Mass readings for the 2nd Sunday of Lent:
Genesis 22.1-32, 9-13, 15-18 Psalm 116.10, 15-19 Romans 8.31-35, 37 Mark 9.2-10
I watched a YouTube interview with polymath and internet personality Eric Weinstein. Whether you agree with his ideas or not, he’s fascinating, delving into issues beyond the trite and superficial treatment we get from the legacy mainstream media. The title of the video is “Why the Moden World makes no sense.”
I don’t want to talk about the video so much as that hook, that title that suggested that if I watched, I’d get an explanation as to why the world doesn’t make sense. And I’m sure I’m not alone in a desire for one. I think it fair to say that a great many share the opinion that the world is not making sense; and this is across a lot of social, cultural and political divides.
We’re looking for that person and that perspective that will make sense of it all. And so, we need to think about who we are looking to, and where we are going to find that angle on the world that will reveal what’s really going on.
When Christ came among God’s people, that was such a time. And such times anticipate spiritual awakenings more profound than any political movement, any tide of revolution. We’re talking about a transformation of human consciousness.
The changes of recent decades in information technology (the internet), other more disturbing innovations like Artificial Intelligence, but also the collapse of consensus concerning what our society is about, what its priorities should be, and atop that the spectre of global conflict as situations abroad spin out of control are creating a sense of civilizational crisis. Its resolution will require profound spiritual change.
There is an historical continuity between Israel and our Western civilization; indeed, the Christian argument is that Israel as God’s project of sanctification of humanity is resurrected in his Church. The crisis of the first century was a long time coming. The problem came of Israel’s absolute conviction that their god was God, the God of creation and history. This in itself was a spiritual, religious and philosophical breakthrough. The monotheism they had at last arrived at through long centuries of struggle and suffering, including the loss of their political independence and territorial autonomy, did not yield what was expected: national liberation and restoration. God should look after those who actually know him, who are his true worshippers. Instead, Rome was in charge, not because of its being so enlightened, but rather because it was so brutal and authoritarian.
Well, from the Christian perspective, God did send to his people a liberator; but the redemption he brought was not something they could recognize, or presented in a manner they could accede to. So, many rejected him; nonetheless some understood, however dimly, and followed him.
And in today’s story, we see Peter, James, and John, the foremost of those who looked to Jesus to make sense of things, and they are following him up Mount Tabor.
We have this expression in English, “a mountaintop experience.” And that is almost always understood in a Judeo-Christian context – in obvious reference to our gospel today that tells the story of Christ’s Transfiguration, but also with regard for the mountain being a place of divine encounter throughout the Bible. In today’s readings we have one of these episodes: Abraham offers his son Isaac in sacrifice atop a mountain.
So, the expression conveys the idea of a peak spiritual experience, a revelation, an epiphany, an encounter with the divine that changes our perspective on the world, and our understanding of God.
The mountains of scripture are literal. There was a real, physical climb involved. Yet we can grasp the spiritual metaphor. We’ve all got to make that climb, and Lent is one of those opportunities to ascend our Mt. Tabor, or Mt. Sinai, or perhaps, an Everest or Kilimanjaro!
But doing that spiritually means simulating in our interior life, and in our life situation, those conditions. And of course, the fasting and abstinence can offer some of the hardship of a long climb with just the food one can carry. The prayer, the meditation upon God’s word is the real work of hauling oneself onward and upward.
And we need to remember that mountaintops are usually pretty lonely places. We’re not talking about a jaunt up Mt. Tremblant or to Whistler. No ski chalets there, rather think of Mt. Tabor in Israel, Mt. Sinai in the desert, or any number of other peaks and mountain ranges that offer people hikes and climbs with the only apparent reward being a spectacular view and a modest sense of accomplishment. These are not, usually, crowded places. And we’ve got to make sure that where we are going is not crowded, crowded in this instance, by the world and all its distractions. I once climbed up to a monastery in the Pyrenees. I got there, and was there no restaurant, no pub with flatscreen TV’s showing the sports, no obnoxious music blaring from a resort disco, and to my chagrin, no modern washroom facilities. There was also the disappointment of going into the ancient monastery to find no carvings or religious artwork as I expected. A dog-eared pamphlet I found explained that the place had been pillaged just prior to the First World War by the New York Metropolitan Museum. If I wanted to see what had been there, I would have to go to something known as “the Cloisters” in Upper Manhattan.
And you know, the experience was probably better for it.
Now as to what we’re to be looking for up there, it isn’t the view. It might be spectacular, but it really can’t tell us much. I remember on that Pyrenean peak seeing smoke rising from a town below, but I couldn’t tell if the place was on fire or if it was simply a little factory firing up its furnaces. Information at that height is, as they say, low resolution. Even with binoculars, I couldn’t tell you what was going on. Well, maybe I just needed a more powerful telescope.
We can withdraw, as if to a mountaintop, and open our laptops and begin looking at what can be called the high-resolution world of today’s information technology. I mean if you want detail, it’s there. Media and information technology, high resolution means we see in incredible detail, but now we are overwhelmed with information; and from all those data points any number of patterns can appear, but whether they reflect reality or our own imaginings is hard to know.
So much of what appears to be collusion and conspiracy creating the evils of our time can often be put down to individual human sinfulness aggregating into social dysfunction, and at the level of our elite, psychosis among those who make decisions that affect us all based on an illusion of consensus. As social psychologists have observed, fear of exclusion from one’s social circle, and loss of power, are incredibly strong motivations for conforming to silly fashions and assenting to insane ideas.
So, this is all to say that we don’t climb the mountain for the view of the world, but rather for what is there at the summit. This was true for Abraham, and for our three Apostles. Abraham made his climb in a state of dread; Peter, James and John, were excited, anxious to have this special time with their teacher. And in Abraham’s case that dread was relieved. In the case of the three disciples, they experienced elation, then terror, and at last confusion over what Jesus told them in his command to keep silent about what they saw.
We’ve got to do it, climb up there, and I don’t know what you’ll find or what I’ll see and hear there. Moses climbed up a mountain to see a burning bush, and we know what came of that. The boy Samuel, left by his mother to serve in the mountain top shrine at Shiloh, naïvely, innocently, comes into the presence of the living God; Elijah took refuge in a mountain cave in the midst of a storm, and God found him there, and spoke to him in a still, small voice almost indistinguishable from silence.
We’re not going to make sense of the world; but Christ will help us make sense of ourselves. Of who we must be in these difficult times.
Amen.