Scripture text: Mark 9:2-10
When we talk about God’s laws as recorded in the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, we see a curious mix of pragmatic rules for living and seemingly arbitrary rite and ritual that presumably helped to bring the ancient Hebrews closer in some way to their God. I would argue this perspective, which is somewhat commonplace among Christians, is a little misguided. There is actually a lot pragmatic about the rites and ritual laws too.
For instance, the ancient Hebrews and their modern descendants in the Jews are told to avoid eating certain foods. We call these rules the Kosher laws. It is, however, not coincidental that many of these foods (particularly in ancient times when sanitary practices were unknown) are notorious for carrying food-borne diseases. Those seemingly arbitrary rules were actually quite helpful.
The truth is, there is a pragmatism to all of God’s law, including those that are not obviously so. The commandment “Thou shalt not make a graven image” may not seem to be very practical or pragmatic. But there is a reason behind it. God is, of course, transcendent. In many ways, unknownable. No one truly knows what he looks like or even if he has an appearance as we understand it at all. But for us humans, we don’t deal well with that. We connect best to the tangible and the concrete. Things we can see and touch and understand with our own senses and minds. Hence, we are often forced by our own needs to break this commandment, to create images of God, shrines to the divine, and other tangible things that allow us to relate to that which is, in many ways, unrelateable.
The danger however and the practical reason behind the commandment is that we can forget that the image, the icon, the idol (as it were) represents but a mere fraction of the true deity behind it. God is always bigger than we imagine him to be.
And that brings us to the mountain of the Transfiguration. Peter and the other apostles are given a first-hand experience of the transcendent unknownable God. They hear his voice. They stand in his presence. And, as humans are wont to do when they have such experiences, they want to find a way to make sense of it. Thus Peter suggests that they memorialize this wondrous moment in time by the creation of a shrine. The full deity of God made manifest in Christ Jesus happened here. Probably a lot more impressive than all those places George Washington supposedly slept.
But it’s the wrong answer to this moment. It’s the wrong answer because what Jesus must do from this moment forward requires his humanity, not his divinity. He goes from this mountaintop to Jerusalem. He goes to the cross. He goes to die. And to focus so much on his divine nature because of this moment of transfiguration, Peter and the others have forgotten the whole of who Jesus is.
Forgetting is always the danger of idolatry. We forget the God behind the image and become enraptured with the image itself. We forget the truths behind the symbol. We forget that God is bigger than we imagine him to be. This is the mistake Peter makes when he suggests they enshrine this wondrous transcendent moment. They would come to focus on the symbol, not on God.
How often do we today fall prey to this error? Given how often Christians become obsessed with institution and tradition, quite a bit. Arguments over church buildings. Debates over who can receive sacraments or serve in the office of ministry. Fights over things because of what some dead former member or long-departed pastor would have wanted. All these happen in the church with some frequency and they are all a form of idolatry. Anytime the words “We’ve never done it that way before” or “So-and-so would have wanted...” are spoken, there is idolatry at work. We lost sight of the truth in the shadow of a symbol.
We are called to remember that God is not a tradition or a building or an institution or a memory. God is always bigger than we imagine him to be. And that’s a good thing. We called into the worship of a divinity that crafted the very substance of the universe, from the smallest atom to most vast galaxy. We called into the worship of a God who loved his creation so much that he became a part of it, incarnating as a human being named Jesus of Nazareth. In the wonder of unknownable mystery, Jesus was both fully divine and fully human and out of love that has no bounds, he went to the cross to do the one thing gods are not supposed to be able to do. He died and he died for us. And then, on the third day, Jesus rose again to life, become the first human, the first of us, to be granted that gift. The first, but far from the last.
In a logical scientific universe of the tangible and the material, there is much about this that makes no sense. But that’s part of the point. God is more than our tangible universe. God is more than we can understand. And he knows that. God has given us things to help us know him. He has given us a church and symbols and rituals that we can comprehend (even if we must remember that truth is greater still than these things). He given us sacraments and his story in the form of the Holy Scriptures. And he’s given us himself, found in the form of a humble carpenter’s son born in the ancient middle east.
In our ingenuity, we may unlock many of the secrets of our tangible universe. How it was made. How it works. But we will never figure out the whole of who God is. But God has told us what we need to know. He loves us, he made us, he died for us, he rose again for us, and he will bring us to him. That is no mystery. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment