Cave Blind

Propers: Transfiguration Sunday, AD 2024 B

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.

Next to the legend of Atlantis, the Allegory of the Cave has to be Plato’s most famous and influential work. He uses it as a metaphor for philosophy, literally the love of wisdom. And the story goes something like this: imagine a group of prisoners who have been chained together in a cave since childhood, utterly immobilized, able only to look straight ahead at one wall of their cave.

Behind them is a fire, but they don’t know what a fire is. Their captors fashion little images, little puppets, and the firelight projects shadows of these puppets on the wall. This then is what the prisoners imagine to be real: these shadow forms, and the echoes of human voices behind them, which they think come from the shadows themselves. That’s reality to these prisoners: light and darkness dancing on a wall.

Now imagine that the prisoners are released. They can turn around to see what’s behind them, to see the fire, but the bright light of its flames hurts their unaccustomed eyes. They are told that the fire is the source of their light, the puppets the source of their shadows, that what they see now is more real than anything they’ve ever known. But the prisoners refuse to believe it! This is too new, too confusing. And so they turn back to the shadows, preferring their previous reality, dark as it may be.

Further imagine now that the captors seize by force one of the prisoners and drag him up out of the cave, into daylight, cowering before the sun. Now he’s in agony, blinded by the light. Yet as his eyes adjust, soon he can make out shadows, then reflections, then people and animals, next the stars and moon, and finally the sun in all its blazing glory. And having seen the sun, he can now begin to reason, now begin to think on what all he has witnessed.

Thus enlightened, he would rejoice at his newfound understanding, his newfound freedom, and come to pity his fellow prisoners in the cave. Surely he must help them. Surely he must tell them. Even the puppets and the fire were as nothing compared to this, to the spheres of the heavens and the earth.

Yet upon his return, eyes now accustomed to the sun no longer see clearly in the dark. He has become blind to the shadow realm, and his fellow prisoners pity him. They think that he’s been harmed, crippled, driven mad. So if anyone attempts to drag them up to the surface as well, they’ll make sure to kill that man, lest they wind up like their brother. Thus those who descend from the heavens come to free their fellow men, only to be murdered by the ones they’ve sought to save. That should ring familiar in any Christian ear.

I think about this often whenever the New Testament speaks of slavery to sin, of judgment, of perishing. I think to the Allegory of the Cave. To Jesus and Peter and Paul and John, it’s not so much a matter of punishment after death, as it is a revelation of our present living death, a life bound and chained, a shadow realm we take for real, preferring it to the light, welcoming lies in place of wisdom.

We all do it. We all know it. Yet we continue on this course. Because it’s familiar. Because we can see it. Because the illusion is real to us: the illusion of self-sufficiency, of consumerism, of purchasing one’s happiness, of placing oneself before others. We’re all stressed-out, unhealthy, lonely, debt-ridden, cynical, medicated, percolated through with microplastics, marveling at the destruction of the planet, and yet we embrace this unsustainable, philosophically untenable, mainstream materialistic mode of life.

How is that not a living death? How are we not all prisoners here of our own device? Maybe the reason why nobody worries about going to hell anymore is because we know that we’re already there. But better the devil you know, I suppose. “If life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me.”

I confess that I was raised religious, and cannot remember a time in my life when I was not aware of the presence of God, and of how that presence imbued every molecule and moment of my existence with purpose and meaning and truth. I believe in God, to paraphrase Lewis, not simply in that I can see Him, but that by Him I can see everything else. Now, granted, I had a very positive experience of religion growing up, within a highly active and overall quite healthy congregation. A lot of people haven’t.

Yet even in highschool, most all of my friends were religious. We all had different religions— Lutheran, Catholic, Baptist, Hindu, Reformed and Conservative Jewish— but we all took our faith seriously. I have a hard time imagining anyone who can’t. Plato would tell us that everyone has some sort of god, some sort of greatest good, which gets us out of bed in the morning and gives direction to our lives.

Alas, so many in our postmodern world appear to have no god beyond the belly, beyond entertainment and consumption and the next new thing. And I have spent my entire adult life attempting to communicate that higher, deeper, freedom: that spiritual reality beyond death, decay, and debt. And more and more people look at me like I’m stupid or insane, as though there could never be anything more to life than shadows and whispers and chains. The Son, they imagine, must have struck me blind.

There will always be religion; there will always be God; there will always be those who experience the Spirit, the revelation of Wisdom Most High. “Even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.” Jesus Christ will save this world, but I’m afraid that the West as we know it will only go kicking and screaming.

Today is Transfiguration Sunday. We mark it, like a deep breath of fresh mountain air, before the long plunge into Lent. Jesus takes James and Peter and John up upon the mountaintop, and there He is transfigured before them, blazing as bright as the sun. And the great figures of His people, Moses and Elijah, appear before Him in His glory: Moses and Elijah, who spoke with God upon the mountaintop; Moses and Elijah, both taken bodily up into Heaven; Moses and Elijah, who represent the Law and the Prophets leading up to the revelation of Christ as the true Word of God.

And good old Simon Peter, impetuous as ever, wants to build shelters, tabernacles, for these three heavenly figures, for Peter knows that at the End of Days we shall all speak to our God face-to-face, as He once appeared to Moses in the Tabernacle. Peter believes it’s the end of the world, and Peter is not wrong. But then suddenly, as abruptly as it began, the glorious vision vanishes, and we are left with only Jesus; who comes down now from the mountain, down into the valley of death, down to the Place of the Skull.

In some ways the Transfiguration serves as a preview of Resurrection, a glimpse of the Risen Christ here before His Cross and Tomb. One cannot have a clearer confession of Jesus’ divinity than to hear Moses and Elijah consult Him atop the mountain. But what I want to emphasize today is that this is His Transfiguration, not His transformation. Jesus doesn’t change. Christ was always God. What changes is our vision, what we’re able and ready to see. Here we espy the deeper reality, Truth Himself made flesh.

We see Jesus as He truly is and will forever be. He is the Light of God, the Wisdom of God, the Incarnation of God, visible Son of the invisible Father. When we see Him as He is, then all else is revealed. He shatters our chains, scatters our shadows, raises us up from the cave and the tomb— for the cave has always been our tomb. And we shall rise in the light of the Son, to marvel at His wonders and His works.

Then you know we must go back. You know we must descend. We have to free our brethren. We have to share the truth. And yeah, they’ll think us crazy. And yeah, they’ll call us blind. And once they weary of pitying us, they might just strike us dead. Yet we who have seen the Risen Son cannot be sated by shadows. We must pursue the love of wisdom. We must live the life of truth. We must share our Resurrection. And having been dragged up and into the light, we must now be Christ for the world.

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

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Brownie points if you knew the illusion quote without having to google it.