Hear

 

Tomorrow, the Church reflects on the Transfiguration of our Lord. It is an astonishing story, profoundly pastoral and deeply political. In a light-diffusing cloud on a hilltop, Jesus makes conference with Moses and Elijah, two great figures of his people’s past, concerning his imminent exodus (or departure, as the English renders it).

Moses, of course, led his people out from slavery in Egypt. The gods of the Egyptians had stopped their ears against the cries of a shepherding people living in the north of their kingdom, conscripted into city-building. Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews, the god who hears, heard their cry. In a series of plagues, Yahweh permitted the gods of Egypt to experience pain; restoring equilibrium whenever their spokesperson, the Pharaoh, cried out. Yet time after time, they rose up again, hardening their hearts. Eventually, Yahweh, descending in a pillar of cloud, led out his people, through the parted waters of the Sea, and to a mountain in the Sinai peninsula, on which the cloud of Yahweh’s presence settled. Moses, alone, was permitted to approach within the cloud, granted audience.

Some eight hundred years later, the people of Israel were reeling under the totalitarian rule of their queen, Jezebel. Promoting the uprising of the Canaanite gods, under the lordship of the sky-and-lightning god Baal, she had countless worshippers of Yahweh put to death. Elijah had already been evading the authorities and performing miracles for several years by the time of his confrontation with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. Again, the matter at hand is over who hears the cry of their people. Baal is deaf to the cries of his prophets; Yahweh hears and responds to Elijah’s voice.

But in the immediate aftermath of Yahweh’s victory, and the breaking of a three-year drought—equilibrium restored, in the heavenly realms and so on earth—Elijah, fearing for his life, runs all the way to Sinai, and the mountain on which Moses had met with God. There, Yahweh meets with him, opening Elijah’s ears to the cry of thousands of other faithful worshippers in hiding, initiating the events that will lead to the overthrow of an oppressive political regime, and identifying a successor for Elijah, who will be taken up into heaven, no longer to be found on earth, as Moses before him.

Some eight hundred years on again, and it is Jesus on the hilltop. His people live under the occupying rule of Rome, before whose sky-and-lightning god Jupiter all must bow or be crushed. Once more, a confrontation is coming, between an unmoving god and a god who is moved by what he hears. A god whose greatest word through Moses was, ‘Hear, O Israel ...’ and a god who declares to Jesus’ disciples, ‘... listen to him.’

So Jesus and Moses and Elijah are in conference concerning Jesus’ exodus, which will take place in Jerusalem. His going outside the city, to suffer and die, familiar words from the psalms on his lips, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me?’ Words, heard, by Yahweh who moves, restoring life, raising Jesus from death on the third day, followed forty days later by his ascension, his returning to the Father, taken up in a cloud.

Luke’s first audience would have heard this story in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem and the levelling of the temple at the hands of the Roman army. The victory of Jupiter over this minor people. And yet, the Transfiguration. The promise of things to come. Of another exodus, a saving out from the hands of the gods, the Roman pantheon that would bow before the risen and ascended Lord Jesus Christ as the Church brought reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles, women and men, slaves and freeborn, children and fathers. As the cries of the oppressed were heard and responded to. Not a reversal of fortunes, but a return to harmonious peace.

In many parts of the world today, our sisters and brothers are experiencing persecution on account of their faith, in the name of other gods, other ideologies. Their cries are not unheard, and neither are the silent cries of their oppressors, who perpetrate violence against themselves. Tomorrow, the Church reflects on the Transfiguration of our Lord. It is an astonishing story, profoundly pastoral and deeply political.

 

Those who live in houses of clay

At Morning Prayer at present, we are reading in the book of Job, a masterful piece of theatre exploring the tragi-comedy of existence. In the play’s prelude we witness the assembly of the council of the gods, before the sovereign Lord of the universe. The Lord engages one of the lesser, created, gods in conversation, the shadowy Satan (or, Accuser), a restless god who walks back and forth on the earth in agitation. They debate the righteous human, Job, and enter into a wager. Satan will test the limits of job’s righteousness; while the Lord will question the far corners of Satan’s agitation, for, we shall see, that the Lord is present and attentive to the pain of all creation.

The drama then shifts to Job and his friends. In his suffering, they are, at first, magnificent in their empathy, sitting with him in silence for seven full days. Then Job speaks (chapter 3), a heart-felt soliloquy giving voice to his pain, and the dam breaks. In turn, his friends offer their insight, conventional but deeply flawed wisdom. First to speak is Eliphaz (chapter 4), who recounts a vision he has had by night, in his fitful sleep as he keeps watch with his hurting friend. Eliphaz mistakes the spirit who appears before him for the Lord, when, in truth, it is the sly, sweet-talking Satan, insinuating seeds of doubt, of both human and divine nature: neither are to be trusted.

He does, however, come out with one of the most incredible descriptions of the human being ever spoken: ‘those who live in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust,’—speaking not of domestic architecture, but of the body, crafted from the clay of the earth, to which it shall return, and animated by the breath of God. For, contrary to Satan’s accusation, the Lord does not only put trust in human beings, but entrusts his very breath.

What impact does it have, what questions does it raise, for us to be those who live in houses of clay?

 

‘Then Eliphaz the Temanite answered:

‘If one ventures a word with you, will you be offended?
But who can keep from speaking?
See, you have instructed many;
you have strengthened the weak hands.
Your words have supported those who were stumbling,
and you have made firm the feeble knees.
But now it has come to you, and you are impatient;
it touches you, and you are dismayed.
Is not your fear of God your confidence,
and the integrity of your ways your hope?

‘Think now, who that was innocent ever perished?
Or where were the upright cut off?
As I have seen, those who plough iniquity
and sow trouble reap the same.
By the breath of God they perish,
and by the blast of his anger they are consumed.
The roar of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion,
and the teeth of the young lions are broken.
The strong lion perishes for lack of prey,
and the whelps of the lioness are scattered.

‘Now a word came stealing to me,
my ear received the whisper of it.
Amid thoughts from visions of the night,
when deep sleep falls on mortals,
dread came upon me, and trembling,
which made all my bones shake.
A spirit glided past my face;
the hair of my flesh bristled.
It stood still,
but I could not discern its appearance.
A form was before my eyes;
there was silence, then I heard a voice:
“Can mortals be righteous before God?
Can human beings be pure before their Maker?
Even in his servants he puts no trust,
and his angels he charges with error;
how much more those who live in houses of clay,
whose foundation is in the dust,
who are crushed like a moth.
Between morning and evening they are destroyed;
they perish for ever without any regarding it.
Their tent-cord is plucked up within them,
and they die devoid of wisdom.”

 

A place to bring your pain

Eight years ago today, I took the funeral of a young man who had been the victim of a particularly brutal murder. It was, and I hope will remain, the most traumatic funeral I have ever had to walk alongside a family.

When we open our church doors to the community, we do so primarily as a place to bring their pain. This is ultimately true even of weddings and christenings, for to birth a marriage or a child into the world is to open ourselves to the inevitability of pain, even if the gas-and-air of celebrations takes the edge of it.

And the Church says, here is a place where you can always bring your pain; a safe place where you can sit with it long enough not to get over it but perhaps to make peace with it. Where the burden can be shared, by neighbours who will pray for you (some ask, what good does that do? but, at times, there is nothing else that can be done), by those who have gone before us, by the Son of Man who gladly carries our infirmities and burdens.

I knew a man once who had come into the church for the funeral of his daughter, a young woman taken too soon by cancer, and who from then on found it too hard to enter the building. His coming to church, from then on, was to mow the church lawn, alongside others who did the same. He did so, religiously, as they say. It matters not which side of the door he was on. In so doing, he was held together while he healed to the possibility of a new life, that carried the memory of another.

And for those of us whose wounds are not raw, the church is a place where we come in from walking alongside our neighbours, and receive the bread and wine and cold water of the Spirit poured out over us, that refreshes us in preparation for another day, another week, seeking out the heavy-laden and saying, there is a place where you can go.