratives of Jesus and reading them as empirically verified, historical eye-witness accounts, reader miss the important spiritual practice of the early communities of people who confessed and shared this experience of identity with the Risen Christ. This identity was stated by Paul, as "Christ in you, the hope of glory."
The transfiguration, which literally, means metamorphosis, is part of the presentation of a spiritual parable of Jesus, as the Risen Christ who is given a visualized Jesus narrative as a way of inspiring the imagination of how Christ is in us.
Mystagogy is language used in a way so that it can bear witness to experience of the sublime. The Gospel writer of Mark knew the body of symbolism found in the Hebrew Scripture. The Gospel preacher believed/knew that Jesus was in succession with the great heroes of the past, with Moses and Elijah. Their reputation was such that in the literature of time of Jesus, they were regarded to be time-space travelers. They could and would be apparitional figures who would reappear to mark new paradigms of spiritual advance.
So, we have the parable of the transfigured Jesus. Jesus takes his disciples up a mountain alone, into the clouds and he becomes the filament for an event of light. And the apparitional Moses and Elijah appear with him to affirm him as the logical succession of their mission, and such event happens on behalf of the disciples in this event of Mystery and Light, in knowing Jesus in a very special way.
In two events in the Gospel of Mark, God the Father, declares with an audible voice to Jesus in the presence of others, "You are my beloved Son." There is another declaration of Jesus as Son of God in the Gospel of Mark, and that is at the death of Jesus on the cross, when the Roman centurion declares, "Truly this is God's Son."
Mystagogy is teaching about the interior event when Christ in us is the hope of glory, the hope of having esteem and worth in our lives. We can appreciate the figurative audience positions of the identity of Christ as Son of God. One is at the Jordan with John and the crowds there, the other is with James, John, and Peter in the encounter with Jesus, Elijah and Moses, and the other is the outsider, the Roman Centurion, who was able to recognize the sublime even being such an outsider. We have our own "audience" position in knowing the Risen Christ, within us as Son of God, helping us to realize ourselves as child of God.
The Gospel of Mark encodes in a parable of Jesus the mystical experience of the people who know that the Risen Christ in within themselves and as he is glorified in being manifest as God's unique Son, so too we are invited to know ourselves as sons and daughters of God.
And in this path of mystagogy, we are invited to the being made Christ-like metamorphoses of spiritual growth. Yes, we may prefer the mountain top and butterfly events, but they accentuate sublime points in the continuous metamorphosis that we are called to in ever become more Christ-like.
Let us embrace the metamorphosis in becoming more Christ-like, which the event of the transfiguration invites us to. Amen.
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