Sunday Meditation: Onto the Mountaintop with the Prophets

Last week Jesus took us into the desert with the wild beasts, but today on the Second Sunday of Lent in Year B, Jesus goes from the desert to the top of a mountain, and instead of communing with wild beasts Jesus communes with two prophets from the Old Testament.

 

Jesus took Peter, James, and John

and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves.

And he was transfigured before them,

and his clothes became dazzling white,

such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.

Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses,

and they were conversing with Jesus.

Then Peter said to Jesus in reply,

"Rabbi, it is good that we are here!

Let us make three tents:

one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah."

He hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified.

Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them;

from the cloud came a voice,

"This is my beloved Son. Listen to him."

Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone

but Jesus alone with them.

 

As they were coming down from the mountain,

he charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone,

except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead.

So they kept the matter to themselves,

questioning what rising from the dead meant.

~Mk 9:2-1

This week I’m going to provide two sermons (I can’t say homilies since neither are priests) on this passage since both are short and to the point.  First will be Jeff Cavins, who has I think the better exegesis.

Jeff rightly points out how the almost sacrifice of Isaac and then replaced by the sacrifice of the lamb projects to the future sacrifice of Christ, the Lamb of God, on still another mountain, Calvary.  The Feast of Booths that he speaks of is called Sukkot, and if you live in a religiously Jewish neighborhood as I do, you will see the booths built for the week long feast in everyone’s backyards or decks.

I know people get hung up on how God could request Abraham the sacrifice of his child, but there is still another way to look at this from what I’ll call the more “Jewish” perspective.  Abraham here at this point is not Jewish; he is a Chaldean, a Semitic people of the region, and like most (if not all) Semitic people of the time practiced child sacrifice.  The most famous perhaps are the Carthaginians of the Punic people who sacrificed infants to the deity Baal.  By leading Abraham to the point of sacrificing his child—and notice Abraham goes along with it as a perfectly normal request—and then stopping it, God stops the practice of child sacrifice in the Jewish people.  Perhaps here with the ending of the child sacrifice, Abraham has now changed from a Chaldean to a Jew.  So do not think of God as a monster here.  There were both contemporaneous and archetypical reasons for God’s request with the intention of ending the horrific practice.  I didn’t mean to dwell so much on the first reading, but I think that needed to be said.

The second sermon will be from John Michael Talbot who I think better captures the spirituality of the passage.    

 

JMT points out the community that forms between Jesus and the three disciples and the two prophets, and that is very insightful and an element of the transfiguration that I never thought about.  I don’t think JMT goes far enough though.  Notice that there are two trinities on the mountain, trinity with a small “t” but perhaps pointing to the Trinity with a capital “T.”  Jesus, Moses, and Elijah form one trinity, and Peter, James, and John form a second trinity.  And both “trinity” and “Trinity” is a community. 

Could the Trinity be there in the passage as well?  Jesus, God the Father in the voice, and the Holy Spirit as the Glory Cloud?  Possible, but I am not quite that knowledgeable to say definitively.  Perhaps that could be our Sunday meditation.

 

Meditation: “Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them; from the cloud came a voice, "This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.”

How can we have a sermon from John Michael Talbot and not play one of his beautiful hymns?  I can’t.  What song would be fitting for the Transfiguration?  How about, “Let Us Kneel Down.”