Amazing Freedom
February 18, 2007
Texts: 2 Corinthians 3:12, 17-4:1; Exodus 34:29-35; Luke 9:28-36
These episodes, the one with Jesus in particular, are fantastic and amazing. I think part of what’s interesting about them is that the people reporting them felt the same way. They don’t report these occurrences as being normal or normative – that is, they are not saying everyone should expect such experiences. Their response is the same as ours – this is amazing; it’s hardly believable! Peter, in the Gospel story, is so amazed that he is babbling and God finally interrupts him to say, in essence, “Be quiet and listen to Jesus.”
The very incredulity of those witnessing the episodes renders them slightly more credible to me. But, I will grant, I struggle with these. And I am certainly sympathetic to those who have trouble accepting as factual some of the central stories of our tradition – even though, for me, faith does not turn on the historical accuracy of the Bible. For me, what is most important is: how has the tradition understood and experienced the human-divine encounter? And, how do we move beyond encounter to empowered living? And I think both of these episodes, particularly taken together, can inform our reflection on these questions, the really interesting questions, which boil down to “what does this mean?” and for each of us: “what does it matter to my life?” Because that, my friends, is where the meaning of these stories comes – in our living of lives that bear the impact of our own relationship with God. How do these stories make us different? What do they tell us about God and us and our lives?
So for the moment, let’s take the stories at face value, and see where that takes us. In the first story, the people of Israel are still in the wilderness. They have experienced the amazing liberating power of God, and Moses has brought them the gift of the Law from God, and when he brought it off the mountain (originally, some chapters back), they had in his absence had an idol crafted, a calf made of gold, to whom the people could offer gifts, and Moses had responded with fury and had thrown the original tablets of the Law, shattering them, but had now gone back to get another set. So much to unpack here – the people, who had already experienced God’s great power in their lives because he had freed them from slavery, soon had begun to resent God, and to doubt God’s ability to continue to lead them. Despite their profound experiences of God, they had difficulty sustaining reliance on God. And despite God’s visible presence among them, sometimes as a cloud, sometimes as a pillar of fire, they preferred to keep God at a distance, choosing to relate to God through Moses. And so God gives them the gift of the Law – teaching them how to live; so Moses goes to receive, again, the gift of the Law for the people, and when Moses returns from the mountain, in this morning’s reading, his face is supernaturally radiant with the reflected glory of God.
Similarly, in the Gospel story told by Luke, Jesus was on a mountain, and was praying, when suddenly, he is joined by Moses and Elijah, and the three of them are also supernaturally radiant as they discuss the coming suffering and death of Jesus. The text says, “they were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” Interestingly, the Greek word for departure is exodos. And as they were conversing, Peter excitedly says how wonderful it is that three of the disciples are there to see this amazing event, and that they should construct three booths, one for each of them. And then a cloud comes, and out of the cloud a voice saying, “This is my chosen One, listen to him.”
So my question is, “Listen to what?” As I look at the passage, that is clearly a central piece of it. The passage starts out, “Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray….” Which sayings? The passage beforehand, in every version of the story (in Matthew, Mark & Luke) is one where Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is. Peter responds, “You are the Messiah, the Son of God.” And Jesus affirms his answer and says that he will be rejected and suffer and die and be raised on the third day. And then he continues, in all three versions to describe the costs of discipleship, that the one who follows Jesus must deny himself, that the one who loses his life will gain it and the one who saves his life will lose it. And it is after these words, that all three gospels say, some days later, the transfiguration took place. All three accounts connect the Transfiguration to the earlier conversation, so it seems likely that the early hearers of this story understood that the words which should be listened to were those that described the coming suffering of Jesus, and the costs of discipleship that come in living out the God-centered life that Jesus is teaching.
One of the obvious questions, especially when reading these stories together, is whether there is a connection between them, and clearly there is – both stories describe glory-filled faces, both describe an encounter with God on a mountain, both refer to building booths, or Tabernacles. Both stories are also preceded by reminders that the life of faith involves giving up reliance on oneself. Both stories are about the miraculous experience of God living visibly among the people, in one as a cloud, in the other as Jesus. Both stories refer to the law – in the Transfiguration, the appearance of Moses and Elijah , who was regarded as the greatest of the prophets, signifies the law and the prophets. Some Christians have seen this story of the Transfiguration as signifying that the work of Jesus replaces the Law and the Prophets, but it seems more reasonable to draw the opposite conclusion.
Jesus doesn’t give Moses and Elijah their pink slips – there is nothing dismissive in his interaction with them. Far from it, the episode doesn’t suggest any disharmony between God’s revelations through the Law and the Prophets and through Jesus. The idea that the coming of Jesus, or particularly that the death and resurrection of Jesus, replace God’s covenant with Israel is called supersessionism. And the Presbyterian Church officially rejected supersessionism in 1987, affirming that Christians and Jews worship the same God, denying that Christians have replaced Jews but have instead become part of the same human community of God’s people, repenting of the many generations of Christian contempt for Judaism, and speaking of Christians and Jews as “partners in waiting.” That is, both are looking toward the future to a time when the peaceable kingdom of God will be more fully realized in the world.
When we look at the stories both through that lens, we can see that both the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, and the people living at the time of Jesus, experienced God’s presence in a unique way both in general, as God guided Israel through the desert and as Jesus ministered in Judea, and powerfully in these particular episodes as the glory of God was reflected in Moses, and later in Jesus with Moses and Elijah. And we can see that both of these episodes have to do with God’s revelation to the people, in the Law that Moses brought, and in the teachings of Jesus. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, has published a new book, The Misunderstood Jew, in which she argues that Christians have viewed Jewish law as some kind of burden of which Jesus came to relieve people. But Jesus himself said that he did not come to abolish the Law. Seminary professor Francis Taylor Gench said in her address to the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators Conference which I attended in Philadelphia 2 weeks ago, in speaking about Levine’s work, that Christians need to understand that the teachings of Jesus aren’t over and against Judaism, but that Jesus represents and explains the possibilities within Judaism. To see him in any other way rejects his faith and his heritage, which he never did.
As Christians, we need to be particularly sensitive to the ways in which our teaching of Christian faith might be implicitly anti-Semitic. Gench recounted an article by noted preacher Barbara Brown Taylor in The Christian Century, in which Taylor tells of receiving a letter from someone about her sermons. The letter-writer was Jewish, and said that he liked Taylor’s sermons very much, although he found elements of anti-Semitism in them. Taylor said she was as horrified as if someone had told her that she had been killing kittens while walking in her sleep. So she looked up the sermons which the writer had mentioned, and there, before she completed reading three paragraphs, she came upon a dead cat. Perhaps if we reorient ourselves along the lines of the 1987 Presbyterian paper, Levine’s book and Gench’s lecture, and think of Judaism and Christianity as a shared heritage, a shared relationship with God, and look at Jesus as not repudiating Judaism, but as Gench described, identifying the possibilities within Judaism – perhaps this will give us a sharper, and more nuanced understanding of Jesus and his teachings to us.
Some of the political theorists, such as Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, whose work was foundational to American constitutional theory, felt that the rule of law created freedom for humans to live and grow without having to fear the chaos of a lawless society. For too long, Christians have regarded the law of God as some kind of bondage, but Jesus was showing us the freedom that was possible in taking the love of God seriously as the guiding principal of the law. So that, for example in the teachings of Jesus, the Sabbath is a gift from God and intended as a blessing, not a hoop for humans to jump through to please God. The commandments are a gift, whether the ten described in Exodus, or the two as Jesus summarized them to love God completely and love each other as ourselves, and they free us from the tyranny of our own wants and fears in order to live the amazing freedom of a God-breathed life.
Christianity and Judaism are both relational, practice-based religions. We have much in common – the understanding that God intends for us to experience life in direct relationship with God, and the recognition that we are called to the service of God in the world. Both faiths are lived out in relationship with God and relationships with others. Both involve practices that make space for the holy, that encourage the life of the mind, and that call us to work for peace and justice in the world. In the recognition that they are practice-based, both Christianity and Judaism are practical.
The Transfiguration story is always read on the Sunday before Lent begins. We can understand that – it does point toward the events of Holy Week, as Jesus is discussing his eventual death with Moses and Elijah. But perhaps we can try to recover another level of response to this story than just a foreshadowing of the end of Lent. Perhaps the next seven weeks can be an opportunity for us to renew ourselves in relational, practical faith resulting in the radiance of God-breathed living. Just as the discipline an athlete or musician exercises becomes a means to their freely developing their talents and abilities, so too, the spiritual disciplines we undertake can be a means to our being transformed, day by day into people who live in the freedom of God’s transcendent, dynamic, and eminently practical love. Let it be so. Amen.
These episodes, the one with Jesus in particular, are fantastic and amazing. I think part of what’s interesting about them is that the people reporting them felt the same way. They don’t report these occurrences as being normal or normative – that is, they are not saying everyone should expect such experiences. Their response is the same as ours – this is amazing; it’s hardly believable! Peter, in the Gospel story, is so amazed that he is babbling and God finally interrupts him to say, in essence, “Be quiet and listen to Jesus.”
The very incredulity of those witnessing the episodes renders them slightly more credible to me. But, I will grant, I struggle with these. And I am certainly sympathetic to those who have trouble accepting as factual some of the central stories of our tradition – even though, for me, faith does not turn on the historical accuracy of the Bible. For me, what is most important is: how has the tradition understood and experienced the human-divine encounter? And, how do we move beyond encounter to empowered living? And I think both of these episodes, particularly taken together, can inform our reflection on these questions, the really interesting questions, which boil down to “what does this mean?” and for each of us: “what does it matter to my life?” Because that, my friends, is where the meaning of these stories comes – in our living of lives that bear the impact of our own relationship with God. How do these stories make us different? What do they tell us about God and us and our lives?
So for the moment, let’s take the stories at face value, and see where that takes us. In the first story, the people of Israel are still in the wilderness. They have experienced the amazing liberating power of God, and Moses has brought them the gift of the Law from God, and when he brought it off the mountain (originally, some chapters back), they had in his absence had an idol crafted, a calf made of gold, to whom the people could offer gifts, and Moses had responded with fury and had thrown the original tablets of the Law, shattering them, but had now gone back to get another set. So much to unpack here – the people, who had already experienced God’s great power in their lives because he had freed them from slavery, soon had begun to resent God, and to doubt God’s ability to continue to lead them. Despite their profound experiences of God, they had difficulty sustaining reliance on God. And despite God’s visible presence among them, sometimes as a cloud, sometimes as a pillar of fire, they preferred to keep God at a distance, choosing to relate to God through Moses. And so God gives them the gift of the Law – teaching them how to live; so Moses goes to receive, again, the gift of the Law for the people, and when Moses returns from the mountain, in this morning’s reading, his face is supernaturally radiant with the reflected glory of God.
Similarly, in the Gospel story told by Luke, Jesus was on a mountain, and was praying, when suddenly, he is joined by Moses and Elijah, and the three of them are also supernaturally radiant as they discuss the coming suffering and death of Jesus. The text says, “they were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.” Interestingly, the Greek word for departure is exodos. And as they were conversing, Peter excitedly says how wonderful it is that three of the disciples are there to see this amazing event, and that they should construct three booths, one for each of them. And then a cloud comes, and out of the cloud a voice saying, “This is my chosen One, listen to him.”
So my question is, “Listen to what?” As I look at the passage, that is clearly a central piece of it. The passage starts out, “Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray….” Which sayings? The passage beforehand, in every version of the story (in Matthew, Mark & Luke) is one where Jesus asks the disciples who they think he is. Peter responds, “You are the Messiah, the Son of God.” And Jesus affirms his answer and says that he will be rejected and suffer and die and be raised on the third day. And then he continues, in all three versions to describe the costs of discipleship, that the one who follows Jesus must deny himself, that the one who loses his life will gain it and the one who saves his life will lose it. And it is after these words, that all three gospels say, some days later, the transfiguration took place. All three accounts connect the Transfiguration to the earlier conversation, so it seems likely that the early hearers of this story understood that the words which should be listened to were those that described the coming suffering of Jesus, and the costs of discipleship that come in living out the God-centered life that Jesus is teaching.
One of the obvious questions, especially when reading these stories together, is whether there is a connection between them, and clearly there is – both stories describe glory-filled faces, both describe an encounter with God on a mountain, both refer to building booths, or Tabernacles. Both stories are also preceded by reminders that the life of faith involves giving up reliance on oneself. Both stories are about the miraculous experience of God living visibly among the people, in one as a cloud, in the other as Jesus. Both stories refer to the law – in the Transfiguration, the appearance of Moses and Elijah , who was regarded as the greatest of the prophets, signifies the law and the prophets. Some Christians have seen this story of the Transfiguration as signifying that the work of Jesus replaces the Law and the Prophets, but it seems more reasonable to draw the opposite conclusion.
Jesus doesn’t give Moses and Elijah their pink slips – there is nothing dismissive in his interaction with them. Far from it, the episode doesn’t suggest any disharmony between God’s revelations through the Law and the Prophets and through Jesus. The idea that the coming of Jesus, or particularly that the death and resurrection of Jesus, replace God’s covenant with Israel is called supersessionism. And the Presbyterian Church officially rejected supersessionism in 1987, affirming that Christians and Jews worship the same God, denying that Christians have replaced Jews but have instead become part of the same human community of God’s people, repenting of the many generations of Christian contempt for Judaism, and speaking of Christians and Jews as “partners in waiting.” That is, both are looking toward the future to a time when the peaceable kingdom of God will be more fully realized in the world.
When we look at the stories both through that lens, we can see that both the Hebrew people at the time of Moses, and the people living at the time of Jesus, experienced God’s presence in a unique way both in general, as God guided Israel through the desert and as Jesus ministered in Judea, and powerfully in these particular episodes as the glory of God was reflected in Moses, and later in Jesus with Moses and Elijah. And we can see that both of these episodes have to do with God’s revelation to the people, in the Law that Moses brought, and in the teachings of Jesus. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, has published a new book, The Misunderstood Jew, in which she argues that Christians have viewed Jewish law as some kind of burden of which Jesus came to relieve people. But Jesus himself said that he did not come to abolish the Law. Seminary professor Francis Taylor Gench said in her address to the Association of Presbyterian Church Educators Conference which I attended in Philadelphia 2 weeks ago, in speaking about Levine’s work, that Christians need to understand that the teachings of Jesus aren’t over and against Judaism, but that Jesus represents and explains the possibilities within Judaism. To see him in any other way rejects his faith and his heritage, which he never did.
As Christians, we need to be particularly sensitive to the ways in which our teaching of Christian faith might be implicitly anti-Semitic. Gench recounted an article by noted preacher Barbara Brown Taylor in The Christian Century, in which Taylor tells of receiving a letter from someone about her sermons. The letter-writer was Jewish, and said that he liked Taylor’s sermons very much, although he found elements of anti-Semitism in them. Taylor said she was as horrified as if someone had told her that she had been killing kittens while walking in her sleep. So she looked up the sermons which the writer had mentioned, and there, before she completed reading three paragraphs, she came upon a dead cat. Perhaps if we reorient ourselves along the lines of the 1987 Presbyterian paper, Levine’s book and Gench’s lecture, and think of Judaism and Christianity as a shared heritage, a shared relationship with God, and look at Jesus as not repudiating Judaism, but as Gench described, identifying the possibilities within Judaism – perhaps this will give us a sharper, and more nuanced understanding of Jesus and his teachings to us.
Some of the political theorists, such as Hobbes, Rousseau and Locke, whose work was foundational to American constitutional theory, felt that the rule of law created freedom for humans to live and grow without having to fear the chaos of a lawless society. For too long, Christians have regarded the law of God as some kind of bondage, but Jesus was showing us the freedom that was possible in taking the love of God seriously as the guiding principal of the law. So that, for example in the teachings of Jesus, the Sabbath is a gift from God and intended as a blessing, not a hoop for humans to jump through to please God. The commandments are a gift, whether the ten described in Exodus, or the two as Jesus summarized them to love God completely and love each other as ourselves, and they free us from the tyranny of our own wants and fears in order to live the amazing freedom of a God-breathed life.
Christianity and Judaism are both relational, practice-based religions. We have much in common – the understanding that God intends for us to experience life in direct relationship with God, and the recognition that we are called to the service of God in the world. Both faiths are lived out in relationship with God and relationships with others. Both involve practices that make space for the holy, that encourage the life of the mind, and that call us to work for peace and justice in the world. In the recognition that they are practice-based, both Christianity and Judaism are practical.
The Transfiguration story is always read on the Sunday before Lent begins. We can understand that – it does point toward the events of Holy Week, as Jesus is discussing his eventual death with Moses and Elijah. But perhaps we can try to recover another level of response to this story than just a foreshadowing of the end of Lent. Perhaps the next seven weeks can be an opportunity for us to renew ourselves in relational, practical faith resulting in the radiance of God-breathed living. Just as the discipline an athlete or musician exercises becomes a means to their freely developing their talents and abilities, so too, the spiritual disciplines we undertake can be a means to our being transformed, day by day into people who live in the freedom of God’s transcendent, dynamic, and eminently practical love. Let it be so. Amen.