Jason Micheli's Blog, page 84
February 26, 2023
Jesus Won't Jump the Shark
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Genesis 30.1-24
In a 1995 essay entitled “Hermeneutics and the Life of the Church,” the American theologian Robert W. Jenson suggests that Christians evidence the inspiration and authority of scripture just to the extent we struggle to say what the text straightforwardly says.
That is, we avow scripture’s inspiration and obey scripture’s authority precisely by avoiding the privileging of parts we prefer and by wrestling with the parts we would prefer to avoid.
He writes,
“We all agree here, I suppose, that the Bible is somehow authoritative. But how does that work? For actual congregations of believers; I suggest, the matter is decided entirely by practice and very simply.
When we hear preaching in the broadest sense, that is to say, when the church's servants call us verbally to faith and obedience, do we observe the preacher struggling to say what the Bible says?
On more formal occasions, do we observe the preacher, or teacher struggling somehow to say what a specific text says? If we do, we then and there experience the authority of Scripture.
It is not a question of the preacher's or teacher's success in saying what Scripture says; the observable effort is by itself the necessary hermeneutical principle.”
Brothers and sisters, observe.
You’re about the see the authority of scripture in action. A sermon on this specific text— believe me, it’s a struggle. I don’t know what to say about what this scripture says; which is to say, I don’t know what to do with this tangled mess of people. Nor do I know what to say about the God who would have anything to do with them.
In the Book of Ruth, when Boaz prepares to marry Naomi’s stubborn, gentile daughter-in-law, the people of Bethlehem bless Boaz by saying, “May the LORD make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.”
Even within the polite confines of a wedding toast, the people of God cannot avoid acknowledgement that the house of Israel is built upon a ramshackle foundation. The people of Bethlehem don’t say “May the LORD make Ruth, who is coming into your house, like Rachel, who built up the house of Israel.” Their benediction does not credit Rachel, the one whom Jacob loved (for a time) with constructing the house of Israel. It’s Rachel and Leah, the one whom Rachel’s impulsive lover wed on accident. “May the LORD make the woman, who is coming into your house, like Rachel and Leah, who together built up the house of Israel.” And, let’s be honest, even this mazel tov is too decorous a commendation.
It’s actually Rachel and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah who lay the foundation for the house of the chosen people of God. And let’s not leave out Laban. After all, Jacob’s children are born on the estate of his petty, con-artist father-in-law, who just after this passage attempts once again to swindle his daughters’s husband.
The house of Israel is built on what reads like the transcript of an episode for the Jerry Springer Show.When it first aired in 1991, TV Guide proclaimed the Jerry Springer Show “the worst TV show of all time.” But this episode in the Book of Genesis, it’s a chapter in the greatest story ever told. No, even more so this is a chapter in the narrative by which the Triune God identifies himself. There simply is no other God behind or beyond this seedy story.
Ladies and gentlemen, eyes up here. See the authority of scripture in action.
Watch me work. Look at me labor, likely in vain. I struggle to know what to say about what this scripture says. I don’t know what to do with these bitter, jealous, conniving people.
What kind of God would have anything to do with such people? We haven’t even gotten to the part of the story where the children of this five-some leave their little brother for dead to be sold into slavery in Egypt.
This passage has so many composite parts it’s easy to miss the movement of the plot. By Genesis 30, the once single, still exiled Jacob is married. He’s married to the beautiful Rachel, whom he loves. And he’s married to her sister, Leah, who, the Bible reports, has “nice eyes,” a Hebrew euphemism for “she’s got a nice personality.”
Jacob’s wedded life did not begin well and in Genesis 30 we learn— to the shock of no one at the wedding— that it is not going well. Genesis 29 concluded by telling us that that Jacob “loved Rachel more than Leah” and that “the Lord saw that Leah was hated.” If the cliche is true that a happy wife means for a happy life, then Jacob has two unhappy lives. Jacob may not have loved Leah, but evidently this did not prevent him from making love(?) to Leah. Jacob has four sons with Leah: Rueben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah. The first three sons all have names which are nothing more than passive aggressive puns expressing Leah’s acute unhappiness. Rueben, in Hebrew, means “Because the Lord has looked upon my affliction; maybe now my husband will love me” Simeon, in Hebrew, means “Because the Lord has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also.” Levi— it doesn’t mean jeans— in Hebrew, it’s “Now this time my husband will be attached to me, because I have borne him three sons.” No child should have to bear such a burden.
Meanwhile, the romance that began with a stone-rolling meet-cute at a well does not weather well. Rachel’s barrenness fills her with envy for her sister, “Give me children,” she screams at Jacob, “or I shall die!” And Jacob responds with the calculated cruelty only a spouse can muster, “Whom am I, God? He’s the one who’s withheld from you the fruit of the womb.” Notice, Jacob doesn’t say us, “…withheld from us the fruit of the womb.” He’s made her all alone.
Rachel envies Leah her children. Leah envies Rachel her husband’s love. Consequently, both initiate a dysfunctional competition against the other. Each wife drafts her maidservant to outdo the rival spouse. Rachel recruits Bilhah to give her husband babies. Leah enlists Zilpah to add to her offspring. And evidently, amidst all this acrimony, Jacob has opted to boycott Leah’s bed; such that, Leah hires her husband for sex, trading Rachel an aphrodisiac fruit for the body of the husband who does not love her. “You must come in to me,” Leah says to Jacob, “for I have hired you with my son’s mandrakes.”
If you can keep up, by the end of the scripture text Rachel has contributed one child, Joseph, to the building up of the house of Israel. Leah gives birth to six sons and one daughter. Bilhah handmaids two sons. Zilpah offers another two boys. And in the very next verses, the children’s Grandpa, Laban, tries to steal all their grocery money through a grift having to do with the spottedness of sheep and goats.
These people—
This is the hot mess that is the foundation of the house of God’s chosen people.
“It is not a question of the preacher’s success in saying what Scripture says,” Jenson writes, “the observable effort is by itself the necessary hermeneutical principle.”
I wonder, have I labored long enough for scripture to exercise its authority over us?
I’ll work a bit harder.
Take my first church. Please, I wish someone had taken it from me.
A member of my congregation, Bill was a philandering, swindling contractor.
Against all good judgment and common sense, a couple in the congregation, Tim and Diane, had cracked open their nest egg and hired Bill to build a home overlooking the Delaware River. Their dream home became a nightmare when Bill took their money, used it pay off other debts and business endeavors, and then declared bankruptcy. I remember sitting in my sock feet in their half finished house listening to Diane rage as she unpacked decorative plates.
“Preacher, when you sit him down,” Diane had wagged her finger at me, “Make sure you go Old Testament on him.”
We all met in the church parlor. Tim and Diane, and Bill. And me. Tim and Diane sat in front of a dusty chalk board with half-erased prayer requests written on it. Bill sat in a rocking chair backed up against a wall, a criminally tacky painting of the Smiling Jesus hung in a frame right above his head.
I opened with what probably sounded to everyone like a condescending prayer.
No one said “Amen.”
Instead Tim and Diane exploded with unbridled anger and unleashed a torrent of expletives that could’ve peeled the varnish off the church parlor china cabinet. And Bill, who’d always been an unimaginative, sedate— even boring— church member, when backed into a corner, became intense and passionate. There was suddenly an urgency to him. With surprising creativity, Bill had an answer, a story, a reason for every possible charge.
In the middle of Bill’s self-serving squirming, Tim and Diane threw back their chairs and, jabbing her finger in his direction, Diane screamed at him, “You think you can just live your life banking on God’s forgiveness?!”
And then she pointed her finger at me instead and with a thunderous whisper said, “After all the good we’ve done for this church, we shouldn’t even need to be having this conversation!”
Then they stormed out of the church parlor. And they caused even more commotion when they left the church for good. Meanwhile Bill just sat there with a blank, guilt-less expression on his face and that offensively tacky picture of Jesus smiling right above him.
After an uncomfortable silence, I said to Bill, “Well, I guess you’re probably wondering if we’re going to make you leave the church?”
He squinted at me, like I’d just uttered a complete non sequitur, “No, why would I be wondering that?”
“Well, obviously, because of everything you’ve done. Lying and cheating and robbing your neighbors. It’s immoral.
And Bill nodded.
“The way I see it,” Bill said, “this church can’t afford to lose someone like me.”
“Can’t afford to lose someone like you? You’re bankrupt. You can’t even pay your own bills, Bill, much less help us pay our bills. What do you mean we can’t afford to lose someone like you?”
Bill nodded and leaned forward and started to gesture with his hands, like he was working out the details of another crooked business deal with great effort.
“You’re seminary educated right preacher?” he asked.
I nodded.
“And of course you know your Bible a lot better than me.”
And I feigned humility and nodded.
“I could be wrong,” he said, “but wouldn’t you say that the people Jesus had the biggest problem with were the scribes and the Pharisees?”
“Yeah,” I nodded, not liking where this was going.
“And back then weren’t they the professional clergy?” Bill asked. “You know...like you?”
“Uh-huh,” I grumbled.
“And, again you’ve been to seminary and all, but wouldn’t you say that across the whole Bible, the people God has a special heart for, the people God just loves to call and use, are people more or less like, well, people like me.”
“You slippery son of a...” I thought to myself.
“Sure, I know what I deserve,” Bill said, rocking in the rocking chair, “but that’s why you all can’t afford to lose me.”
I struggled to catch his meaning.
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well, without someone like me around church, good folks like you are liable to forget how it’s lucky for all of us that we don’t have to deal with a just God. Without someone like me around, good people like you might take it for granted how lucky it is that all we ever get is a gracious God who refuses to give us what we deserve.”
I can’t prove it, but I swear Jesus’ smile had grown bigger in that offensively tacky picture hanging above Bill on the wall. Maybe Jesus’s smile had gotten bigger because Bill was smiling. And I wasn’t.
I suppose it’s not just Jacob’s haram that’s a hot mess.
The Holy Bible is riddled with worse than unseemliness.
Evidently Noah packed more than animals two-by-two onto the ark because, after the flood, he passes out drunk and naked and then, to add injury to insult, he curses the grandkids who discover him. Two of the three patriarchs in the Book of Genesis pass off their wives as their sisters to lure the attention of other men. Abraham does it twice, and he even strikes it rich through the scheme. Along the way in the word of God, a son will sleep with the mother of his half-brothers. A daughter-in-law will dress as a prostitute in a ploy to seduce the father of her two dead husbands.
And in inverse proportion to the soap-opera sordidness of scripture there is not any hint of divine condemnation.The Lord never so much as scolds Abraham for pretending Sarah is his sister. God doesn’t even should on Isaac for doing the same with his wife, Rebekah, “You probably shouldn’t do that, Issac.”
Consider the verbs Genesis credits to God in our text.
Each and every tawdry time, the God of Israel is like Jesus before the woman caught in adultery, saying “Neither do I condemn you.”
God gives.
God chastens.
God hears.
God gives (again).
God heeds.
God gives (again).
God endows.
God remembers.
God heeds (again).
God opens.
God removes (shame).
Not a single verb of reproach.
This is surprising.
After all, ever since the moment the church became predominantly a gentile church, we have been told again and again that the God of the New Testament is somehow different— greater in graciousness, more merciful— than the God of the Old Testament.
The God of the former is a loving promise-maker, we’re told on good authority, while the God of the latter is a vengeful law-layer.
“Preacher, when you sit him down, make sure you go Old Testament on him.”
“Have you actually read the thing?” I thought to myself.
If you look to the next chapter, to the resolution of Laban’s double cross of Jacob, you see that Genesis credits God with a verb that is even more direct. God speaks. The word of the Lord comes to Jacob and tells Jacob how to outfox his father-in-law.
God speaks. The word of the Lord comes to Jacob.
It’s critical we understand that locution.
If we do not, then Christians have neither the reason nor the right to read Israel’s Bible as also our scripture.
When the Old Testament tells us that “the word came to…” it does not mean that the Father sent some words to one prophet or patriarch and then sent another batch of words to another prophet or patriarch.If that’s what it means, then, for Christians, the documents which comprise the Old Testament are nothing more than interesting historical background and cultural context for the New Testament.Of course, this is all the Old Testament is for a great many— maybe most— Christians.
But this is not what “the word of the Lord came to…” means.
When the Old Testament tells us that the word of the Lord came to Jacob, when the Old Testament reports that the word of the Lord came to Isaiah son of Amoz, when the word of the Lord came to Elijah, saying ”Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain upon the land,” the word of the Lord in the Old Testament is the word incarnate.
The logos is Jesus.
The reason the word of the Lord responds, over and over again, to the hot mess that is the house of Israel, responds just like Christ before the woman caught in adultery, is that the word of the Lord in the Old Testament is Jesus.
Fully human, fully divine Jesus. Jesus did not become fully human and fully divine— that’s not the dogma. Jesus is fully human and fully divine, eternally so.
As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, “Before Abraham was, I am.”
The logos who speaks in the Old Testament is not some other extra word of God.The logos is Jesus.It’s Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who inspired David to pray, “The Lord is my shepherd…” The reason Isaiah prophesies that the messiah will be a Man of Sorrows is that the word who came to the prophet Isaiah was Jesus, the Man of Sorrows. This is why you cannot say that Jesus never said anything about how you should treat immigrants or practice chastity or any of the other subjects that are inconvenient in our secular age, for the word of the Lord that came to Moses on Mt. Sinai was Jesus.
To say, as the creeds and the apostles do, that Jesus is preexistent is to say that it is Jesus who is the voice that addresses his people in the Old Testament. And it’s no different for us today. When we preface the reading of scripture by saying, “Listen for the word of the Lord…” the creeds and the apostles would have us listen for the Lord Jesus, whether the scripture is from Matthew or Luke, Genesis or Judges.
If the word of the Lord in the Old Testament is not Jesus, then for us the Old Testament can only ever be the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible.
It cannot be scripture.
As Robert Jenson writes,
“It was a great maxim of all pre-modern interpretation that the very word who is incarnate as Christ was not first heard when he became flesh and dwelt among us. God speaks throughout the life of Israel and in her scriptures, and when he speaks this utterance is not another than that same word who is named Jesus.”
After their blowup with Bill, I found Tim and Diane waiting for me in the parking lot.
She poked me in the chest.
Hard.
And she hollered even harder, “YOU DIDN’T CONDEMN HIM AT ALL! I TOLD YOU TO GO OLD TESTAMENT ON THAT SOB!”
I bit my lip and mulled it over for a moment.
“I think I kinda, sorta did go Old Testament on him,” I said.
“We all agree here, I suppose, that the Bible is somehow authoritative. But how does that work?” Robert Jenson asks. Scripture’s authority works, he says, by watching a preacher or teacher struggle— and maybe fail— with an odd or inconvenient text.
Well, you may not be able to see from your seat in the pew, but I am sweating now and I have sweated. I’ve toiled and labored. And the upside of all my effort is that you can rest.
You can rest in the promise that God will deal graciously with you.
He will be Mercy to you when he finds you a hot mess.After all, if Jesus is the word who addresses us in the Old Testament and if Jesus is what God says to us again in the New, then you and I are like characters in the last third of an Author’s unfinished play.
There is still more.
There is still more future, more time.
There is still these last days, the final bit of the third act.
And there is yet the finale.
But the Author has made choices in the first two acts.
The Author has limited the options before him, and in doing so the Author has limited himself. He can still surprise us, sure. But the story we inhabit is not absurd. The story we inhabit has an Author with intentions; therefore, whatever the Author does next with us he’s not going to jump the shark. The balance of the story must be consistent with the words he’s already committed to the page.
Therefore, whatever is in store for you, you can rest in the knowledge that it will sound like, “Neither do I condemn you.”
February 24, 2023
"You People" is a Warning, You People
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Liel Liebowitz is a writer for Tablet magazine and host of the popular podcast, Unorthodox. Liel is an Israeli journalist, author, media critic and video game scholar. Leibovitz was born in Tel Aviv, immigrated to the United States in 1999, and earned a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 2007. In 2014, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. He is the author of many books, including The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, How the Talmud Can Change Your Life, and Stan Lee: A Life in Comics.
You can read his recent editorial in Tablet here.
February 23, 2023
God *Needs* for All to be Saved
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Every third year, the season of Lent begins in a remembered garden where Eve and Adam fall prey to a tempter attempting to lure them away from taking God at his word. The lectionary assigns Genesis 2 at the beginning of Lent as a way to plot the story of salvation that culminates in great mystery of Christ passing over from death to life. However, the plot, in the minds of many Christians, is not nearly as grand or surpassingly good as Christian dogma begs.
It starts with God’s work of creation ex nihilo.
The doctrine of creation is not merely an explanation of origins but is an eschatological claim, as concerned with our whither every bit as much as our whence. Precisely because that whence is sheer gift, the whither— if God is indeed Good— can only lead to one End, which Robert Jenson describes simply as “Music.”
It is a profound mistake then to circumscribe the term “creation” to the first six days and thereby conjugate the Triune God’s deliberation (“Let us make humankind in our image…”) into the past tense. When Christians erroneously suppose that the doctrine of creation refers to our beginnings, in the past, they not only get into misbegotten debates pitting science against scripture, they fail to realize that a notion like an eternal hell is morally contradictory to the doctrine of creation.
Christians do not posit creation from nothing as a claim about the origins of the universe. Nor do we mean it merely as a metaphysical one— that God is the answer we give to the question, “Why is there something instead of nothing?” Of course it includes both of those claims but creation from nothing is hardly reducible to either of them. Instead, as Church Fathers like Gregory of Nyssa saw clearly, creation from nothing does not refer to God’s primordial act but to an eschatological one which witnesses to God’s ultimate, as in teleological, relation to creation. For Christians, the doctrine of creation from nothing is not a belief about what God did, billions or thousands of years ago. It’s a confession that necessarily includes what God has done, is doing, and will do unto fruition.
Creation from nothing isn’t so much a statement about what God did or what God does. It is a statement about who is the God that is.To say that God creates ex nihilo is to assert that God did not need creation.
God, who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is, already and eternally so, sufficient unto himself, a perfect community of fullness and love, without deficit or need and with no potentiality. Creation from nothing confesses our belief that the world is not nature but creation; that is, it is sheer gift because the Giver is without any lack. Creation is not necessary to God. It is not the terrain on which God needs to realize any part of an incomplete identity. Creation from nothing then is shorthand for the Christian assertion that the Creator is categorically Other from his creation. Simultaneously, however, creation from nothing requires that though— really, because— Creator and creation are ontologically distinct they are morally inseparable.
February 22, 2023
The International League of the Guilty
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Here’s an excerpt of an Ash Wednesday piece I wrote for Mockingbird. Click over to check out the whole article.
One could easily note a fair amount of cognitive dissonance with all the ashes. The day can look and sound like it’s exactly the sort of righteousness-chasing, purity-performing that Frances Lee critiques and, even worse, what Jesus Christ forbids. After all, in the Gospel passage assigned for every Ash Wednesday, Christ commands us to do the very opposite of what it appears we’re about to do. We will practice our piety before others; there is no ad space more public than your forehead. We will disfigure your face with oily ash, and then we’ll send you forth with unwashed faces not into the privacy of your prayer closet but out into the world where you will be tempted to repeat after the Pharisee, “Thank God, I am not like other men.”
Ash Wednesday’s promise of grace can get lost in the contradictions. But the most important point to remember about the ashy cross the church smears across the forehead is that it’s a cross.
The cross is absolutely irreligious. The cross is a reminder that the very best of our piety put God to death; therefore, on Ash Wednesday Christians come out of the closet and with a soot scarlet letter freely admit that we are not just flawed and not just broken (that’s a romantic Christian word) but sinners. Sin is the only word that appropriately names our racism and our prejudice, our violence and apathy and avarice. We are the worst text messages that we send. We’re sinners.
The cross on our foreheads announces that before God’s Law we are failures. We have not loved God with our whole hearts. We have not loved our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, to say nothing of the love of our enemies. We have left undone the many things we ought to have done.
What Christians do with ash and oil does not violate Christ’s command against virtue-signaling because the cross signifies our vice. It brands us not as people who thinks we’re holy but as people who know our need. On Ash Wednesday Christians remember that — on paper at least — we are, in fact, the most inclusive people in the world. We are all sinners. Smudged or not smudged. Christian or not, activist or evangelical, none of us are clean.
February 21, 2023
Transfiguring Silence
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For Lent, I’m helping to lead an online study of Chris EW Green’s new book, Being Transfigured. Here’s the first session in which we talk to Chris about the transfiguration, the glory that leaks from Christ, and listening as the primary posture of a creature before God.
If you’d like to sign up to join us for future sessions, you do so here. You can find Chris’s book here.
Lastly, if you have questions for Chris or any of the panelists, shoot me an email or leave a comment below and we’ll get to them next time.
February 20, 2023
The Devil in the Desert Speaks the Gospel Truth
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Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men opens with theologizing by Sheriff Tom Bell, a character portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones in the Coen Brothers’s film of the novel, “Somewhere out there is a true and living prophet of destruction and I dont want to confront him. I know he’s real. I have seen his work.” No Country for Old Men reads like a chase story but it’s really an eschatological allegory; that is, it’s about a creation that has been turned upside down, where truth is lost and life is worthless. Reading the horrific stories in the newspaper and seeing the senseless violence on his police beat, Sheriff Bell— the old man of the story’s title— no longer recognizes the country in which he was raised.
The fact frightens him.
The Oscar-wining screenplay omits the scene which closes the novel— and makes it intelligible. Sheriff Bell is at the supper table with his wife and observes, “she told me she’d been readin St. John. The Revelations. Any time I get to talkin about how things are she’ll find somethin in the bible so I asked her if Revelations had anything to say about the shape things was takin and she said she’d let me know.” But before she comes back to him, Sheriff Bell reasons his way from the depraved, hopeless condition of humanity to his own biblical judgment. He says, ““I wake up sometimes way in the night and I know as certain as death that there aint nothin short of the second comin of Christ that can slow this train.”
In the first three chapters of the Epistle to the Romans, the apostle Paul famously argues that the creation itself is a two-sided apocalypse.
Creation reveals God’s gratuity. Creation discloses our depravity.
Creation not only is a revelation of the Love that is God, creation is an ongoing, possibly ever-increasing, unveiling of human sin. This is why, at the beginning of his letter, Paul speaks of creation as already suffering the wrath of God. Only through the faith of Jesus Christ, the Righteous One, is the story of Sin unwound and retold, writes Paul (3.22-25).
Another way of putting Paul’s point: the Devil was right.
“You shall be as gods,” insisted the serpent to Eve in Eden.
And he was right. We shall become as God.
As the apostle writes in another epistle, “For our sake, God made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” To become the righteousness of God is to become as Christ, the Son of God. As St. Athanasius puts it in On the Incarnation, a maxim that makes its way into the catechism, “For the Son of God became man so that man might become God.”
February 19, 2023
Divine Allurement
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Genesis 29.1-30
Rebekah’s fidelity to the strange promise she received from the Lord leads to her youngest child’s exile. On account of God’s promise, Jacob has dishonored his father and stolen his elder brother’s blessing. Esau consoled himself, scripture says, by plotting to kill his brother. Thus, Jacob is a refugee from home, headed eastward, hoping to find sanctuary in the country of his mother’s kin.
He discovers that he’s reached his destination when he encounters a trio of shepherds who inform him that he’s arrived in Haran. Initially, Genesis reports an unremarkable, leisurely exchange between strangers at a watering hole.
“My brothers, where do you come from?”
“We are from Haran.”
“Do you know my uncle, Laban son of Nahor?”
“We do.”
“Is it well with him?”
“Yes, and here is his daughter, Rachel, coming with the flock.”
Then it happens.
Over the horizon, Jacob sees Rachel. And he’s allured, aroused, overcome. He’s so captivated by the sight of her, so bewitched and enchanted by her beauty, the urgency of desire galvanizes him. You think Mark, the Cue Card Guy, in Love Actually made a bold move? Rachel hasn’t even had him at hello yet. Jacob simply sees Rachel and immediately Jacob turns to pick up the heavy stone sitting like a lid on the mouth of the well and he does what the three shepherds by themselves could not do. He rolls the stone away. Love not only conquers death, it compels lovers to offer extravagant, even silly gestures.
Jacob sees Rachel, and he rolls the stone away, as if it’s the most sensical response imaginable. And then, as foolish as meeting a stranger at the top of the Empire State Building, Jacob kisses her and, in kissing her, he’s so overwhelmed by passion for her that he starts to weep.
Jacob asks Laban permission to betroth her a month later.
Jacob labors under Laban for seven years in order to wed her.
It’s a strange story.
At the end of his prolonged betrothal, Jacob attempts to consummate his pledge to Rachel. They don’t teach this part of the story in Godly Play. There’s a wedding party. In the tradition of Christ at Cana, Jacob evidently has a few drinks more than he should, and his groomsmen must be too over-served to watch out for their friend. Jacob goes to Rachel in the honeymoon suite.
The lights must have been off.
In the morning, Jacob rolls over in bed and, in my favorite bit of biblical understatement, Genesis says simply, “It was Leah!” The meet-cute at a well trope aside, it’s not a conventional, happily ever after love story. Nevertheless, in the end, Jacob gets the girl, but in the process he gets a lot more than he anticipated, a second wife whom he doesn’t find nearly as attractive or alluring and seven more years of labor under Laban’s thumb.
It’s a strange story made stranger still by the fact its scripture.
Think about it— this meet-cute at a well is canon. It’s not Ovid or Arabian Nights. It’s the Word of the Lord.
And because God is the Word, this strange story is God’s self-revelation.Jacob’s urgent desire and foolhardy gestures and unreasonable commitment— fourteen years he labored to love her— are revelatory not simply of Jacob but of Jacob’s God, the God of Israel. Just as surely as he does atop Mt. Sinai or in Mary’s womb, the Triune God reveals something of himself in this odd, embarrassing, and erotic story. Were it not so, this story would not be counted among the canon.
This past May a friend and clergy colleague celebrated his tenth anniversary. He asked me to officiate a service for the renewal of their vows and to preach at that service. Because most of his attention was given to the afterparty at a local brewery, he left the selection of a scripture text to me— obviously a mistake. Leave it up me and I’ll choose 1 Corinthians 13, with its pablum about love being patient and kind, never out of ten times. Instead I chose this passage from Genesis that narrates Jacob’s urgent and unchecked and unwise passion.
“This story is the story of every marriage,” I told them in my sermon.
“This odd story is the story of every couple crazy enough to pledge “I do” to the stranger whom they love. One day you wake up, and you expect to find Rachel, the person that made you say and do things you never thought you’d do or say, the person who you dreamed dreams about and dreamed dreams with, and what do you find, Leah. Someone strangely unfamiliar. The fact is that you married both of these people. You married their best self— their Rachel— and their shadow side— Leah. The key to showing forgiveness and grace in marriage is to understand that we all bring a Rachel and a Leah to every one of our relationships. We all have a lovely and an unlovely side to our selves. The key to a merciful marriage is learning how to love both the Rachel and the Leah to whom you’re married.”
I preached.
And what I said about relationships is true. What I said about relationships is even, more or less, a clear implication of the gospel. What’s more, what I said about relationships— I know, people tell me— it’s actually helpful. Nevertheless, this narrative of Jacob’s embarrassing and extravagant eros is not in scripture so that preachers like me can offer advice to people like you. We may be able to glean wisdom about our relationships with one another from this narrative but Jacob’s passionate and foolhardy pursuit of Rachel is not canon because it illuminates our relationships with one another. As Robert Jenson writes,
“If we make the Bible a collection of tales about a fanciful other world, it will have no power, and if we make the Bible a source of advice about how to get along in the world, the advice will always prove unsuitable and will again have no power. But we will do one or the other if we do not with every glance into the book confess the Christ of Nicaea and Chalcedon. What scripture opens to us is the mystery of Christ. And our preaching and teaching and reading from scripture will have power as— and only as— the mystery of Christ is at every biblical step what we discover in the Bible and preach and teach and obey.”
What Jenson writes about scripture is no different than what Jesus himself says of it on Easter. Walking along the way to Emmaus, Luke reports the Risen Christ “interpreted to [Cleopas and the other disciple] all the things about himself in all of the scriptures, beginning with Moses [that’s the Book of Genesis] and all the prophets.” Straight out of the grave, what Jesus wants his disciples to know is that the whole of Israel’s scriptures are about him.
Like Jesus burning and aglow with the glory of God on the Mount of Transfiguration, all of scripture is an epiphany. It’s all Christophany. It all shimmers and glistens with the mystery of the Triune God.It’s not “The Old Testament is over there and the New Testament is over here and the two are radically distinct from one another.” No, that’s an ancient heresy called Marcionism. All of it, all of scripture— its purpose, Jesus teaches— is to disclose the Father’s only Son to his beloved. The purpose of the passage in Genesis 29, therefore, is not as a prooftext for “practical” Christianity. Rather, Jacob’s romantic comedy was recorded in Israel’s scripture and later included in the Christian Bible because it is revelatory. It unveils the true God’s love for his people.
If the claim made on the way to Emmaus is true (and if it’s not true, we have no basis for our faith), if all the scriptures disclose the Lord Jesus, if every passage of the Bible points in some way to the Father’s Son and their love for their people, then we are supposed to see Jacob as more than merely Isaac’s son and we are meant to recognize that Rachel is not simply the object of his fierce and urgent desire.
Jacob signifies the Almighty Father’s only begotten Son.And Rachel represents you.You are Rachel.You are this fierce and foolish Lover’s delight.To the old rabbis, this much was clear. One of those ancient interpreters went so far as to assert that “anyone who says this is just a love story forfeits his share in the world to come.” According to the ancient church fathers, the lovers in this meet-cute at a well are Christ and the Church or, therein, Christ and the believing soul. And this is not an allegorical reading of scripture. This is the plain sense of scripture precisely because this is the very reason Israel and later the Church included this scripture in the canon. Straightforwardly, the Lord Jesus Christ is here cast as Jacob. And you are Rachel. You are the occasion for his ridiculous wooing, his uncontrollable kisses and astonished tears, his extravagant and costly patience.
Years ago, I buried an old woman in my parish named Paige. She had no children. So far as I knew, Paige had never married. Her family had all predeceased her. To be honest, I had always pictured Paige as a spinster, old and lonely, with not much in her life but a fat orange cat and some friends in the choir. One of those choir friends, Betty, ended up being the one to settle Paige’s estate when she died. No sooner had she started to clean out Paige’s modest home than she rushed into my office to tell me.
“I couldn’t believe it. You’ll never believe it,” she said, truly astonished.
“Believe what?” I asked, expecting to hear she’d discovered a dozen more cats in the deceased’s house.
“I found all these photos,” she said breathlessly, “and love letters, boxes of them, stacks tied with ribbon.”
“Really,” I said, “photos with whom? Letters from whom?”
“Stuart,” she said, “before he died.”
“Stuart,” I said and I paused, thinking, “you mean from the choir?”
She nodded and then shook her head at the mystery of it.
“I’d seen them chatting before worship,” I said, “but I had no idea.”
“Neither did I. Not a clue.”
“She didn’t get rid of them,” I said, “She wanted you to find them. She wanted you to know. It’s like the Holy Spirit— love between two needs a third person, a witness.”
“You think so?”
I nodded and then I said, “Well, gosh. We’ve got to share that story during the funeral. She had a love in her life no one suspected. We’ve got to celebrate it.”
“No,” Betty waved me off, “We can’t tell. It wouldn’t be appropriate to share about Stuart and her at a funeral of all places.”
“Appropriate?” I said, “It’s more than appropriate. A love affair is the perfect analogy for how Paige is now loved by her God.”
Betty squinted at me, uncomfortable I could tell, with Paige being paired with the Lord in such carnal terms, but it’s nothing short of biblical.
There’s a reason why falling in love makes us all like the burning bush, ablaze with glory but somehow not consumed by it. It is because there is no other experience in our lives that so closely approximates how God loves God and, correlatively, how God loves you.
Notice how the Book of Genesis is entirely uncritical of Jacob’s impetuous passion.
When it comes to the urgency of Jacob’s desire, scripture offers nary a hint of reproach.
This is but another reminder of how odd is the God of the Bible. By contrast, Plato wished to ban poets and songwriters from his Republic because he thought their ability to arouse emotion and kindle passion was at odds with the virtues. Passion was dangerous, Plato believed, the very opposite of prudence and wisdom. Along with Plato and much like the Buddhists, the ancient Greek philosophers saw cool rationality and emotional detachment as the center of human dignity and, thus, as the essence of true religion.
Not so the God of Israel.
Quite simply, Israel experienced the favor of her God as his burning, unquenchable, passionate love for her. The Book of Deuteronomy insists upon it as a matter of dogma. The Lord chose Israel not because Israel was the greatest among the nations. The Lord chose Israel not because Israel had a particular proclivity for covenant or unique potential for faithfulness. The Lord chose Israel and made her his own for no other reason than that the Lord loved her. Israel’s election, her chosenness, is the result neither of a rational decision nor an arbitrary one.
God is the God of Israel because the Lord fell in love with her.Just as God happens in the world, Israel happens to God.And he falls in love with her.And it’s every bit as foolish and impulsive as the love Rachel arouses in Jacob, for God’s People, then and now, in no way warrant such steadfast passion nor are we reliably monogamous lovers.
Lovers—
The analogy between the Lord’s relationship to Israel and conjugal love shows up early and often in scripture. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth,” Israel sings in scripture before turning to the Lord and inviting him to her, “Draw me after you, let us make haste…” Not only is Israel’s Lord a Lover, he is a covetous one. The Lord tells Moses on Mt. Sinai that Jealous (with a capital J) is the Lord’s proper name. The prophets, meanwhile, seize upon the underside of this analogy and rail against Israel as the Lord’s “whoring bride.”
This marital analogy is not unique to Israel’s scripture. “This is my body. I give it to you,” the earliest Christians recognized from the start that Christ’s words of institution at the eucharist are simultaneously the words of a lover to his beloved, a connection made even more unavoidable when we eat and drink and thereby take the Lover’s body in to our own bodies. In his letter to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul interprets the mystery of sexual union by relation of Christ and the Church and by relation to the triune life itself.
And note what Paul thereby stipulates. According to the logic of analogy, the love shared between human lovers is recognizably passionate only by distant resemblance to a true passion which is God's alone. Our passion is the copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. Of which God’s passion is the original.
Very few of us would roll away a stone, kiss and weep and ask for an “I do” before we even said hello or got together for drinks. Our passion is faint and faded compared to the passion of the Triune God.
Passion.
Eros.
In 1930, the Swedish Protestant theologian Anders Nygren published an enormously influential book entitled, Agape and Eros. Agape and eros, Nygren argued, are opposite phenomenon which nevertheless get translated into English with the same word, “love.” Agape, Nygren posited, is disinterested self-giving love to the other while eros is needy desire for the other. The God of the Bible, according to Nygren, is all agape and no eros, and, by implication God’s people should likewise strive for the former and renounce the latter. Nygren’s argument was successful just to the extent that most people of faith aspire to agape love while talk of erotic love seems embarrassingly out of place in worship.
As common as it is to draw a distinction between agape and eros, it’s wrongheaded. No straightforward reading of scripture can agree with it. “My beloved is a packet of myrrh, lodged between my breasts,” Israel sings of God in scripture. That’s plainly unabashed, unashamed eros not agape. Besides, who on earth ever would want to be loved only with a disinterested, self-giving love? Who on earth would want to be the object of someone’s charity instead of the object of their passionate delight and overwhelming desire? Not only will the biblical narrative not support a distinction between supposedly divine agape and fleshly eros, the very name of God rules it out.
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The Father would not be the Father without the Son.
The Son would not be the Son without the Father.
The Holy Spirit would not be except as the bond of love between the two.
In other words, the name of God itself insists that the Father needs the Son to be God. The Son needs the Father to be God. The Holy Spirit needs the Father to love the Son and the Son to love the Father for the Holy Spirit to be God. Therefore, the attributes of eros— need, want, desire, longing— are not antithetical to God’s love. As Robert Jenson writes, they belong to the very being of God.”
Need, want, desire, longing belong to the very being of the Triune God.In his memoir Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, Richard Selzer tells of a young woman, a new wife, from whose face he removed a tumor, cutting a nerve in her cheek in the process and leaving her face smiling in a twisted palsy.
Her young husband stood by the bed as she awoke and appraised her new self, “Will my mouth always be like this?” she asks.
The surgeon nods and her husband smiles, “I like it,” he says, “It is kind of cute.”
Selzer goes one to testify to the epiphany he witnesses:
“Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth, and I’m so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works. And all at once, I know who he is. I understand, and I lower my gaze and back away slowly. One is not bold in an encounter with God.”
Selzer, the surgeon, knew more than Nygren, the theologian.
The theologian should know better.
The apostle Paul presents discipleship not as climbing a ladder to God, one rung up and two rungs down ever after. Paul presents discipleship neither as a process of accruing righteousness nor as a process of becoming a better you. Paul does not even present discipleship as the path of an apprentice following after a master teacher.
Paul presents discipleship as courtship.
As a courtship that cannot fail.
“I promised you in marriage,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, “I promised you in marriage to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.”
For Paul, discipleship is not about learning or serving or improving. For Paul, discipleship is not about piety; it’s about passion.
Discipleship is about being woo’d.Courted.Seduced.And of course discipleship is about being woo’d— what the English Reformation called “divine allurement.”
If the consumption that all of scripture is driving towards— the very conclusion of the Bible— is what the Book of Revelation calls the Marriage Supper of the Lamb, then, absolutely, more so than a forgiver or redeemer, more so than a shepherd or a sage or, even, a sacrifice, more so than our maker or our judge, the Lord God is our Lover. The God of the Bible is very much— more so than any other possible image— like a Lover who stoops down and contorts his lips, so badly does he long for his beloved’s kiss.
The Lord is a Lover.
And you are his Rachel.
He gives you his very body so that your heart might be crucified by his love.
And just to get your attention, just to woo you— on the third day, he picked up the stone and he rolled it away.
So come to the table. As John Wesley says, the table is our altar call. Why would you invite the Lord into your heart when he wants to enter you all the way down? Come to the table, and, to the one who labors still, patiently and ceaselessly, in word and water and wine and bread, to woo you, give him your hand.
And say, “I do.”
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February 16, 2023
We are Beggars, This is True
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Here’s a hymn written by my friend Ken Jones on the Transfiguration.
Dr. Jones gets it. The song plays with both the Transfiguration story and Luther’s last written words (“We are beggars. This is true.”). Luther’s death anniversary is Saturday.
It’s to the tune of Londonderry Air (Danny Boy).
It also teaches a bit of theology.
Better than Elijah
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When he was a child, every Palm Sunday Karl Barth would rush to the window of his family’s church and press his face against the glass in order to spy a glimpse of Jesus trotting down the streets of Basel, Switzerland atop a donkey, cloaks and palm leaves laid on the path before him and shouts of “Hosanna” hanging in the air. The stories of the Gospel so captured the future theologian that he heard them as present-tense announcements of news. The narrative illuminated the land around him as though the two were necessary for a proper proclamation. Similarly, Christians have long referred to the Holy Land as an interpretative companion to the Gospel, the place of Jesus’s preaching of the Kingdom as a necessary hermeneutic to a right apprehension of it.
Last spring I realized what the Church Fathers meant by calling the Holy Land the Fifth Gospel. For example, I stood on the grounds of the little church that sits at the top of Mount Carmel. In case you’ve forgotten your Sunday School, Mount Carmel is the site where King Ahab summons the prophet Elijah as well as the 450 prophets of Baal. It’s like a Top Chef Finalist Competition but with higher stakes. King Ahab’s men butcher some bulls and bring out fire wood for the showdown between the barren deities of Canaan and the God who heard his people’s cries and raised them from captivity in Egypt.
The contest is simple.
“The God who answers by fire,” Elijah declares, “that god is God.” The hundreds of false prophets— be warned: I’m sure they were sincere in their false piety— pray to their barren deities from morning to noon with the sorts of loud cries and outsized affectations you might see on the Trinity Broadcasting Network. Nada. So after lunch, Elijah has his seminary interns pour four jars of water all over the wood of his altars dedicated to Yahweh. For added measure, Elijah has them pour water a second time and then a third. Finally, Elijah doesn’t so much as raising his voice. He prays, simply, “O Lord, God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, let it be known this day that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant, and that I have done all these things at your word. Answer me, O Lord, answer me, that this people may know that you, O Lord, are God, and that you have turned their hearts back.” And fire falls from the sky and consumes the entirety of Elijah’s offering.
A feature of the story we’ve successfully excised from our Sunday School memories is that, having defeated the prophets of Baal without raising a finger, Elijah drags them one-by-one down the mount to the Kishon wadi where he takes up the sword and lops off their heads.
I’ve preached this text several times over the course of twenty some years. It is to preachers what a Gary Clark Jr. tune is to guitarists. It’s a big, thick text to better yourself as a preacher precisely by failing to master it. But I lacked the young Barth’s felt connection to the land as a necessary hermeneutical lens.
It never occurred to me that Mount Carmel, the wadi Kishon, and the prophet who takes up the sword with the vengeance of the Lord upon him all take place straightaway across the valley from the gentle, rounded slopes of Mount Tabor.
It’s barely a cross-country run from the one mountain to the other mountain, each plainly visible to the other even on a cloudy day.
Mount Tabor is also known as the Mount of Transfiguration. It’s the place where Jesus, like the Burning Bush before him, is afire with the glory of God but not consumed by it. Elijah and Moses, representing the Prophets and the Law, appear alongside the beautified Son as the Father doubles down on his baptismal declaration, “This is my beloved Son— listen to him!” Preachers often chide Peter because he responds to the transfiguration by wanting to preserve the epiphany and remain on the mountaintop, “Let us make three booths, one for each of you, and abide here with you.” The hackneyed preacher’s trope suggests that Peter, who’d foolishly attempted to defy gravity on the lake, once again fails to understand. The life of a follower of Jesus is back down in the valley, Peter, with our sleeves rolled up to serve a creation still groaning in labor pains.
Perhaps Peter understood far better than preachers give him credit.
Perhaps Peter understood that in this Jesus of Nazareth God’s People finally had a prophet better than Elijah.
It was only after being in the Holy Land and seeing the joggable distance between Mt. Carmel and Mt. Tabor that I understood the snatch of conversation Jesus exchanges with James and John, whom Jesus calls “sons of thunder.” They’re on their way to Jerusalem by way of a village of Samaritans, traditional enemies of the Jews. When the Samaritans, as expected, do not welcome Jesus into their homes, the sons of thunder ask, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’”
Elijah had done it.
Why don’t you do it and be done with them, Jesus?
“Jesus turned and rebuked James and John, and said, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”
The sons of thunder didn’t yet know what the one whom Jesus calls the rock had already intuited by looking across the valley at Elijah’s mountain and the wadi that once had run red with blood and hearing the Father insist that Jesus— NOT Elijah— was the prophet to be heeded.
Stanley Hauerwas says we cannot know the Kingdom unless our eyes are opened to see it.
I think Stanley’s point applies to the land as much as it pertains to any spiritual perception.
The particular geography of Jesus’s of ministry makes unavoidable the lesson his cross and empty tomb make universal.
More than a prophet, Jesus does not take up the sword. He suffers it.
As a crucified Christ, Jesus does not call down on sinners the fire of God’s wrath. He’s consumed by it.
As God in the flesh, Jesus does not destroy his enemies. While they were yet his enemies, Christ dies for the ungodly.
It’s the message of the cross, sure. It’s the Gospel in nuce, no doubt. But, long before he gets to Jerusalem, it’s a lesson woven into the lay of the land. Peter was right on Mount Tabor. In Christ, we have been given not a prophet who abides by our sense of justice. We have been given a still greater One in whom it is good and right for us to abide.
Speaking of the Transfiguration, sign up for an online class with Chris EW Green on his new book, Being Transfigured. It starts Monday night.
February 15, 2023
Peter's Right (on the Mountaintop)
(Ivanka Demchuk)
On the Transfiguration
“Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.”
If you’ve ever sat through more than a handful of sermons, or endured even a couple of mine, then chances are you already know how the preaching from this point on the mountaintop is supposed to go. I’m supposed to point the finger at Peter and chalk this episode up as yet another example of obtuse, dunder-tongued Peter getting Jesus bassakwards. I’m expected to chide Peter for wanting to preserve this spiritual, mountaintop experience.
From there, preaching on the Transfiguration is permitted to go in 1 of 2 ways.
I’m allowed to pivot from Peter’s foolish gesture to the (supposedly sophisticated) observation that discipleship isn’t about adoring glory or mountaintop experiences; no, it’s about going back down the mountain, into the grit and the grind of everyday life, where we can feed the hungry and cloth the naked and do everything else upper middle class Christians aren’t embarrassed to affirm.
Or-
Rather than pivot to the poor, I can keep the sermon focused on Peter. I can encourage you to identify with Peter, the disciple whose mouth is always quicker than his mind and whose ambition never measures up to his courage. I could preach Peter to you and comfort you that Peter’s just like you: a foolish, imperfect follower who fails at his faith as often as he gets it right. And, yet, Jesus loves him (and you) and builds his Church on him.
That’s how you preach this text:
Go back down the mountaintop, back into ‘real life.’
Or, look at Peter- he’s just like you.
Given the way sermons on the Transfiguration always go, you’d think these are the only two options allowed.
Except—
As cliched as those interpretations are, they’re not without their problems.
For one, when I was on medical leave fighting stage-serious cancer, I wasn’t able to go much of anywhere or do much of anything much less venture out into the world’s hurt, roll up my sleeves, and serve the poor. I wasn’t strong enough to do that kind of thing anymore. So discipleship can’t merely be a matter of going back down the mountain because such a definition excludes a great many disciples, including me.
For another, if this is nothing more than another example of how obtuse Peter is, how Peter always manages to get it wrong, then when Peter profess “Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us make three tabernacles, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah” why doesn’t Jesus correct him?
If Peter is wrong, why doesn’t Jesus correct him?
Why doesn’t Jesus rebuff Peter and say: ‘No, it is good for us to go back down the mountain to serve the least, the lost, and the lonely?’
Why doesn’t Jesus scold Peter: ‘Peter, it’s not about spiritual experiences, the Son of Man came to serve?’
If Peter’s offer is such a grave temptation, then why doesn’t Jesus exhort him like he does elsewhere and say: ‘Get behind me, satan?’ If Peter is so wrong, then why doesn’t Jesus respond by rebuking Peter?
In fact, here on the mountaintop, it’s the only instance in any of the Gospels where Jesus doesn’t respond at all to something someone has said to him.This is the only instance where Jesus doesn’t respond.
I wonder:
What if Jesus doesn’t respond because, more or less, Peter’s right.
Ludwig Feuerbach, a 19th century critic of religion, accused Christians that all our theology is really only anthropology, that rather than talking about God, as we claim, we’re in fact only speaking about ourselves in a loud voice.
There’s perhaps no better proof of Feuerbach’s accusation than our propensity to make Peter the point of this scripture.
To make this theophany, anthropology.
To transfigure this story into something ordinary.
Just think, what would Peter make of the fact that so many preachers like me make Peter the subject of our preaching? Which is but a way making ourselves the focus of this story. Don’t forget that this is the same Peter who insisted that he was not worthy to die in the same manner as Christ and so asked to be crucified upside down. More than any of us, Peter would know that he should not be the subject of our sermons. Peter would know that he’s not the one we should be looking at in this scene.
I wonder, does Jesus not respond because what Peter gets right, even if he doesn’t know exactly what he’s saying, is that gazing upon Christ, who is charged with the uncreated light of God, is good.
Gazing upon Christ, who is charged with the uncreated light of God, is good.
Not only is it good, all the sermons to the contrary to the contrary, it is the essence of discipleship. Indeed in this image of the transfigured Christ Peter sees the life of all lives flash before his eyes. In one instant of transfigured clarity, Peter sees the humanity of Jesus suffused with the eternal glory of God, and in that instant Peter glimpses the mystery of our faith: that God became human so that humanity might become God.
This is where the good news is to be found.
Not in Peter being as dumb or scared as you and me. Not in a message like ‘serve the poor’ that you would still agree to even if you knew not Christ. No, the good news is found in the same glory that transfigured the face of Moses and dwelt in the Temple and rested upon the ark and overshadowed Mary pervading even Jesus’ humanity and also, one day, ours.
God became like us, that’s what Peter sees; so that, we might become like God, that’s what Peter eventually learns. The light that radiates Jesus’ flesh is the same light that said ‘Let there be...’ It’s the same light that the world awaits with groaning and labor pains and sighs too deep for words. It’s the light that will one day make all of creation a burning bush, afire with God’s glory but not consumed by it.
Peter’s right.
It is right and good, always and everywhere, to worship and adore God became man, and, in seeing him, to see ourselves taken up into that same glory. It is right and good, always and everywhere, to anticipate our flesh being remade into God’s image so that we may be united with God.
It is good, for just as Christ’s humanity is transfigured by glory without ceasing to be human so too will our humanity be called into union with God, to be deified, without our ceasing to be creatures. That’s the plot of scripture. That’s the mystery of our faith. Not only is Peter right, all the other sermons on this passage go in the wrong direction. It’s not about going back down the mountain. Rather the entire Christian life is a sort of ascent, venturing further and further up the mountain, to worship and adore the transfigured Christ and, in so doing, to be transfigured ourselves. If we’re not transformed, what’s the point of going back down the mountain? We’d be down there, no different than anyone else, which leaves the world no different than its always been.
You can almost ask Jesus. Peter’s right.
What Peter gets wrong isn’t that it’s good to be there adoring the transfigured Christ. What Peter gets wrong is thinking he needs to build 3 tabernacles. Elijah and Moses maybe could’ve used them, but not Jesus.
Jesus’ flesh, his humanity, is the tabernacle.
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