Lent Transfiguration story: to take holiness,
insights into the groaning cities
Second Sunday of Lent
By JOAN CHITTISTER
Of all the questions with which the
Lenten journey to the center of the soul confronts us, the one that emerges out
of the gospel of the Second Sunday of Lent may be the most determining of them
all. Once this question is answered, everything else falls in place, an uneasy
place, perhaps, but in place, nevertheless. The question is a deceptive one,
simple at one level, dangerously profound at another. The question of the
second week of Lent is not What should we do to make ourselves
religious? It is What should we do to make ourselves
holy?
An ancient story from another tradition may make the point more
clear: Once upon a time, the story tells, a seeker went from
land to land to discover an authentic religion. Finally, the seeker found a
group of extraordinary fame. They were known for the goodness of their lives
and for the singleness of their hearts and for the sincerity of their
service.
I see everything you do, the seeker said, and
Im impressed by it. But, before I become your disciple, I have a question
to ask: Does your God work miracles?
Well, the disciples said to the seeker, it all
depends on what you mean by a miracle. Some people call it a miracle when God
does the will of people. We call it a miracle when people do the will of
God.
There is a tension in religion today that swirls around the
struggle for authenticity. Is adherence to doctrinal purity the true mark of
the committed Christian? Or is it deference to hierarchy? Or does authenticity
lie in being citizen Christians whose intention to maintain the Christian world
lies in fashioning into law and public structures the theology of one
denomination or another: Enshrining the Ten Commandments in every courtroom,
for instance, in a pluralistic society; maintaining a common Sabbath and a
common religious calendar of holidays. Or does real spirituality lie in
withdrawal from the fray into some kind of pious Nirvana where the cares of the
day and the questions of the time touch us not?
The answer, I think, lies in our own story, this one from a
scripture that is often translated as a glimpse of glory or a case for
contemplative withdrawal from the chaos around us but which, I believe, is
really an insight into the spirituality of courage. It is a call for the kind
of involvement that changes things. It is a commitment to work miracles for the
poor and marginalized rather than maintain them in the name of tradition and
authority and good order.
The story that really makes a difference for us today, I think, is
the story of the Transfiguration.
Mount Tabor, site of the Transfiguration, is one of those places
that is not on the way to anywhere. It is steep and rugged and hard
to scale. The path that leads to the top of the mountain is hand-hewn out of
rock. It is also narrow and dangerous and long: a journey not to be made
lightly.
Then, at the top, with the exception of the view of the vast,
unending plain of Jezreel below -- there is nothing there. Its an out of
the way place that has all the character of a dead end.
And it is bleak, isolated, stark Mount Tabor to which Jesus took
Peter, James and John.
If we want to understand precisely to what kind of Lenten
conversion we ourselves are being called on the Second Sunday of Lent all we
need to do, I think, is to look at Peter, James and John on Tabor.
In the first place, Peter, James and John thought they had been
called to go up the mountain to be with Jesus alone. So, the scripture says
they left the world below and went off by themselves, prepared,
apparently, to follow Jesus and find God, to become
contemplative.
But mountains in ancient spiritualities, Judaism included, were
always thought of as points of contact with God since they were the places
where earth touched heaven. To go up to a high mountain -- to which
there are eight major references in the Judeo-Christian scriptures -- is always
then to be seeking a very special relationship with God.
A pietists dream
On this particular excursion up this particular mountain theirs
was a very select group: No one else was with them and they had Jesus all to
themselves. It was a pietists dream.
And, sure enough, scripture records that a strange and wonderful
thing occurred there. Up on the top of that faraway mountain, Peter, James and
John got a new insight into Jesus. Up there by themselves, they began to see
Jesus differently. And he was a great deal more than they had ever imagined: He
was dazzling and intense and all-consuming. The idea was overwhelming. And
very, very heady. It was also very, very disturbing. Because then and there, in
a gospel that is apparently about the mystical, the privatized dimensions of
religion we begin to see the perennial struggle between piety and Christianity,
between religion-for-real and religion-for-show.
There, on the top of that mountain, right in front of their eyes,
Jesus, the scripture says, became transfigured before them. He was radiant as
the sun. And he was talking to Moses and Elijah. And thats the part of
the story that makes the difference.
If were going to understand the difference between piety and
Christianity, if were going to be able to make the distinction ourselves
between the keeping of Lent and the coming to conversion, its important
to realize four things about this gospel.
In the first place, Peter himself opted first for piety.
Jesus, its good for us to be here, Peter said. Let us
build three booths. Lets live in this nice comfortable religious
cloud, in other words. Lets institutionalize the mystical. Lets
concentrate on the next world. Peter knows a good thing when he sees it and
Peter plans to settle down in a nest of pieties and wait. At the very moment of
his deepest revelation and clearest call, in other words, Peter decides that
the spiritual life has something to do with building temples and keeping the
rituals and enlarging the facilities and floating above the fray. Indeed, if
there is a temptation in Christianity on the Second Sunday of Lent, it is
probably the temptation to play church. To dabble in religion. To recite the
prayers without becoming them. And therein lies the second significant
dimension of the story: the almost cacophonous cry of this scripture. No sooner
has Peter decided to be a church bureaucrat, a weekday mystic, an office
manager, than the irony of the situation shocks us all: Scripture dashes the
entire thought in mid-air. While he was still speaking, the
scripture records, The voice of God said, This is my son ...
Listen!
To the dirty towns
Then the passage continues beyond todays reading of it to
the end of this chapter in Luke, to the fulfillment of this incident. Slowly
but surely, Jesus begins to lead them around the edges of the cliffs, over the
rocky road, back down the mountain to the very bottom of the hill: to the dirty
towns and hurting people and unbelieving officials and ineffective institutions
below, where the sick and outcast, the abandoned and infected waited for them,
expecting the miraculous, expecting to be healed.
The fourth and determining development in the story implies very
clearly why they had a right to expect the impossible. Jesus, you see,
didnt appear to Peter, James and John with David the king, or with Aaron
the priest. Jesus didnt show himself to the disciples with those who
interpreted the law or with those who maintained its temples in society. Jesus
didnt reveal his work as either royalty or ritual. No, Jesus identified
himself on Tabor with Moses and Elijah. With Moses who had led people out of
oppression, and with Elijah whom King Ahab called that troublemaker of
Israel, -- the one who condemned Israels compromise between true
and false gods -- the one, in other words, who exposed to the people the
underlying causes of their problems.
Jesus identified himself, not with the kings and the priests of
Israel who had maintained its establishments and developed its institutions,
good as they were. Jesus identified himself with the prophets. With those who
had been sent to warn Israel of its unconscionable abandonment of the covenant.
With those who poured out their lives for the people around them.
This Lenten gospel is the very bedrock lesson of the Christian
life. If the great spiritual journey is to have any meaning whatsoever in our
times, we, you and I, too, will have to wade into the throngs of hurting people
on every plain of this planet, listening, listening, listening to the prophet
Jesus, and exposing to people the underlying causes of all the wounding in this
world and healing what we touch.
And all of that in the face of those institution-types for whom
saving the system is much too often a higher priority than saving the
people.
The call to a Christianity that is profoundly prophetic
presupposes of course a long, long journey up a mountain to find God. It
certainly implies a deep personal spiritual life. But the call to Christianity
also means that we cannot have a real Christian life and expect to stay on the
top of our antiseptic little mountains.
Profoundly prophetic
The call of the spiritual life is the call to take all the
insights into the life of Christ that we have ever been able to gather and to
go alone back down our private little mountains to the grasping, groaning world
of our own time.
It is one thing to be devout. Its relatively easy, in fact,
to enclose ourselves in a cocoon of pious practices. It is another thing
entirely to live a life worthy of a follower of Jesus, the prophet.
If the question of the Second Sunday of Lent is What must we
do to be truly holy, the call to Christianity in this second Sunday of
Lent is surely the call to be aware of the root causes of suffering in this
world and to have the courage to work a few miracles of our own.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, author and lecturer, lives in
Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, March 2,
2001
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