22nd February 2009
2 Kings 2:1-12
2 Corinthians 4:3-6
Mark 9:2-9
On this final Sunday of the Epiphany season we read the story of the transfiguration. It may seem a little out of its place in the narrative dynamic of our liturgical drama, for Mark places the story right in the middle of the Gospel story, whereas we are still near the beginning. We shall see later, however, that it may be a good place to read this story, in addition to reading it on the feast of the transfiguration in August.
We shall come back to that, but for the moment let us start with some reflection on our first reading, the well known story of the transition between the ministries of Elijah and Elisha. In fact most scholars agree that the Elijah and Elisha cycles of stories are actually a doublet of the same story-cycle being passed down through two rather different channels of oral tradition. If this is right, then we can suppose that the beautiful story of the chariots of fire is an editorial composition to link the two cycles together. But again, what we are always dealing with in our interpretation of the Bible, is not history reporting facts, but narrative around which meaning can coalesce. Later tradition refers to this event as the assumption of Elijah: Elijah is one of the very few persons in the Hebrew-Christian tradition who do not die an earthly death, but are taken directly into heaven. Another, Enoch, makes a cameo appearance in Genesis:
Thus all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty-five years. Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him.[1]
If you think Enoch lived to a ripe old age it is nothing compared with his son Methuselah who lived to be nine hundred and sixty nine years. But he died. For the next person to escape human death we have to fast forward to Mary the mother of Jesus. Nothing much is said of Mary by name in the Gospels after the nativity stories. She is seen in the Acts of the Apostles, praying with the eleven in the upper room after the ascension of Jesus. But later tradition has it that Mary too was assumed into heaven. At least that is the Latin tradition. In Orthodoxy it is a little more mysterious. Her final earthly hours are described as the falling asleep, or dormition of Mary.
There is one last person who has a similar experience, but this is in the Shi'ite Islamic tradition. The twelfth Imam disappeared. It is described as the occultation of the Twelfth Imam. Some Shi'ite Muslims await his return as mahdi, or messiah.
I mention all this, because each of these stories points to a mystery beyond ordinary life and comprehension. The same has to be said about a number of the stories in the Gospels. Two in particular are the stories of the Resurrection and the Ascension of Jesus. But we also have to add the stories of Jesus walking on water, rising from the dead, appearing in mysterious ways to the disciples in the forty days after the resurrection, and perhaps several others, including the story of the nativity itself.
Paul, who seems to know very little of any of these stories, other than the resurrection, has his own accounts of this mysterious dimension. In today's reading he writes:
For it is the God who said, "Let light shine out of darkness," who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. [2]
In the letter to the Galatian Christians, he speaks of a mysterious understanding of the significance of Jesus granted to him directly, not coming from any human tradition.[3] Elsewhere in the Corinthian correspondence he speaks of an experience of being taken into the third heaven.[4] Just what relation these events bear to Luke's Road to Damascus story is not clear, and unimportant for my present purpose.
So what does all this represent? Since the Enlightenment, there has always been a temptation among more liberal expositors of the Scriptures to pass over these stories and concentrate on the moral teaching of Jesus or on the more pragmatic stories of Jesus feeding the crowds, healing the sick and organizing his disciples. But the stories we are dealing with today present a quite other side of the Gospel. Let us call them stories about experience of transcendence. I believe we can see them as stories about our conviction and experience that there is something more to being human than being overdeveloped chimpanzees. In this bicentennial celebration of the year of the birth of Charles Darwin, I am not at all joining those who deny the theory of evolution and preach that the fossil record was planted by God just to deceive biologists. I have no doubt that the chain of life developed roughly in the way Darwin thought, thought, of course the detailed picture is constantly changing as more discoveries of the fossil record are made. What I am suggesting is that in the course of evolution from higher primate to homo sapiens, we developed a capacity to search for meaning, which transcends our biology. Religion is a locus which can be a source for finding and understanding transcendence.
If we look specifically at our Christian faith, this, I believe, poses two difficult and serious questions for us. The first concerns our foundational texts, especially the Bible. Is the Bible a record of history, that is, of things that happened, or is it collection of meaningful stories, that is, a narrative which relates to this human capacity to wonder about and search for meaning? In one way the answer to this question is not all that difficult, for indeed the Bible is, or contains both. The problem really comes in knowing which is which, for the Bible comes from an era when, by and large, the distinction between fact and story was not made. But in dealing with this there are three broad lines. There are those who maintain that everything in the Bible is fact as it really happened. In the middle are those like me who believe that while much is narrative, there is also much that is historical and verifiable against the literary and archaeological record. We nevertheless tend to believe that even the historical narrative has been shaped and transmitted more for its meaning than for its factuality. At the other end spectrum are the neo-atheists who believe that religion in general (though they usually attack Christianity) consists of meaningless legends and fables, and even if it does concern historical fact it is of no present day interest. Not only, they claim, is religion of no value in the 21st century: it is positively harmful. It is sometimes not too difficult to see why they think that.
The second and more difficult problem is this: Is religious language ontological, that is speaking about God, Heaven, the soul and the like, as having a real existence? Or is it metaphorical, bearing witness to this human search for transcendence? Again, there are several ways of looking at this. Treating religious language as ontological poses problems, not only for scientists, but also for theologians. For the scientific mind the overall understanding of the history, nature and functioning of the universe leaves little room for God, at least as God has been traditionally understood and preached. For theologians, especially in the eastern tradition, to predicate existence to God is actually to deny him, since God must always be other than existence. At the other end of the scale the neo-atheists claim that neither ontological nor metaphorical religious language has any value for 21st century humanity. You have no doubt heard of busses in London and other European cities that carry the neo-atheist advertisement:
There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
Of course Evangelical Christians have replied with their own advertisement:
There definitely is a God
I don't think that slogan slinging is ever particularly helpful. I think it is much more important to keep the dialogue on both the biblical and religious language issues open and ongoing. For to close the question on either side, or even in the middle, cuts off communication with millions of people.
Being a long-winded theologian of the progressive school, and a foreigner to the ten second sound-byte age, I have my own proposal to a slogan.
The God most of you have usually believed in probably does not exist. If you still want to believe in God in the twenty first century, you have a lot of hard thinking to do.
I wonder where I could find the funds to publish that on the busses?
Seriously though, I believe, there is an important task for those of us who stand somewhere between religious literalists and neo-atheist scientists. Our task is to try to keep the dialogue open. It is at the ends of the spectrum where we find the desire to close the dialogue, with the simple minded statement that we have all the truth, either given by God or discovered in research. So we shall always be fighting in an uphill struggle. But for me at least it is struggle which it is my duty and my joy to pursue for as long as I am able.
[1] Genesis 5:23-24
[2] 2 Corinthians 4:6
[3] Galatians 1:11-24
[4] 2 Corinthian 12:1-10
