Eco-Justice
Commentary on the Common Lectionary for the Sundays after Epiphany, 2017
By
Dennis Ormseth
Transfiguration
of Our Lord, February 26
Psalm 2
Exodus 24:12-18
2 Peter 1:16-21
Matthew 17:1-9
Mountains
matter. Beginning with the readings for
the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany, in which the mountains were called on by the
prophet Micah to witness God's controversy with God's people, we have sought
and found in the sayings of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount material grounding for
an Earth-honoring faith. Now with the readings for the Sunday of the
Transfiguration of our Lord, the mountains nearly speak for themselves,
demanding our attention as part of some of the most important, defining
narratives of the biblical tradition.
The texts constitute
a thick conflation of several events in the history of God’s people, extended
over the ages. God, as it were, summons
to the high mountain of the Transfiguration “those two great ancient worthies,” Moses and Elijah, the founding liberator and
lawgiver from the exodus from Egypt, and the great prophet from the reign of
Ahab and Jezebel in the northern kingdom of Israel, respectively (Robert H.
Smith’s phrase, from New Proclamation, Series A, 1998-1999, p. 171).
Amplifying this look backwards, the first reading recalls Moses’ own encounter
with God on Mt. Sinai. A comparison of these stories produces several elements
held in common, which serves to tie them intimately together: each happens on a
mountain, “six days later”, with a special select group; the shining face and
skin, the bright cloud and voice from the cloud result in great fear on the
part of the bystanders (Warren Carter, Matthew and the Margins: A
Sociopolitical and Religious Reading. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books,
2000, p. 348.) Elijah brings to the
scene an experience similarly connected to Sinai, as well. In the context of
his conflict with Ahab and Jezebel and their priests of Baal, he ascends Sinai
alone. There he is caught up in a great
wind, an earthquake and fire, and then hears out of the sheer silence the voice
of God (1 Kings 19). Belden Lane
explores the connections here:
The mountain
narratives of Moses and Elijah had situated each of them within a context of
loneliness and rejection. In going to
meet God on the mountain, the one had been scorned by his people, who demanded
a golden calf to worship (Ex. 32:1). The
other had been threatened by Jezebel, who’d sworn herself to vengeance (I Kings
19:2). In both cases, their “seeing of
God” on the mountain was but an interlude in an ongoing struggle, given at a
time when the absence of God seemed for them most painfully real (Belden C.
Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes:
Desert and Mountain Spirituality.
Oxford: Oxford Univeersity
Press, 1998, p. 135).
Thus the pairing of
Moses and Elijah on Sinai with Jesus on Tabor lends political significance to
the narrative of the Transfiguration. Tabor is thereby associated with a
challenge to entrenched political power: “Lying far from the
corridors of influence in Jerusalem (or Egypt, for that matter), the mountains
defy the authority of the state,
“clashing with every royal religion enamored of image, vision, appearance,
structure.” Coming to Sinai, Moses had
witnessed the overthrow of oppression in Egypt.
Elijah came to the mountain fleeing the corrupt regime of Ahab, having
just undermined the hegemony of Baal on Mount Carmel.
The mountain of God necessarily brings
into question all claims to political power.
Its iconographic imagery challenges every human structure. Similarly, at
Tabor, the transfiguration reaches beyond the present failure of political
justice in Jerusalem to affirm an unrealized future where Christ is king (Lane,
p. 135).
Jesus brings to the
mountain assembly his disciples Peter, James and his brother John, the fishermen
to whom we were introduced on the Third Sunday after the Epiphany as he called
them away from their life by the sea and the hardships of fishing under the
oppressive control of Roman imperial rule. Jesus has been traversing Galilee
with them, teaching, healing, and feeding people as they went, a journey
interspersed by repeated visits to remote areas, including both mountains and
the Sea of Galilee. Their journey
culminates just prior to their ascent of the mountain in Peter’s confession
that Jesus is the Messiah, followed almost immediately, however, by a bitter
exchange between Jesus and Peter over Jesus’ future path to Jerusalem and the
cross. It is the opposition of his
disciples to his disclosure that he will face crucifixion and death before
being raised up (Matthew 16:21-28) that leads to the divine instruction from
out of the cloud, “This is my Son, the
Beloved. Listen to him.”
The second reading
for this Sunday recalls the event of the Transfiguration in the voice of Peter
from some time near the end of his life, apparently also in response to the
religious challenge from an opponent, suggesting the continued immediate
relevance of this instruction in the life of the young church: “You will do well to be attentive to this
[account] as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the
morning star rises in your hearts.” As indeed do we, also. The older and wiser Peter sees what these
narratives share: each of these men has
been in a dark place, but they are being drawn into the light. Moses, Elijah and Jesus each went to the
remote mountain after experiencing difficulty in the communities for which they
are leaders. Away from the political and religious centers of society, each
time the manifestation of God lends legitimacy to their leadership in a time of
conflict, and empowers their future course of action. All three emerge, as it were, from the
darkness of those conflicts into the holy light on the mountain, before
descending the mountain to resume their leadership according to the will of
God.
Thus the presence of
Moses and Elijah confirms for Jesus’ disciples his “high rank and holy task,”
encouraging them “to follow him in his unrelenting journey to the cross”
(Robert H. Smith, p. 171). But Jesus’ traverse of this passage from dark to
light is in one key respect different.
Readers of our comment on the text for the Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
might recall that we have recently heard from Moses’ farewell address from Mt.
Nebo, in which he exhorted the people ‘to choose life’” as they prepared to
enter the promised land without him. Elijah’s adventure on Sinai followed on an
opposite choice by the people and their leaders, once they lived in the land,
of the way of death that is manifested in a pervasive drought in the land. In contrast to both Moses’ prior exclusion
from the land and Elijah’s conflict with royal idolatry there, Jesus has gone
deeply into the land to engage its people, and has manifested there a benign
and restorative presence among them. He
has been about the healing of the creation.
The conflict between
Jesus and his disciples is particularly telling in this perspective. As Robert H. Smith points out, in spite of
their experience on the mountain, the disciples do not really hear what Jesus
is saying. Matthew brings this section of his gospel to a close with an account
of their dispute amongst themselves, as to who will be seated in positions of
power and authority when Jesus ascends the throne of the kingdom (Matt.
20:20-27), an account that, as Smith notes, reverberates with damning
significance for our own times:
They
all wanted to be in charge, to sit on seats of privilege and power. It is not only pharaohs who build
pyramids. All the nations do it.
Corporations do it. Churches and schools
organize hierarchies, and families and clans do it. It all seems so natural. It happens so regularly, so easily, so
universally, that we find ourselves thinking, “of course the few were born to
give orders, and the many were made to obey!
But is it natural?
Where does it all come from? From
God? Did God order the universe in such
a way that humankind should exercise a ruthless dominion over the trees and
rivers, over birds and beasts? Did God’s
voice really call out that men should rule over women? The people of the Northern Hemisphere should
dominate the poorer nations to the south?
Did the finger of God write that we should have social systems that are
rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian, and patriarchal? (Smith, pp. 172-73).
No, this pattern of
domination does not come from God, as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount has made
clear. It is those who are poor in
spirit, those who lament the absence of righteousness in the land and desire
above all its full restoration, the meek who give place to others in the full
community of life and who seek peace, even to the point of refusing violence in
return for persecution by their and Jesus’ enemies, who will be comforted and
inherit the kingdom (see our comment in this series on the Fourth Sunday after
Epiphany). Indeed, Jesus’ passage through the countryside constitutes a
foretaste of the healing of creation to come with his entry into the full reign
of God as servant of all creation.
Followers of his way have been warned against “affairs of the heart”
which contribute to the patterns of dominations that disrupt the good creation
(see our comment on the Sixth Sunday). They will be salt and light for a
sustained and illuminating demonstration of the kingdom, characterized by
obedience to God’s creation-serving law and genuine and full-hearted love of
the other, including non-human creatures (see our comments on the Fifth and
Seventh Sundays). But for all that to take place he needs first to go to
Jerusalem to confront the authorities that hold the land in destructive bondage
to the pursuit of power, privilege and wealth that will result in its
ecological devastation and abandonment (see our comment on the Sixth Sunday).
As we prepare to
leave the mountain with him and take the Lenten road to Jerusalem, however, it
is important that we take note of both the specific location and the actual
event of Jesus’ transfiguration. Again we would urge, the mountain itself
matters. It has been observed that Mount Tabor, the presumed locus of the
transfiguration, is a very different place than Mount Sinai. Sinai is high and forbidding, “a place of
dark and difficult beauty,” as Belden Lane experienced it on a climb to the
peak. For him, “it symbolized the
wandering of the children of Israel, the experience of loss and the bread of
hardness. The Sinai wilderness is a
place far from home, a ‘no man’s land’ of fire and smoke.” Mt. Tabor, on the
other hand, is “a cone-shaped peak in Galilee,” appropriately captured in the
words of Elisaeus, a seventh-century Armenian pilgrim, who described it as
surrounded by “springing wells of water and many densely planted trees, which
blossom from the rain of the clouds and produce all kinds of sweet fruits and
delightful scents; there are also vines which give wine worthy for kings to
drink.” “If Sinai wins the soul by
threat and leanness,” Lane comments, “Tabor compels by charm.” “In Jewish
history,” he notes, “Tabor is associated with Deborah, the woman of faith and
daring who led her people in defeating the captain of the Canaanites and his fearful
iron chariots (Judg. 4-5). This mountain
is one possessed of an ancient, feminine energy. It is Mother and Sister, one whose strength
is bent toward nurture and wholeness.”
As he walked alone in cold rain on Tabor’s lower slopes, Lane found the
mountain, “especially in the rain …a place of nourishment, a place to
rest and be still” As he comments, in contrast to the landscape of Sinai, Tabor
‘offers a landscape of accessible and gentle beauty. Like a wet, green breast rising out of the
Plains of Jezreel, it is bathed in light, covered with woodland trees and
wildflowers.” (Lane, pp. 124-25, 130-31.)
Belden’s contrast
matches our expectation that Jesus would go to such a mountain as Tabor to help
bring his disciples to a sense of the beauty of creation as it would be in a
world freed from the pursuit of wealth and the associated all-encompassing
pattern of domination. “The sacred
mountain, from Sinai to Tabor to Zion,” comments Lane rightly, “is a place
where political priorities are realigned.
To flee to the mountain is to identify with the marginalized, with those
denied access to the empowerment of the state and thus subject to its
wrath. Jesus and his disciples may well
have contemplated such things as they walked down Tabor on their way back toward
Jerusalem.” But where the
desert-mountain tradition “stringently insists that ‘moments of splendor’ serve
the purposes of justice and responsibility in the ordinary life” (Lane, p.
135), the more ecologically harmonious experience of Tabor, we want to suggest,
encourages the hope that somewhere ahead lies another mountain that instead
invites us to ascend it more with the beauty of the infinite than the terror of
injustice, more fascinans than tremendum, more love than
dread.
We
in fact take that to be the deepest meaning of what happened to Jesus there on
Tabor: that “he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun,
and his clothes became dazzling white” is, as the Orthodox tradition
understands it, the sign of things to come for the whole creation. A recent visit by this writer to the
sanctuary of Sant' Apollinare in Classe, outside of Ravenna, Italy, where the
scene of the Tranfiguration fills the apse, confirms this possibility. Moses and Elijah rest on clouds to the left
and right of the star-studded cosmic field which surrounds a cross that bears
the face of Jesus at its center. Below
them, trees, flowers, birds and animals of the forest delight the eye, while
sheep of the parish fold and their bishop walk amongst the lilies. Again Lane
comments significantly:
Tabor
is the mountain of light, taking joy in the greening power of God’s spirit, as
Hildegard, the twelfth-century Benedictine nun, described its impulse toward
growth. This is a mountain that thrives
on abundance and redundancy. It supports
a plant life of variegated wonder. The
apocryphal Gospel of Hebrews connects its summit with the height of mystical
insight; “The Holy Spirit, my Mother, came and took me by the hair and carried
me to the great Mount Tabor.” Here is
effulgence, an excess of glory (Lane, p. 140).
The
Transfiguration, and the Eastern iconographic tradition that builds upon it,
draws us forward with a vision of the “as-yet-unrealized but promised
transfigured glory of the entire material world. Because of God having been
made flesh in Jesus Christ, humans are able to glimpse the very face of God in
matter itself” (Lane, p. 126). God’s
love of the creation, so amply exhibited in the readings of the Season of
Epiphany, knows no final limit; all creation can look forward in joy to the
culmination in God’s future of the reconciliation and incorporation of all
things in the glory of God. This is,
indeed, an Earth-honoring faith.