February 25, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Exodus 34:29-35 The skin of Moses' face was shining
Psalm 99 Dominus regnavit
1 Corinthians 12:27-13:13 God has appointed first, second, third.
Luke 9:28-36 Metamorphosis of Jesus
It's been more than thirty years since I had my first "mountain top" experience. I tramped around the Mediterranean on a rust bucket freighter that docked a few days in Naples. I went to see Pompeii, and decided to go up to the top of Mount Vesuvius, the volcano that had buried the town so long ago. We went up in single seat cable chairs, which ran constantly up and down the mountain like city buses, and seemed perfectly safe and not at all alarming. Everyone was doing it. But I hadn't reckoned on the clouds. Half way up, suspended hundreds of feet up in the thin mountain air, cold and misty, the moving chair suddenly entered a thick cloud. In an instant, nothing could be seen. I could not see the mountain any more, I coud not see the kiosk below, where we had bought tickets. I could not see the chair I sat in, swinging on its cable in the ascent to the peak. It was one of the eeriest feelings I have ever had--dream like, lonely, terrifying. I came out of it suddenly into brilliant sunlight, which refracted the droplets of mist with iridesence, I felt tipsy, dislocated, in another world. We set our feet down on a dry, bright mountaintop, but now could not see the world below the mountain at all. Only the blinding sun, and the awe-full steaming crater of Vesuvius, on whose edge we teetered, from whose gray lip cinders scuttered off into fog and silence. I suddenly realized the only way back to the world below would be to go back through the cloud, and by the slender cable hanging in the sky. It would be nice if I could postpone that scary descent for a while, to work up my nerves.
Of course I thought of this experience when I first read the words of today's evangel, about Jesus and the disciples on the mount of metamorphosis, the mountain of change, where "a cloud came and overshadowed them, and they were afraid as they entered the cloud." At various times in our lives we have come to the crater's edge on a mountain of change, and there is always a cloud, and there is always an ascent of fear. As I write this I enter my seventieth year, hobbling still up the mountain after Jesus, who still beckons and calls, "Follow me." There's no way to the top except through the clouds, and with faith therefore that there is sunshine and light on the other side. This has been true a dozen critical times in a lifetime. But this story of the Mount is more than a paradigm of faith and its perennial triumph over doubt and fear. Something happens on the mountain of metamorphosis, and it is in the context of prayer that it happens. Luke tells us that they went up to the mountain--Jesus and only three friends: Peter, James and John--and they go up to pray. And Luke says it was while Jesus was praying that he was changed, that he was "metamorphosed," that his face ws changed, and even his clothing looked like a dazzling white light had suffused it with sudden brilliance. "White and glistering," the collect used to say, before it got tampered with.
Luke also says it was the dawn of a new age when they went up to the mountain to pray: it was "eight days" after Peter's confession of faith in Jesus as Liberator--for that is what Messiah means--"eight days"--one more day than a week, it was the first Lord's day of the New Dimension, the messianic age, beyond the faith commitment, when they went up to pray, and in that new dimension, in the midst of prayer, everything looked different. The way Jesus looked to his friends was different, and what disappeared was the doubt: "Whom do people think I am?" Jesus had asked. Did he himself wonder who he was now, what his vocation might in fact be now, and where was he headed? Was he asking himself as well as Peter, "Who do you think I am? Who am I? What has God got in mind for me?" All the doubts in the wilderness came to their apex here, the rejection at Nazareth, the storm on the lake, the enmity of his own family, the threats of Herod. In the context of prayer, Jesus was seen to be Who He Is and it was in the context of a people's liberation that he is identified, that clarity comes to his countenance, that the spotlight moved to him as central to the drama of his whole life as the Chosen One. Suddenly there were two other persons with him on the mount--the founder of the nation and its greatest prophet. It was as if at Dubya's inauguration a few weeks ago that suddenly George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr. both appeared on the platform with him--our young nation's founder and its greatest prophet. Dubya would have had to excuse himself, as grossly out of place, which he should have done when he found himself elected president. But Jesus didn't have to leave, for he was in good company, standing in solidarity with the nation's history. (To paraphrase a remark once made to Dan Quayle: "Well, I know Jesus of Nazareth, and Jesus of Nazareth is a friend of mine, and you're no Jesus of Nazareth.")
But the political and prophetic and liberative dimensions are so easily forgotten when we talk about the mountain top and transfiguration. We need to remember that Martin King said, "I have been to the mountain top and I have looked over into the promised land." That is what mountain tops are for, they are, as they were for Jesus, the places where we are able to look beyond our present circumstances, to see into change, and see through it (as through a mist) into a new dimension, a way out of the past, into the coming age. What did Moses and Elijah talk with Jesus about? In what language? What did they have in common? Luke says it was Exodus they talked about--our translation says they spoke of Jesus' despedida-- his "departure at Jerusalem"--another translation says they spoke of his "passing." The Greek word Luke uses is EXODUS. Now in the Bible Exodus is not an individualistic experience, such as might be had by a transcendentalist poet on a hilltop in New England. It is not infused contemplation in a remote hutch of isolation. Exodus is the liberation of a people, it is national deliverance, it is escape to the promised land and paradise. We talk about it in the context of all of the people's history.
Peter thinks he sees the significance of it all at once, and says "let us celebrate the feast of tabernacles here on the mountain." The feast of Succoth--the time of booths, the holiday in which every family builds a lean-to of branches and camps out in celebration of the mythical Exodus from Egypt. To recall the time when we are all people on the move, striding toward freedom, but a safely past event, a historical commemoration. Peter, like a good bishop, believes there ought to be a liturgical response to every experience. Gather some flowers for the altar, light the candles, dress up a bit, and we can handle something called Liberation, something called Exodus, a holiday, like the 4th of July. But Luke says, "He didn't know what he was talking about." Not the last such critique of a word from the apostolic chair.
"It's wonderful for us to be here, let's tent out here a while," Peter says. Luke excuses him, "he was heavy with sleep." A perennial problem of discipleship, on holiday afternoons. Sleep is sometimes a way of slipping into God's presence, and John Donne, the 17th century priest-poet praised it for the pleasure it brought, and thought that death, our longest sleep to come, would likewise bring us pleasure, and be a short way to God after all. The thin air of mountain top experience makes some people giddy--we use the word "high" to describe what this intoxicant does. Like Peter, our resolutions get distorted, and we decide we like it there in the rosy, giddy, sleepy world of "high". Let's stay here, then, where we had the vision, let's live in dreamy resolution. Thus Rip Van Winkle slept through the transfiguration that was the American revolution, and woke up in a world he didn't know because he had not helped to make it. In Gethsemane, Jesus would kneel and weep and cry "Let this cup pass." But here on the mountaintop he has a vision in which the lives of the saints and liberators of the ages assemble and empower and strengthen his resolve, and the coming Exodus is seen in the light of Resurrection. After this hill he will go to another hill with high resolve.
We cannot stay here now and sleep. G.K. Chesterton wrote in "The Everlasting Man" that "a despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep." That is what has happened in the United States, where the nation has slipped into a tired democracy's despotism, and a president is appointed by reactionary judges. The mass media now censor themselves and most citizens are snoring in front of their boob tubes. In the face of a somnolent Christian community, the gospel now wails at us from minarets all across the East: Allah Akbar! God is great! God is greater than your love of power, God is greater than your engines of destruction and their thirst for oil! Allah Akbar! Hear, O Israel, and Hear O Church! The Lord our God, the Lord is One. Listen to my Child! Listen to my Prophet! There is no human future that does not make room for new departures, new ways out of the present danger. The gospel for today has a rubric for all of us in the west: "Listen!"
Ernesto Cardenal was living in the Nicaragua of Anastasio Somoza when he wrote "The Gospel in Solentiname", and recorded a poor campesina commenting on the Transfiguration of Jesus: "We are going to be transformed like him," Olivia preached.
Moses and Elijah were discussing the Exodus project--the coming Liberation that Jesus was to accomplish, Luke says, at Jerusalem. And so what happened here was like what had happened on Sinai, when Moses went up to talk with God and had his face sunburned by the unbearable lightness of being. Moses had no fear, but the people were afraid of Moses, and so he had to veil his face before he could be seen by them, and talk to them. He wore no veil when he went to speak with God, for the clouds and veils were not here to frighten, but to soften the sharpness, to mute the glare of glory. St. Thomas Aquinas once said it is better to light up than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate. And so it is better to bear a lamp than to wear a halo. The Mount of Metamorphosis is not merely a shiny place in the life of Jesus, or a glittering feast in the last days before the Tenebrae, the Shadows, of Lent. The season of "lengthened" days, of days reaching for more and more light as we draw onwards towards the ultimate Epiphany of Christ, in the Exodus he is to accomplish at Jerusalem.
Liberation is the course of human history, taught in this triptych of law, prophets, and gospel: Moses, Elijah, Yeshua. The agenda, the project of all religion, is Exodus. The community's agenda, its constitution, is here show-cased and epiphanized. Paul tells us in the letter to the Corinthians today that there are indeed priorities in the work of liberation. To a congregtion that valued flashy trashy tongue wagging highs above everything, he sent a list with their specialty at the bottom of the catalog. "Try out for the higher charisms," he said to the crazy-matics. "Try out for Apostle," Paul the Apostle of Jesus, born out of due time, says to a church forgetting how to sing the four clear notes of its gospel song. That's a higher office than Prophet, he says. Or try out for Teacher, that's a higher office than miracle manager. Try healing, try therapy on those who are ill, try therapy to heal disputes, that's a higher gift than being helpful even. Even housekeeping, for heaven's sake--that's more important than your babbling in tongues. Do that in private and may it do you some good! Paul makes it clear that not everybody can have all the gifts all the time. (Only the clergy, it seems, are expected to do it all--everything from being housekeepers as great as St. Martha Stewart to being miracle workers and great techers and helpful Hannahs when called upon.) Paul, being an apostle, puts Apostle as the greatest of all ministries. We read that clergy are more trusted than physicians, in the polls that are taken to see who has our confidence, and to shake our own. Used car vendors are still pretty far down the line, but druggists: your friendly neighborhood pharmacist, not the pusher, is the most trusted of all in the hierarchy of bourgeois American trust. Paul put Apostles in first place, and on the mountain of change, the Mount of Transfiguration, God put Liberator in first place: "This is my child, my chosen one, this is the priority person, this is the One I trust. Listen up!" In our own time, a flashy group of people call themselves charismatics, and co-opt the name (it means" spiritually gifted") for themsleves. But Paul says talking that way is no big thing, "let me show you a more excellent way", he says. Earnestly desire the charisms of faith, hope, and love. Even among these three there is a hierarchy, for faith and hope he says will come to an end and their great contributions will have had their day. Moses' faith, Elijah's faith and the hopeful vision of a liberated future will have had their day, when the future is now and visions belong only to yesterday. Love will still be alive, for it never ends or dies. So Lovers are the greatest of charismatics among us all, the ones who live now as if the future has arrived.
Faith in the future God has revealed to us in our moments of metamorphosis, love for the companions of our pilgrimage who share the breathlessness of the vision, and hope that we as a people will get to the promised land: these are the biggies. And we shall all need veils for our faces when God leads us by the hand off the mountain of change, the mountain of new departures that we have begun to ascend in our life together in Christ.
To stand on a mountaintop is to stand in an exciting place, a dangerous place. I remember having to be led by the hand from the edge of Vesuvius back to the cable car. I was terrified on Mount Vesuvius, that the ground would slip from under my feet and I would lose my footing, and slide into the crater. But I put my hand in another's hand, and was led around the crumbling edge of the chasm, back to sfety, back through the clouds to a firm land I could walk on, and even run.
Transfiguration, Change, Metamnorphosis, this mountain top experience calls us back to earth, to the Jerusalem of our confrontation with oppression. Lillian Smith in "The Journey" writes of standing in this aperture, in this open space where the future is beyond the cloud:
"To belive in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives, it is the only way we can leave the future open. Humanity, surrounded by facts, permitting itself no surmise, no intuitive flash, no great hypothesis, no risk, is in a locked cell. Ignorance cannot seal the mind and imagination more surely. To find the point where hypothesis and fact meet; the delicate equilibrium between dream and reality, the place where fantasy and earthly signs are metamorphosed into a work of art; the hour when faith in the future becomes knowledge of the past -- to lay down one's power for others in need; to shake off the old ordeal and get ready for the new, to question, knowing that never can the full answer be found; to accept uncertainties quietly; even our incomplete knowledge of God: this is what the human journey is about."
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