Long, long
ago, back when I was a parish priest,
a new family began attending our
church.
After
awhile, they said to me,
“We’d like to make this our church home.
But there’s one
problem.
You just go on about
Jesus too much.
Every prayer you say
has Jesus in it.
Every Sunday, it’s all Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
It was like
telling someone you loved everything about them
except their heart and their soul.
Being a
Christian is all about Jesus.
Jesus in the
morning, Jesus an the noontime,
Jesus at the close of day.
Our lessons
for Transfiguration Sunday
express the very point of
Christianity.
The
revelation we have been receiving throughout the Epiphany season
comes down to this: It’s all about
Jesus.
The point is absolutely simple.
But
explaining why it’s all about Jesus
takes a little going into
–
starting
with the mountains and the mountain men.
Moses was a
mountain man.
He climbed
Mt. Sinai.
It had the
law on top.
It had God’s
moral standards.
Moses
climbed the mountain of ethical living.
Elijah was a
mountain man.
He climbed
Mount Carmel.
It had
prophesy on top,
the awesome silence of God’s voice,
the voice we hear in contemplation.
Elijah
climbed the mountain of spiritual experience.
He climbed
both mountains – ethics and spirituality.
As a
Pharisee he practiced the moral life to perfection.
As a
Mer-kobah mystic, he experienced the most advanced
states of spiritual contemplation.
But one day
Paul,
like the disciples on the Mount of
the Transfiguration,
had a vision of light shining from
Jesus
– and that vision changed
everything.
20 years later,
he remembered all his ethical living and his mysticism,
and he said,
“Whatever gains I had, these I count
as loss
because of the surpassing value of knowing
Christ Jesus my Lord.”
He no longer
billed himself as a just man or a mystic.
He didn’t
bill himself at all.
He said, “It
is not ourselves that we proclaim.
We proclaim Christ Jesus as Lord and
ourselves as your servants
for his sake.”
Paul tossed
aside every prize he had claimed
at the top of every mountain and
said,
“I’d rather have Jesus.”
Jesus was a
mountain man.
He led his
disciples up there mountains
– the one where he taught them the
Beatitudes
and to turn the other
cheek
– the Mount of the Transfiguration
-- and finally the Mount of Olives.
There’s a
lot of mountain climbing in the Bible
because there’s so much mountain climbing in life.
We can spend
our whole lives climbing mountains
-
the
career mountain, the money mountain,
the mental health mountain,
the happy family mountain,
even the religion mountain.
There are so
many mountains,
each with a prize on top.
and collected their prizes.
But by the
time we get to this story,
they had already left most things
behind.
They’d given
up homes, families, careers.
But they
still had their religion.
They had the
Law of Moses and the spirituality of Elijah.
So when they
saw their rabbi talking on a mountaintop
with the father of ethical religion
and the father of Jewish
spirituality,
it all came together.
And Peter
said to Jesus, “Let’s build three dwellings here
– one for you, one for Moses, and
one for Elijah.”
He meant it
as a compliment, to put Jesus on a par with those giants.
But Peter
had missed the point.
So God
showed up as a “bright cloud” and thundered,
“This is my beloved Son . . . .
Listen to him.”
And the
disciples were afraid.
They were
afraid because they had rashly answered
life’s ultimate question
– the question of what really
matters
– and they had gotten it wrong.
They had pushed the existential Jeopardy buzzer too
soon.
In a
multiple choice question,
with the answers being morality, spirituality,
and Jesus;
they’d answered “all of
the above.”
But that
wasn’t’ God’s answer.
They failed
to see what blind Paul saw so clearly
– that the ultimate value of God’s
own self
was fully present in
this human person, Jesus.
All of
morality and all of spirituality lead to this point,
what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
called “the Omega Point,”
the destination of everything.
The notion
that the final answer is not
the moral order or a transcendent
experience
but a person – that’s a
lot to swallow.
But it is
the key to intimacy with God.
The story of
the Transfiguration shows us why.
The
disciples thought the terrifying cloud was the Epiphany.
They thought
the voice from heaven was the divine revelation.
So they fell
on the ground and hid their faces.
But the real
epiphany was what happened next.
The real
epiphany was Jesus.
It happened
when he touched them and said,
“Get up and do not be afraid.”
God is most
perfectly seen and heard not as a thundercloud
sending us diving to the dust in
fear,
but as a brother saying “Get up and
do not be afraid.”
John Calvin,
a man who could be so very wrong, got this right.
He said, “(A)ll
thinking of God, apart from Christ,
is a bottomless abyss
which utterly swallows
up our senses . . . .
In Christ, God . . . makes himself
little,
in order to lower
himself to our capacity;
and Christ
alone calms (us)
so that (we) . . . dare
intimately approach God.”
Jesus makes
it possible for us
to be intimate with God.
In Jesus, we
can embrace the perfect value
from which all good things derive
their value
as we might embrace a friend.
Jesus brings
divine love into the flesh of human life.
God can
touch us only with a human touch.
A surgeon named Richard Selzer tells a story
from his medical practice that
explains what happens
for us in Jesus.
He writes:
“I stand by the bed where a young
woman lies
. . . her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish.
A
. . . facial nerve has been severed . . .
(T)o remove the tumor in her cheek,
I had to cut the
nerve.
“Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
“Yes,” I say, “It will because the nerve is cut.”
She nods and is silent,
but the young man
smiles,
“I
like it,” he says.
“It’s
kind of cute.”
He bends to kiss her crooked mouth,
and I, so close I
can see
how he twists his
own lips to accommodate hers,
to show her that
their kiss still works . . . .
(I)
hold
my breath . . . .”
Just so,
“Jesus touched them, saying,
‘Get up and do not be
afraid.’
And when
they looked up,
“they saw no one except Jesus
himself alone.”
