Second Sunday of Lent

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1. The Gospel

• In my previous life as a philosopher at one stage I did quite a lot of work on the phenomenology and philosophy of religious experience across various religious traditions, and came to the perhaps surprising for a philosopher conclusion that experiences like as in today’s Gospel do actually occur, and often occur, phenomenologically, pretty much as reported; and that they can play an important, sometimes vital role for the people in the traditions in which they occur, breaking though into new insight and new faith, and validating insight which has already occurred.
• This event which we call the Transfiguration is well attested in the New Testament (4 times) and has all the marks of a classic religious experience. It probably did happen, therefore, and apart from a few details here and there it probably did happen phenomenologically pretty much as reported. It seems to have played an important role in the construction of our tradition, in the faith journey of some of the key apostles, and also in the construction of the first three Gospels; and may also possibly play a role in our own journey in faith and also in our lives.
• Peter James and John, Jesus’ prayer partners (cf. the Garden of Olives), are with Jesus, their Jesus, the one they run around Galilee with, on the top of a mountain. In a state of intense prayer and, according to one of the reports (Luke) on the verge of sleep, their Jesus is manifested to them as he really is:
• As the fulfillment of their religious hopes and dreams, as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets: thus Moses the law-giver and Elijah the paradigmatic prophet. He is up there with the big ones, and what they promised he has come to bring about.
• Their Jesus, and themselves in proximity to Jesus, are enveloped in Divinity, thus the cloud, the symbolic presence of God since the time of the Exodus, covering them in shadow. Like people classically in the presence of divinity they are struck with Awe, they are so frightened as the text says. But also as Peter says, “It is wonderful for us to be here.” This is a classic sign of being in the presence of Divinity, this Awe, like with Moses and the Burning Bush or on Mount Sinai or Elijah at the Cave, or Isaiah in the Temple, or the call of Peter, or the storm at sea, a strange amalgam of terror and attraction, wonderful but terrifying also.
• Within this cloud and from out of the cloud, their Jesus is manifested as God’s dear Son, my Son, the Beloved. Which is to say, Jesus’ profound experience at his baptism coming up out of the waters, “You are My Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased”, now becomes theirs as well: “This is My Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.”
• All together, what they have already come to believe and to profess, as in Peter’s confession of faith, eight days earlier according to Luke, the insight they are probing towards already is now sharpened and validated, they now experience it this way, it is presented to them in an experiential manner, they perceive it in colour and sound, the reality itself breaks through for them in its given-ness, there before their eyes.
• And this is just nevertheless their Jesus, their very own Jesus, the very one they spend all their time running around with, and will continue to spend all their time running around with: Then suddenly, when they looked round, they saw no one with them any more but only Jesus.
• They can’t stay within the experience, however, even though Peter wants to, to prolong the experience, to have Jesus and Moses and Elijah set up camp on the mountain, in this wonderful albeit terrifying place. Having gone up the mountain and had the experience, they then have to go down the mountain again, back into the mess: like the Buddha coming out of his enlightenment experience in compassion for humankind, or like Socrates or the philosopher having ascended out of the Cave of shadows and illusions into the sunlight of truth and reality, going back down into the cave in compassion for her or his fellows; or like Keana Reeves in the Matrix series, having escaped the Matrix going back in again. This is Jesus’ regular pattern, from a busy day, out into a lonely place back into a busy day; it now becomes the disciples’ pattern, and it is our pattern as well. No matter how strong the experience, this Transfiguration, this Christian Enlightenment Experience included. Time out, prayer time, up the mountain or in a lonely place, for its own sake, for the nourishment and insight it brings; but back down into the mess, in so far as it is also for the mess itself, for the sake of our involvement and our work for the coming of the Reign of God, for coping with the mess and coping in the midst of the mess.
• And it is a true mess that they come back down into, total chaos. A large crowd, arguing with his disciples and with each other. At the centre of it all, a boy possessed by a deaf and dumb spirit, convulsions and foaming at the mouth and his distraught helpless hopeless father, and his disciples can do nothing about it. Jesus comes into the midst of it, calms the situation down, attends to the boy and his father, drives out the demon and restores the boy to his senses, puts him back on his feet, in response to the desperate love of the father, I believe help thou my unbelief. When his disciples ask him later why they couldn’t do anything, he says something very interesting: this kind can come out only through prayer.

2. “Since God did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all…”

• In Mark’s gospel, this passage of Transfiguration and then back into the mess, is surrounded by predictions of the Passion, that the Son of Man must suffer: this person who must suffer is yet the fulfillment of the prophets, God’s presence among us, My Son the Beloved. And already in Mark there is the reference at the end to tell no one until the Son of Man has risen from the dead. Luke however tells us that this was in fact what Moses and Elijah were talking with Jesus about anyway: “They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.” Which is to say as is evident also in Mark: this Passion business is something intrinsic to the role, the role of being the fulfillment of the promise of the Law and the Prophets, this Passion business, something intrinsic also to being My Son, the Beloved and the presence of Divinity among us. And indeed, the next time in Mark that Jesus gets called, God’s Son, by anyone else, it is by the centurion, at the foot of the cross, immediately after his death.
• This is a total reversal of the situation with Abraham and God in the first reading. This text is commonly thought to be in fact a way of abolishing human sacrifice, getting it out of their religion, in the midst of a culture where it was taken for granted, as with the Canaanites in the midst of whom they lived and as with many an ancient religion. We don’t do human sacrifice, we sacrifice sheep and goats instead. But still it leaves a bad taste: God is being cruel, asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, his only son, whom he loves, even if it is only a test, of faith beyond faith and trust beyond hope, and even if it is for the sake of abolishing human sacrifice in a culture which takes it for granted as something that a god could ask. But still it leaves a bad taste.
• But now it is God who has put Godself not in the position of God in the story but in the position of Abraham, in a total reversal: God who did not spare his own Son, his own dear Son, whom he loves, My Son the Beloved, but gave himself up to benefit us all, and just as much so, God’s own Son who did not spare himself but gave himself up to benefit us all.
• So to the conclusion, namely our second reading. As St Paul says in the conclusion to his considered and passionate presentation of the Good News in his Epistle to the Romans, end of Chapter 8: “What then are we to say about these things? With God on our side, who can be against us?...” And the paragraph, of which we have the first few verses, concludes, a few verses later: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, is able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
• So what is the end of the story, projected eventually from our Christian Enlightenment Experience On the Mountain, My Son the Beloved, the Fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, and which we look forward to at the end of our Lent? An experiential realization of ourselves as strangely and unexpectedly ourselves the Beloved, an experiential realization of a Love from God and from God’s Beloved from which nothing at all can separate us.

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