NewCreation

Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent 2021 Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the second Sunday in Lent. Last time we saw Jesus in the wilderness; now we come to really the center, the middle of St Mark's Gospel: Jesus' Transfiguration. And we get a key word, "beloved," which had also last come just before Jesus went out into the wilderness. At Jesus's baptism he heard a voice which said, "You are my beloved Son" — agapitos — and here on the mount of Transfiguration that is going to be the key word: "beloved." We're going to see why that's important, because the Church today asks us to read this Gospel in the light of the Abraham text about his sacrifice, or near-sacrifice, of Isaac, and the key word there is agapetos, "beloved." So I'm going to try and be obedient to the Church, even though they've given us a thoroughly bowdlerized version of the Genesis 22 text. They haven't given us the whole of it; they've given us some poorly chosen chunks of it, in my opinion. But I'll try and make sense of what's going on here, and will fit in Moses and Elijah as well, since they're part of the story. So just before today's Gospel, in St Mark's Gospel, Peter has recognized that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus has rebuked him after he then tries to get in the way of Jesus explaining that he's going to die and rise again. Then Jesus explains not only to the disciples but to a broader public — to whom he has not shared the business about him being the Messiah — about the importance of being able to take up your cross and being prepared to die, and that's what following him is going to look like. Then he takes Peter and James and John off to the mountain. Now there's Peter, whom he's rebuked before for having failed to understand what it was about — what this business about dying and rising. He's now taking him up to the mountain, and they get there after six days. Okay, so here's already a hint as to what's happening. We're talking about the seventh day, the day when the fullness of new creation will start to become available. So here they are on a high mountain apart by themselves, and he was transfigured before them. In other words, his form changed. The changes of form in the Hebrew text are usually shown by means of garments, and this is no exception. His clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them. And this is a reference to Malachi, where the prophet Malachi refers to: "For he is like a refiner's fire and like fuller's soap; he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver." This is something which — "for who shall abide the day of his coming" — which we get in Handel's Messiah. It's like a refiner's fire. So here is the sign that this is the Lord. This is not a messenger, this is not an angel, this is the Lord and he's the one who is coming. There is something really quite frightening about this. And then there appeared to them — or, in the passive form, "there were seen by them" — Elijah and Moses, interestingly Elijah first rather than Moses, even though chronologically, theoretically, it was the other way around. Why these two? Well, bear in mind that this is to do with dying and rising. And what was Moses to do with this? Well, Moses was dead. This seems a bizarre thing to say, but Moses did actually die. Deuteronomy says very obliquely he was buried, but no one knows where he was buried, leaving many rabbinical questions in the air. Who buried him? Why does no one know where he's buried? Perhaps it was God who buried him, took him away. But the answer is no one knows. So: dead Moses. There's never been a body of Moses, so no relics of Moses for anyone to fight about. Moses is dead. But Moses had prophesied that there would be another prophet like him, and that that one would be able to offer atonement, which he himself, Moses, was not allowed to do. God prevented what Moses offered — to make atonement for the people — God turned down the offer and said that another one would come and do that. So Moses: a key part in establishing the covenant, but dead. And then Elijah, more mysteriously, alive, because Elijah was the prophet who was associated with resurrection in the first place. One of his miracles was having brought back to life the son of a widow. And secondly, he had himself of course been assumed into heaven by the chariot of Israel, in the sight of Elisha his successor. In other words, Elijah didn't die, which was why there was, if you like, always an eschatological quality to Elijah. He was the one who was going to come — because he'd been taken up into heaven — was going to come. Curiously, there was something of the same with Isaac, because many rabbis read the story in Genesis of Abraham's sacrifice, or failed sacrifice, of Isaac as if in fact Abraham did sacrifice Isaac, and at the moment of sacrifice Isaac was carried up to heaven and kept there alive and allowed back later. Let's just give you an example of how rabbis, or some rabbis at least, were capable of interpreting the Genesis story. Okay, so we have the one who is the sign of rising to life and the one who is the sign of future atonement, coming together and discussing things with Jesus. And the word for talking is the same word that we get in Exodus when Moses goes in and out and talks with God. He goes in, talks with God, then comes out, puts a veil on his face so that his brilliance is not too strong for the people to see, and he then talks to them with a veil on his face. Here Peter and James and John are inside the vision; they don't need veils. They see the discussion; they're on the inside of it. Then Peter says to Jesus, "Rabbi, it's good for us to be here, let's make three dwellings." Peter typically gets something right but in completely the wrong way. It is what he says, but not as he knows it. So he refers to the making of tabernacles, tents, which of course refer back to the making of tents in the desert and the tabernacle over which the Holy One of God – which the Holy One of God overshadowed with a cloud. He says, "We're going to make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah." In other words, we can see that you're at the same level; this is rather jolly, let's be in this together. But in fact it can't have been this jolly, because it says he did not know what to say. Why bother to say anything? For they were terrified, and the word for terrified is the same word as describes Moses's terror in the face of the Most High, quoted again in the episode of the Hebrew. So this word for the terror of Moses in the face of the Most High is clearly a very significant word. It says then a cloud overshadows them, and from the cloud there comes a voice: "This is my Son, the beloved" – ho agapetos – "listen to him." Okay, so here we have, curiously, the center of what is expected to be shown to them: this strange mixture, mystery of dying and rising, which is what this is supposed to be about, which is what they hadn't understood before and still won't get to understand, and which God is trying to get through to them, is about to come into their midst. And there's no question that it refers to the Genesis text; it refers to "your son, your beloved son." Now let's just remember something about the Genesis text – and again, please note the shortened version which we have here, but the full thing. The Genesis text, the sacrifice of Isaac, is a terrible, scandalous text as we have it now, and it requires us to do a good deal of hard work to be able to imagine it as what it actually was, which was deliberately and from the beginning a prophetic text undoing the world of child sacrifice. In it, immediately Abraham is taken out as a test. He sees from afar the place where the sacrifice is going to be, and the place where the sacrifice is going to be is also going to be the place on which Solomon is going to found the Temple. In other words, what does he see in the distance? He sees in the distance the place where a Temple based on the sacrifice of lambs instead of humans is going to be set up. In other words, the place where Moses's redemptive lamb religion is going to replace the older religion, in which some people at least thought they were justified in sacrificing their firstborn. When Isaac, reasonably enough, Noticing that there isn't a victim as he's taken up the hill, asks his dad what's going to happen. Abraham says, "God will himself provide the lamb for sacrifice, my son." God is a third person; it's referred to as Elohim. But all of this of course is before the Moses revolution, in which Moses' revolution God is "I Am." And it's an angel from "I Am" who – theoretically Abraham has never heard of it – it says in the book of Exodus quite clearly, "By my name 'I Am' I did not refer to myself to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob; I had other names for them." But "I Am" speaks, as it were, from Moses's future into Abraham's past, and countermands the sacrifice. And he countermands the sacrifice. And remember that the very same phrase that I've just recited for you – "God himself will provide the lamb for sacrifice, my son" – if it's "I Am" who's saying that, then it is "I Am will provide myself for sacrifice, the Lamb, my Son." In other words, it's a prophecy of the one who is going to give himself up as an act of self-providing, so that we never have to be involved in the world of sacrifices again. So there's already the hint of that in the "I Am" God undoing the Elohim God's instruction. And of course this is part of what is being fulfilled. Jesus is actually the acting out of God giving himself as a lamb – his Son, himself – to be the sacrifice. This is what Jesus is saying. He's saying, "Yes, this is what's going to happen; this is going to be a gift for you. And what your life is going to look like is entering into that gift; that's what's going to be made possible." Now how could they have understood this? How can we understand this? It's immensely difficult to understand that God gave himself as a sacrifice to us, undoing our need for sacrifices, in order to establish our stability, our security, and all that – not because God needed sacrifice, but because we need sacrifices such is our fear and our dangerousness to each other – and that he's entering into that space to take us out of it. And to enable us… suddenly, when they looked around, they saw no one with them anymore but only Jesus. Okay. So the vision that's attempted to complexify what they were about to see vanishes. Now they're left just with the human being Jesus. And as they were coming down the mountain, he ordered them to tell no one about what they had seen until after the Son of Man had risen from the dead. In other words, don't attempt to explain all this until it's actually happened; then you can find yourselves on the inside. So they kept the matter to themselves, questioning what this rising from the dead could mean. And that's the hint: all of this is about rising from the dead. What they're being asked to do, what we're being asked to do, in the second Sunday of Lent, is to enter into the dynamic and wonder what it is that God is bringing us to life, what that's going to look like.