The Mundane and Miraculous

God of Fire, by Carmen Michelle

Propers: The Transfiguration of Our Lord, AD 2023 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I wish I could tell you that a single glimpse of the miraculous will change your life forever, that faith gives way to sight and one need neither doubt nor despair ever again in this world. But that’s not how it works, at least not for most of us. I know because I’ve witnessed miracles, and other weirder things too.

At first it comes as a shock. “Did I really just see what I saw? Did you not see it as well?” Over time it comes to feel like something from out of a dream, something not of this world, not of daily life, some story that you told once, already half-forgotten. Rationalization starts to take over. You begin to explain it away, even though you know deep down that you’re lying to yourself. One does question one’s memory.

But then something reaffirms the experience: some further encounter with the weird; or corroborating evidence; or a fellow eyewitness, all of which reminds you, “My God, I didn’t make it up. This actually happened to me. This was real.” So then what? You still have to get up, shower, brush your teeth, go to work, pay your bills. The mundane returns to envelop you in routine, and you’re left to wonder what in the world reality is, and how it all works behind the veil of things.

I wish I could say that a miracle changes everything. But mostly it just unsettles, and we run back eagerly to the smothering embrace of the predictable and unsurprising. It’s easier that way.

Imagine being Peter and James and John, daring to believe, desperately hoping, that they are living through the end of the age; not just something extraordinary, not just something miraculous, but something outright apocalyptic. For hundreds of years, perhaps a millennium, the people of Israel have been promised a Messiah, an Anointed One, a Christ—not like the priests and kings of old, who failed so miserably, but a cosmic High Priest, a divine King of Kings.

Things have been bad for so long, generations of violence and oppression and war. And here at last is hope fulfilled, God willing. Just at the moment Daniel’s prophecy foretold, here comes this Jesus in off the Galilee preaching the Kingdom of God. And yes, there have been others. He’s neither the first nor the last claimant of that title. But He seems to them, to Peter and James and John, to be the real deal, in His actions, in His preaching. Oh, the things He says! Oh, the things He does!

And, I’ll grant you, He’s not quite what we’d expected. He didn’t descend from Heaven shining upon a cloud, leading forth legions of angels. He hasn’t yet called down the thunderbolt to burn up the heathens of Rome. But still—He heals the sick, casts out demons, raises the dead! We’ve seen Him walk on water. Normal people don’t do that. He has to be the Messiah, right? Has to be!

You can almost hear the tension in that first half of Jesus’ ministry, not just from the crowds and the disciples but from the Apostles as well, His inner core of Twelve. It’s like they’re trying to figure Him out, what He is, what He’s here for. They think they know, or at least suspect, because they have established expectations for the Messiah, and they’re pretty sure this is their guy. They really want Him to be.

But He’s not acting like a Christ. Miracles, yeah, sure, but where’s the spectacle? Where’s the razzamatazz? Why doesn’t Jesus just take the country back, wage the war for which we’ve been praying for, oh, so many years? It’s like He wants to keep it secret, to cover it all up until some opportune time. But we do not understand why. Peter and James and John do not understand why. Why shouldn’t He yell it from the rooftops? Why not cast the mountain into the sea?

So they follow Him around, through all these Podunk towns, feeding the hungry, curing the ill, helping little old ladies to cross the street, that sort of thing—all the while anxious, all the while tense, all the while waiting with bated breath to see where exactly all of this is going. And then finally something changes. Something shifts. It starts with the death of John the Baptist. It continues with the Confession of Peter, when he finally blurts out that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, and Jesus does not correct him, actually tells Peter that Peter has learned this by divine inspiration.

But then He starts talking about death. Death, of all things! Here at last they’ve confirmed that for which they have desperately hoped—Jesus is the Christ!—and He starts prattling on about being killed and resurrected. And when Peter protests—“God forbid it, Lord! This should not happen to you!”—Jesus then rebukes Peter as strongly as He’d just lauded him, “Get behind Me, Satan!” and tells His Apostles to tell no-one else until after He had risen from the dead.

Six days later, Jesus takes Peter and James and John and leads them up a high mountain. Now, those six days are significant, but more on that in a bit. Up on top of that mountain, something astonishing happens, something inexplicable. Jesus shines miraculously, as does the prophesied “one like a Son of Man” sent by God in the Book of Daniel. They are enveloped in the Shekinah, the cloud of the divine presence, which acts as a veil between this world and the next.

And they witness Jesus speaking with Moses and Elijah, which is remarkable for a number of reasons, starting off with the fact that both of those guys are supposed to have been dead for centuries. Moses and Elijah each ascended a mountain in order to commune with God. Both, according to Scripture, were taken bodily up into Heaven, at a time when Heaven was understood to be the abode of angels, not fit for the souls of mortal men.

Everything that happens here—the light, the cloud, the dynamic duo of divine interlocutors—all screams out in big flashing neon letters, “THIS MAN IS GOD.” And Peter, amidst all this otherworldly astonishment, wants to pitch some tents. How about that? Has he gone completely out of his gourd? Well, not necessarily. Peter might be the only one of the three who almost understands just what is going on.

See, there is a holiday in the Hebrew Bible called Sukkot, the Festival of Booths. It commemorates a number of things, but the primary religious message is that once upon a time Moses communed with God in a Tabernacle, which is to say, a mobile temple, an elaborate booth or tent—keeping in mind that nomadic peoples had some truly gigantic and ornate tents. At Sukkot, all the faithful build little tabernacles of their own, because at the end of the age God will commune with everyone face-to-face as once He did with Moses.

So, you see what Peter’s getting at? It’s the end of the age, the end of the world as we know it. The Messiah has come, and He is God on earth, so what exactly is a good observant faithful Jewish man to do? Why, pitch a tent, of course! And if we do the math—if we assume that the Transfiguration occurs on Sukkot, and backtrack those six days—we come to the Day of Atonement, the one day of the whole year when one man alone, the High Priest, was permitted to enter the Holy of Holies in the Temple and to invoke the ineffable Name of God.

In other words, Peter confessed the identity of Jesus on the one day when God’s Name is permitted and required to be spoken. No way that’s a coincidence.

This is everything Peter wanted, the confirmation of all his hopes and dreams, lit up like the Vegas Strip. It is a vision of glory and power and wonder and might. Then just like that—it’s over. It’s done. No more light show, no more Moses and Elijah. It’s just Jesus: plain old simple Jesus, with Peter and James and John. And they go down the mountain, into the valley, on the long road to the Cross and the Tomb.

I think that must be more shocking to them than anything else; that after seeing what they’ve seen, and knowing what they now know, it’s back to the mundane world, to business as usual. Because yes, God is now on this earth as one of us. And yes, the end of the world as we’ve known it has come. And it is simply Jesus.

The presence of God is not found primarily in the mountaintop experience, in the miracle that changes everything that we think we know. God is found in Christ, walking with us, teaching, healing, liberating, feeding, raising us up from the dead. God has found us in the last place that we expected to find Him: in the simple life and ignominious death of a rural Rabbi surrounded by fishermen, tax collectors, prostitutes, and cripples. That’s the glory of God under the form of the Cross.

And that’s where we still find Jesus today: in the simple, the everyday, the mundane; loving us, forgiving us, ennobling us, and calling us all home in Him. He is not the Messiah whom we wanted, but He’s absolutely the One we all need.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.