Vanity of Vanities, Session 2
The Widow and the Unjust Judge
If you’ve been at the Cathedral for a while, you’ve heard me tell a story or two of my maternal grandmother, Boo. You may not, however, have heard me talk much about my other grandmother, Buell Stuart Thompson, from whom my middle name comes. My grandmother was from McGehee, Arkansas, deep in the Delta, where mosquitos are the size of chicken hawks and have been known to carry away small children and dogs. Her Southern drawl would have fit equally well in Dothan, Alabama. Her grandkids couldn’t say “Grandmother,” so we called her “Gee.” Gee died when I was fourteen, so my memories of her are not as many as those of my other grandmother, Boo. Nevertheless, Gee was a remarkable woman.
Gee had five burly brothers—country boys all, with the names Skeet, Jap, Cutter, Tom, and Fred—and for years she would fill her tiny living room with a drop-leaf dining table each Sunday at noon, where she’d feed all those Stuart men. Gee was in charge of them all, and of that no one was in doubt.
My dad tells a childhood story of how he once accidentally walked into an enormous yellowjacket nest in the barn behind their house and ran home stung and crying. Without hesitation, Gee grabbed an old fashioned, hand-held pump sprayer full of mid-century insecticide and marched into the barn cussing a blue streak to do battle with the yellowjackets as if they were the German Luftwaffe. Gee walked out unscathed. The yellowjackets did not.
“Gee grabbed an old fashioned, hand-held pump sprayer full of mid-century insecticide and marched into the barn cussing a blue streak to do battle with the yellowjackets as if they were the German Luftwaffe.”
In the 1970s, Gee developed cancer of the sinus cavity behind her right eye. Radiation beat the cancer but destroyed the eye, and Gee had a glass eye implanted. The implant soon became infected and had to be removed, but Gee insisted for the reminder of her life upon wearing the glass eye itself minus the implant, which meant the eye sat way back in her eye socket, giving her an eerie look and drawing the stares of curiosity seekers. Gee didn’t care. Cleaning that eye in the sink one day, Gee dropped it, promptly called a plumber, and informed him matter-of-factly, “I need you to come over. I’ve dropped my eye down the drain.”
Gee broke both hips in the early 1980s. Finally, she developed lung cancer after a lifetime of chain smoking Now cigarettes. Remembering what cancer treatment was like the first time around, she made the steely-eyed decision to forego any treatment and let lung cancer run its course. She died in 1987 at age seventy-eight.
Gee’s husband, my grandfather, died in Houston in 1956 (under the care of Michael DeBakey, no less) when Gee was forty-seven. For the next thirty-one years she lived, widowed, in one half of a one-bedroom duplex in McGehee, renting out the other half for income. To my siblings and me, Gee was a gentle and tender soul. To others, I’m told, she was tough as nails and had a withering look. And I cannot read today’s Gospel passage—the Parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge—within imagining Gee.
The version of the Bible from which we read each Sunday is the New Revised Standard. It is usually a good and responsible translation, but not today. In too many ways, it smooths the edges of what Jesus conveys in his story. The NRSV suggests that the widow pleads with the judge, “Please grant me justice,” but the Greek is forceful and forward, more like “Justice belongs to me, and you’d better give it to me!” The NRSV then says that the judge ponders, “This widow is bothersome. She may wear me out” as if the threat to him is mere exasperation, but the Greek actually uses a boxing term. A more faithful translation would be, “If I don’t heed this widow, she’s going to knock this door down and beat me to a pulp!”[i]
The image of the pitiful, pleading widow is misleading.
In other words, the image of this widow is not that of a mousy, pitiful and weak person tapping tentatively in desperation at the judge’s door. It is of Gee, corralling a room full of ornery men, marching into battle against wasps and hornets, staring at cancer through her one good eye and saying, “I’ll die on my own terms, thank you very much.” The judge in this parable thinks, at first, that he has power and the widow is powerless. He quickly learns that she will not be cowed, that he is the one in trouble in this situation, and that he’d best respond to her with the justice she knows she deserves.
To the audience to whom Jesus told this story, this depiction would have gotten their attention. Widows in their culture were not the protagonists in any story. Widows were not people to emulate. Widows were nobody. They had been extensions of their husbands in society’s eyes, and when those husbands died, they were rendered, in effect, non-people. For exactly this reason, due to widows’ extreme vulnerability, throughout the Old Testament there are injunctions that others must look out for widows, protecting them and advocating for them. But widows would not—and by the rules of society could not—do this for themselves. A widow knocking on a judge’s door on her own behalf would have been as nonsensical to the hearer as a cow walking on the moon.
And yet, here she is in Jesus’ parable thundering against the door of the powerful, demanding that her voice be heard and goodness prevail. And she succeeds. How is that so? The remainder of today’s passage gives us the answer. Jesus contrasts God to the judge in his parable, and of God Jesus says, “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.”
In other words, though the judge may not know it, and though the world surrounding her may not admit it, God has already granted justice to this widow. And what is God’s justice? Biblical scholar Paul Metzger defines it this way: “God’s justice involves making individuals, communities, and the cosmos whole… Justice flows from God’s heart and character. As true and good, God seeks to make the object of his holy love whole.”[ii]
And so, we see that despite the initial sneering disregard of the judge toward the widow, her worth, her dignity, and (he learns the hard way) her power precede his answering or even her knocking on the door. From the outside, the widow may look weak, but internally she is fathomlessly strong, because she has already embraced the wholeness within that God grants her. And because she has done so, she is empowered to seek justice without. The judge doesn’t stand a chance.
The question then becomes for Jesus’ audience, who were largely made up of others society would deem weak, unworthy, or broken: Will they embrace God’s justice within them? And will they then live in the world as this widow, through whom dignity shines and power thunders, making the judge quake in his high seat?
The question is for us, too. Though in our modern world we may wear a disguising façade, I daresay we sometimes feel weak, and unworthy, and broken. We may see images and hear voices that tell us we are nobody, that break us down and strip us internally of our worth. But like the widow, we, too, are God’s own children, the objects of God’s holy love. No matter what anyone has ever told you; no matter what anyone has ever done to you; no matter what you have ever said or done, you are the object of God’s holy love. That love mends our brokenness and makes us whole, and the world has nothing to say about it. It makes me want to exhale in sweet relief. It makes me feel like I could knock down any door.
“You are the object of God’s holy love.”
In his discussion of God’s justice, Paul Metzger says that, “Both individual transformation and community transformation are part of restoring wholeness…With transformed hearts, we are to extend God’s justice” into the world.[iii] We aren’t told what the widow’s case before the judge is about. But I daresay one of her character, in whom the justice of God brims to overflowing, speaks for more than herself alone. I bet she also speaks for others to whom the world grants no voice. We are called to do the same. No matter who we are, not matter what power society says we have or lack, when we awaken to the wondrous recognition that in God and to God we are whole, we cannot help but work in the world to extend God’s justice to others through acts of courage, goodness, and grace. In that way alone the thickest doors closed to God’s children will be broken down, God’s love will redeem both the voiceless and the powerful, and God’s justice will reign over all the earth.
[i] Levine, Amy-Jill. Short Stories by Jesus, pp. 242-243.
[ii] https://www.christianitytoday.com/pastors/2010/summer/biblicaljustice.html
[iii] Ibid
Vanity of Vanities, Session 1
Blueberry milkshakes
Making your way in the world today takes everything you’ve got.
Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.
Wouldn’t you like to get away? Sometimes you’ve want to go where everybody knows your name…
I’ve only ever had one establishment that called out my name as soon as I entered and began preparing my order before I could speak it. It was an ice cream shop called The Little Dipper on the market square in downtown Roanoke, Virginia. I’d walk in, the two ladies behind the counter (who were the owners) would call out agreeably, “Barkley!” and they’d immediately begin making my favorite: a blueberry milkshake. So simple; just vanilla ice cream, milk, and fresh blueberries. It wasn’t even on the menu, but there’s nothing in the world I’d rather have. The ladies at The Little Dipper knew it, and whenever I was there, their smiles, their welcome, and their sacramental offering of that blueberry milkshake could turn the worst day into the best.
But there is one thing about a blueberry milkshake that can be problematic: blueberry seeds. They are so tiny as to be almost imperceptible. That is, until one gets caught in your gum line. For the average consumer of blueberries, this is not a problem. But when you eat as many blueberries as I do, and especially when the blueberries are blended into a milkshake the seeds can become an irritant. It’s remarkable that a blueberry seed in the gum line can be completely preoccupying. Such a tiny thing, but when it is lodged there everything else becomes tertiary. That seed commands one’s entire attention. Trust me. I love blueberries.
In today’s Gospel lesson, for the second time Jesus invokes another tiny seed—this one mustard—to talk about faith. Jesus says, “If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.”
Most often when discussing this passage, preachers focus on the stupendous and miraculous power of such faith, but I find that seed much more interesting. I’m captivated by the notion that Jesus would choose as his repeated example a thing so very small.
In sermons recently I’ve talked a lot about faith, about how faith is not some magic, spoken formula about Jesus that punches one’s ticket to heaven; about how faith is not some unrealistic (and unbiblical) belief that God’s going to make everything turn out o.k.; and about how faith is the recognition—the wondrous recognition—that this world is animated by God; that God pervades our waking like the very air we breathe; that God is always here, immediately with us, no matter where and no matter what, in the grandest moments and in the most mundane.
Often, the first realization that this is what faith is comes in a flash, a bare moment of insight that passes as quickly as it came. In the 86,400 seconds that make up a day, the encounter with the reality of God may have taken just one.
And it doesn’t even have to be a knock-you-down, Road to Damascus moment. The dawning of faith as an awareness of the presence and companionship of God may come from something as ordinary as being called by name by a smiling face when you walk through the door of an ice cream shop.
But when it happens—once it’s happened—this tiny, perhaps almost imperceptible encounter becomes like a blueberry seed stuck in the gums. Even as those subsequent 86,399 seconds stream by, even as the demands of work, and family, and the day crowd in, the seed is still there, making its presence known, reminding one of the taste of God sweeter than a blueberry milkshake. Its presence may even be an irritant. One may wish it would go away, that this tiny but all consuming new thing would let life resort back to what it had been. But it won’t. It stays, this new faith. It never fully recedes into the background. It demands attention, as the smallest thing becomes the most encompassing.
Another image that Jesus uses to describe faith in the Gospels is the pearl, as if to drive home the point to the thickest of us. A pearl is, after all, nothing other than the transformation of an irritant, a grain of sand that works its way into an oyster’s protective shell and that, once there, will not be ignored. The oyster has no choice but to respond to the grain. That irritant spurs the oyster on to respond again, and again and again And slowly, day after day, week after week, that tiny grain grows into a thing of profound beauty and value. When you think about it, I’d say that’s more miraculous than planting a mulberry tree in the middle of the ocean.
So what does this mean for us at Christ Church Cathedral on this very day? It speaks directly to us, I’d say, as we enter into this season of stewardship. Stewardship is, first and foremost, a term related to the growing and transforming of things. It is about turning fully toward those encounters, profound and mundane, in which we have recognized God. It is about the way in which the seed planted by such encounters, tiny as it may be, lodges itself within us and will not be ignored try as we may. It is about how that seed—that grain of sand—which may, at first, confuse or even irritate us as it tries to upend our status quo, can grow into the pearl of greatest price.
Using the language of the miraculous, Jesus says today that there are no limits to what we can accomplish when we finally give in and allow that relentless seed of faith to grow and to capture our hearts as well as our attention. And when we express that transformation within us through our support for God’s mission in the church, there are no limits to what we can accomplish in God’s world.
In my own life, this is the experience I know most to be true. Faith, that wonder at the reality and presence of God, is like that blueberry seed lodged in my gums. Sometimes, honestly, I wish I could root it out, that it would just go away and let me live my life as I see fit. But then I remember the threshold of God across which I am always called by name. I remember the love that knows what I need even before I ask for it. I remember the taste of grace, sweeter than a blueberry milkshake.
How should we respond? If we each responded in the full measure of our relief, our joy, our wonder at the encounter with the reality of God, then the Cathedral’s ministry budget would be overflowing, the impact of Christ Church on this city would be miraculous, and mulberry trees would grow in the middle of the ship channel.
We can respond that way, each of us. When we walk through these doors, we are known by name. The face of the God of love smiles upon us. God nourishes us with the grace we need even before we can ask. Faith is like a blueberry seed. It is the smallest thing, and the greatest thing in all the world.
Tangled in Barbed Wire
There is a scene in the 1994 film Legends of the Fall, in which Tristan Ludlow, a Montana rancher, rides out into big sky country to check the perimeter of his ranch. As with every scene in the movie, which won the Academy Award for cinematography in 1994, the viewer is drawn into the magnificent and sublime visual imagery. It seems as though from outside this world. Vistas are broad, colors are stunning, and (my wife would add) the fact that Tristan Ludlow is played by Brad Pitt only adds to the sweeping canvas. The mythos of Montana is captured, and the viewer is very nearly drawn out of the everyday world.
But in this scene, the viewer is dragged back to earth so quickly that the experience is wrenching. Tristan Ludlow, checking on the perimeter of his ranch, comes upon a bleating, young calf, completely tangled and bloodied in a mess of barbed wire. The calf struggles to get free, but with each movement it draws the razor wire in on itself, increasing its entanglement and pain. We don’t know how the calf became tangled. Most likely it wandered from the herd, only to be chased by a wolf or some other predator. The how doesn’t really matter. The calf is lost. It is trapped. And with each attempt to pull itself free, it causes itself greater injury.
I thought of this scene as I studied the Gospel text for today. In today’s passage from Luke, Jesus locks horns with the scribes and Pharisees, two groups who live out their religious lives by drawing away from the everyday world. The Pharisees draw away from the world for fear it will make them impure. The scribes draw away from the world because they are establishment insiders who prefer to keep company only with their own social elite.
Both of these groups grumble at Jesus today, because the faith Jesus preaches is unlike that practiced by either Pharisee or scribe. Jesus does not draw away from the world. Rather, he is drawn to those who are in trouble, physically, emotionally, or spiritually. He spends time being present to and offering grace to those who are in pain, and he doesn’t care how impure or on the outside the world may claim them to be. One might say that Jesus, like rancher Tristan Ludlow, frequents the perimeters of life, seeking out the lost, those who find themselves tangled in barbed wire.
The scribes and the Pharisees don’t understand this. So they grumble. And in response, Jesus asks them a question this morning:
“Wouldn’t any of you,” Jesus asks, “having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until you found it?”
I think we usually read this passage assuming the scribes and the Pharisees would have nodded in agreement to Jesus’ proposition. But that’s not so! In an impoverished place like first century Palestine, a landowner with one hundred sheep was a rare, rare thing. And there’s no way that such a landowner would endanger 99% of his wealth in order to save the remaining 1%. Translated into religious terms, the Pharisees would not risk their purity to help a so-called impure person in need. The scribes would not risk their place of privilege in society to save a single hurting soul. And so when Jesus asks his question, the response of the scribes and Pharisees is undoubtedly, “Are you crazy? Leave 99 sheep to save one lamb? What kind of sense is that? What kind of religion is that?”
Faith, for the scribes and Pharisees, is all about drawing away from the hardscrabble world, keeping their lives neatly ordered and preserving what they have.
What Jesus knows, though, and what even the scribes and Pharisees undoubtedly know in the deepest recesses of their hearts, is that there is no such thing as the neatly ordered life. Those—then and now—whose lives appear to be neatly put together are often those who, just beneath the surface, feel hurt and tangled up spiritually and emotionally, like that hundredth lost sheep, or that calf caught in barbed wire.
Jesus knows this because he, like all the rest of us, experienced it. As a youth, he struggled with parents with whose expectations for him he disagreed. As an adult after his baptism, he was tormented and tempted in the wilderness by the Devil himself. And later, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he was so pained at the thought of the coming cross that he sweat drops like blood.
Jesus has been, in his own way, that hundredth sheep. He may not have sinned, but he surely knows what it feels like to be starkly, desperately alone. He knows what it feels like for the cords of life to wrap ever more tightly around him. He knows what it feels like to hang on the cross and pray to God for deliverance. And because of this, he knows that there is nothing more important in the life of faith than to seek out the lost sheep and bring it home. This is what he does for us, and this is what he calls us to do for one another.
In Legends of the Fall, Tristan Ludlow rides upon the calf caught in the barbed wire. It is, for a rancher, an insignificant thing: one small calf among hundreds of head of cattle. It would be easy to draw away and pass the calf by. But Tristan leaps from his horse without hesitation and struggles with all his strength to loosen the cords that cut and strangle this frightened and hurting creature. What makes the difference? Those who have seen Legends of the Fall know that, though Brad Pitt may be beautiful and the cinematography grand, Tristan has suffered incredible pain and loss in his life. In other words, he knows what it is to be pursued by wolves, to be constricted with razor wire that draws in upon him at every movement. He knows what it is and so in a moment of his strength he responds, seeking to be a blessing to one in desperate need.
At some times in our lives we, like Tristan Ludlow, experience confidence and strength. At other moments, we experience circumstances in life that affect us like emotional or spiritual barbed wire, and every attempt to struggle free only brings more pain. We cannot be delivered by our own strength, and we must receive help from outside of ourselves.
Remember, we are in good company! Jesus himself experienced both extremes, and he meets us in both extremes. When we are lost, Jesus seeks us to bring us home. When we are strong, he empowers us to become the bearers of his grace to the lost sheep. What an awesome responsibility! It is this of which the scribes and Pharisees wanted no part. It is this that they could not understand.
Jesus’ faith, and the faith to which he calls us, is the faith that is drawn to the lost sheep and the tangled calf. This is the faith into which I pray we will all live. It’s my prayer that we will share the grace of God in Jesus Christ with one another in these walls, especially when those among us feel lost and alone and experience the barbed wire of life entangling us. It is also my prayer that we will ride out to the perimeter of our neighborhoods and this great city and seek those who are lost there, too, just as Tristan Ludlow rode to the very edge of his ranch. Some may over time have wandered from the flock. Others we meet may have never known the grace of a loving God at all. To everyone we meet, I pray we will offer a way home.
We don’t go alone! Jesus himself goes with us, because he knows what it is to be lost and alone, just as he knows what it is to be strong. He goes with us. His love can snap any cord. It can heal all wounds. And it seeks us out when we are lost, even to the end of the earth. And for that, thanks be to God.
Does Jesus really tell us to hate?
“Jesus turned to the crowd and said, ‘Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.’” (Luke 14:26)
This passage is what biblical scholars refer to as one of the “hard sayings” of Jesus. It’s a party-stopper. One can almost hear the D.J.’s needle scratch across the record.
I still remember the very first time I read this passage. I was in my childhood bedroom in Paragould, Arkansas, reading the denim-covered Good News Bible I’d been given at third-grade Sunday school graduation. That Jesus, meek and mild, would say such things confused me and brought me to tears. I got out of bed, found my mom, and told her I wouldn’t hate her, no matter what Jesus said. My incredulity isn’t much less today than it was circa 1980. In a world in which hating one another seems ever more acceptable, in which disagreement becomes tantamount to a declaration of war, do we really need Jesus pushing us in that direction? What does Jesus mean here?
If ever a word study in New Testament Greek mattered, it does here. When, in twenty-first century English, we say “hate,” we mean something like “mean-spirited disdain and hostility,” a loathing that ultimately writes off the other as unworthy of our consideration or care. That is not what the word in Luke today means. Let me say that again: That is not what the word in Luke today means. It would be out of Jesus’ character and out of sync with the entire rest of the Gospel for Jesus to commend us to hate in that sense. So, what does Jesus mean, and is it important to us today?
For fourteen chapters in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has been proclaiming—and, more importantly, living—a Way. He has shown grace, love, and mercy when no one else would do so. He has denied custom; he has denied his family when they sought to silence him and bring him home; he has even denied the law whenever these things sought to stifle his words or actions of love and grace. Ten chapters ago, the people of Nazareth among whom he was raised even attempted to throw Jesus off a cliff and shut him up permanently. And yet Jesus has continued to proclaim and live the Way he knows is God’s hope for the world. At each turn, he must leave behind someone or something he has loved—and still loves—in order to be faithful.
Now consider this (and feel free to use it as a conversation starter with your more Evangelical friends): By my count, in the entire Gospels Jesus says to those around him, “Believe in me” twice. Two times. By comparison, Jesus says “Follow me” twenty-two times. Discipleship—following Jesus—is exponentially more important to Jesus than belief. That’s not my opinion; that’s the repeated stress of Jesus’ own preaching. And for my fellow grammar nerds, this is the imperative case, the command of Jesus, “not an ask, but a tell,” as my mother would say. The Way Jesus proclaims and walks is not a way for him only. It is the Way of God’s hope for the entire world. It is the Way anyone who claims Jesus is called to walk with him.
Often when I study the Gospels, I sometimes try to imagine myself as various characters in the story, to picture in my mind’s eye what the action would have been like from the participants’ point of view. (Try it sometime.) As I engage in this exercise, I seem to return repeatedly to that buddy threesome from Capernaum who are constantly at Jesus’ heels: Peter, James, and John. They are, in Luke’s Gospel, the first three people who tether themselves to Jesus. Until Jesus meets them on the banks of the Sea of Galilee, he is a solitary preacher. Forever after, Jesus is rabbi with disciples. Peter, James, and John leave behind everything they’ve known to walk in his Way. What would it have been like to be Peter, James, or John? More specifically, how would Jesus’ hard saying today have struck them? In order to know that, we need to look at a mountain and a garden.
First, we need to go back five chapters in Luke’s Gospel, to Mount Tabor, rising up from the Jezreel Valley. On a different, earlier day, Peter, James, and John follow Jesus up that mountain, and on its summit they have a collective epiphany. Jesus is transfigured before them. The veil drops, and for just a moment Peter, James, and John see the world as it truly is, as God intends it to be, without shadow and without illusion. It is the spiritual high of all spiritual highs. The three friends are awash in joy and an eager desire to do something, to respond to this gift in some big and profound way.
We may never have seen Jesus transfigured, but very many of us get it on some level. We, too, have had some mountaintop experience, somewhere along the way. Maybe it was in church; maybe it was at a spiritual renewal weekend like Cursillo or the Emmaus Walk; maybe it was in the grandeur of nature; maybe it was at a vulnerable low point of health; maybe it was sitting in quiet solitude over morning coffee. Regardless of the setting, we have felt so close to God, even if for just a moment, that the encounter worked its way into the very marrow of us. It made us feel so good, so loved, so accepted that the background radiation of our epiphany has lingered ever since, so much so that it has perhaps come to define for us what our relationship with God is all about. It’s what we want faith to be all about: a recurrence of that experience and that feeling.
Fast forward thirteen chapters in Luke’s Gospel, leapfrogging over today’s hard sayings at the halfway point, and Peter, James, and John again find themselves alone with Jesus in a garden called Gethsemane on the down slope of the Mount of Olives. Their encounter in the garden has none of the hallmarks of the earlier experience on Mount Tabor. Jesus is not transfigured. Rather, now Jesus is starkly, abjectly alone. Jesus has reached the destination to which walking in God’s Way has taken him, where his willingness to walk away from all the things in his world that push against God’s hope has taken him. In the garden, Jesus doubles over in anguish so intense that Luke tells us, “His sweat became like great drops of blood falling to the ground.” Jesus seems horribly, pitifully human, and the scene is worsened when the mob shows up and drags Jesus away from his friends. This is not the big and profound way Peter, James, and John had hoped—had believed—things would go. And suddenly discipleship isn’t academic. These three must decide if they can and will continue to walk the Way of Jesus, the way of grace, in the face of everyone—the mob, Pilate, the Jewish leaders, their families—who pressure them otherwise. They will hesitate. They will falter. They will temporarily forget the joy and power of the Mount of Transfiguration as they are overwhelmed by the anguish and sorrow of the Garden of Gethsemane. Now realizing that the way of grace requires sacrifice, and discomfort, and loss in addition to feelings of warmth and joy, Peter, James, and John must decide whether they will still walk the Way of Jesus. Imagine yourself as Peter, James, or John, and imagine the jarring disconnect between the high on the Mount of Transfiguration and the low in the Garden of Gethsemane, from rapturous joy to stunned and hollow sorrow. And only then return to a consideration of the hard saying in today’s Gospel passage.
The Greek word for “hate” that appears in this saying of Jesus–miseo–does not, it turns out, mean mean-spirited hostility.[i] It means, rather, that in the case of conflict between Jesus’ call of discipleship and anything else, including our most cherished relationships in the world, followers of Jesus must choose the Way of the Gospel, which is always the way of love and grace.
The hard lesson learned by Peter, James, and John is that the gift of the heady and sublime experience on the mountaintop, which does indeed change us, is not given to us by God simply to uplift our spirits and buoy us through the world. The mountaintop experience is given to us so that we have the strength still to follow, still to remain faithful, when the pressure, and sorrow, and anguish around us and in us becomes so intense that we sweat like drops of blood.
The mountaintop experience reveals to us that we are created in love and showered in grace. And it compels us to live through love and shower the world in grace always, and especially when the political, social, familial grain would have us do otherwise. The Garden of Gethsemane always eventually follows the Mount of Transfiguration. They are forever tethered in this broken world. We should rejoice in the mount and thank God for it, but we must always remember that the mountaintop experience energizes and sustains us so that we have the strength to follow Jesus through the garden. These days, the Garden of Gethsemane seems to have extended from the down slope of the Mount of Olives out across the landscape of the whole world. These days, it is so easy to despair of so much hatred, and selfishness, and vitriol that we sweat in sorrow like drops of blood. But the world as God hopes it to be is also right here, just on the other side of the veil. We have seen it in glimpses; we have been empowered by the gift of that vision; and we are called to follow the Way until the love and grace of God transfigure the whole world.
_______________________________
[i] The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. IX, pg. 292.
