September 22, 2013
The Mountain in the Middle of the Gospel
Opening
I’m told that you can visit the Gardens at Giverny in France, the famous gardens enshrined forever in
Claude Monet’s famous paintings. I’ve certainly seen pictures of the gardens, the lily ponds, and that
Japanese bridge over one of them. And I’ve tried to imagine for myself the layers of light and colour
that he so expertly transcribed onto canvas.
Have any of you been there?
I did not understand the scope of Monet’s work, nor the grand influence he had in the world of art, until
this summer I made a sojourn to the Art Institute on Michigan Ave in downtown Chicago. While there
were a number of great exhibits to see, I was focused. I was zeroing in on Monet. I wanted to see the
famous paintings. Nothing could have prepared me for the spectacle in front of me. The canvases are
huge, the size of walls. Some are on multiple canvases spread across a whole wall of the gallery. Those
postcard images you can buy in the souvenir shop do not do the painting justice. I’m not sure that my
heart was adequately prepared. I wonder if it’s like going in search of a buried treasure, map in hand, x
marking the spot. You dig up the treasure only to find there are MANY chests, not just one. You open
the chests and they are filled with gold and all kinds of sparkling treasure. Overwhelming!!!
Seeing the Monet, I was gripped by his own comment that one can only adequately paint about 30
minutes of light. Then the light changes, the colours shift, and the moment passes. And looking at that
masterpiece on the wall, I understood, it really was only a glimpse of the light in the garden for about 30
minutes or so, but what a glimpse! That glimpse will last forever. In fact, after Monet, the whole of the
painting world would never be quite the same.
In a book called A Sense of Beauty, Santayana wrote:
Unhappy is the man who in all his life
Has had no glimpse of perfection,
Who in the ecstasy of love
Or in the light of contemplation
Has never been able to say: it is attained.
Have you ever attained the perfect moment? Found the golden orb? Have you ever grasped the pearl
of great price, or the one single word helped you make sense of your own life? The secret?
Or has it eluded you? Searching for that transcendent moment can leave us weary and tired, and the
timeworn paths of so many other before us seem as if they lead nowhere, nowhere at all. We give up.
Thinking about our current contemporary culture, I wonder if, in general, we may have removed
ourselves from the QUEST for the ETERNAL.
I wonder if we have removed ourselves from the expectation of transcendence.
It may be that our whole culture is too fast moving to notice things like shimmering light on lily ponds,
and too jumbled with life’s many pressures to be able to appreciate the subtle influence of a beautiful
story?
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September 22, 2013
The Mountain in the Middle of the Gospel
It may be that we doubt. We doubt the myths and the pathways of old. And we haven’t yet found a
new myth with which to ground our lives. (Many contemporary writers work from this cynical place I
find).
The quest which is still evident even in our day, for humans to project themselves as far upward and
outward as possible, is one we participate in only vicariously. We watch the Hubble telescope and the
Martian rover go as they send pictures back to us of the remote, the quest to explore now taking us out
beyond even the edges of our solar system. A most recent example of this: the journey to Mars, the
next and latest attraction, a one-way ticket. How many people willingly put their lives on a list to go
there, to cross the next frontier, to become immortalized in the annals of human history? I think it’s a
Dutch company that is planning to launch the first one-way ticket to Mars. Would you be crazy enough
to go? On the very first day of its announcement, some 10,000 people signed up.
The Story
In Mark’s gospel (and also in the other three, but Mark tells the story first), in the middle of the
narrative, we have a picture of Jesus transfigured on a mountain.
Surely this story is mythical, even archetypal!
A spiritual man goes to the top of a mountain and there he becomes as bright as the sun, his clothes and
his body seem to disappear; all that is left is essence, a light so bright you can’t look at it for long, a
transformation of body and soul, of matter and spirit, into pure essence.
It’s a shocking and unusual story. And the difficulty is only multiplied when we take the details literally.
Surely, by now, you have heard my plea that we stop taking these stories so literally. Surely by now, you
can see the value of interpreting the stories in scripture as either allegory or metaphor, and also, as I am
trying to introduce this fall, as myth.
It’s hard for us to think of Bible stories as myth. Myths are fairy tales to us. Like King Arthur, or
Cinderella. These are not true stories, at least in detail. They are told to lift spirits, to inspire greatness,
to offer hope to people in times of darkness and despair. Myths typically function at two levels, the one,
on top, is the obvious one, the lesson that the hero learns, such as Prometheus playing with fire, and the
underlying level, the deeper level, in which the story plays out for us some of those deep-seated human
quandaries. Those questions we talked about last week. The quest for ultimate meaning or purpose.
Believe it or not, the Bible itself functions this way. It is mythical in every way, many-layered, while also
deep and mysterious. It takes a long time, many years of reading and reflection, for the Bible to cough
up its secrets.
In today’s story, we have a mythical journey to the top of a mountain, with Peter James and John, who
were Jesus’ closest friends. I’m not saying the trip up the mountain didn’t occur. What I AM saying is
that whoever wrote this story up did not see it as JUST a trip up a mountain!!!! The “mountain” is the
highest attainable SPIRITUAL place imaginable at the time. A mountain functioned in early mythology as
the meeting place for humans and gods. Of COURSE Jesus took his closest friends up a mountain to talk
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The Mountain in the Middle of the Gospel
with God!! To show them his true self. To reveal to them the secret location of the inner and deepest
truth of his whole mission, like divulging for them the secret hiding place of the largest treasure that lies
buried somewhere in this earth.
In Mark, the author imagines the scene as one of intense shimmering light, a light-show unlike any
other. Why so bright and shiny? This isn’t Las Vegas after all, and God tends to be a little more subtle
when it comes to revelation of secrets. The gospel writer sees Jesus as ONE OF THE GROUP OF the
others in the long line of mythical figures, like Osiris, and Horus, and Mithra, even the Buddha, to name
a few of Jesus’ predecessors. These stories were well known myths at the time. Mark’s point seems to
be: this Jesus supercedes them. He is the one that all the others have been waiting for! (which would
get the Christians in all kinds of trouble later on!) the author’s point is that in Jesus, the divine nature of
humanity is finally revealed. It is in Jesus that this secret finally comes out. It is the exact same thing as
handing Peter James and John, a treasure map with an X on it, except that the X marking the spot, is
over Jesus’s head.
The funny thing is that in order for Mark’s hearers to hear what he was saying, he HAD to use the
mythical language of the day. WE IN OUR DAY are not used to this style of thinking or talking. It’s not
scientific enough and can’t be empirically proved in a double blind study. Understand?
Even more curious? This story is placed in the exact middle of the gospel that Mark wrote. It is the
high point, the apex, the summit of the story so far, the place of sacred reality and realization, right
smack in the middle of the story.
What we have here then, in the very middle of the gospel (so obvious to us now of course!!!) IS
the high point of the gospel!!! This is the unearthed treasure, this is the garden at the heart of
the universe, this is the pearl of great price, the treasure chest of gold, the holy grail, and let me
give it to you in 8 short words:
We humans are the embodiment of divine essence.
A poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins:
Flesh fade and mortal trash
fall to the mortuary worm;
World’s wildfire leave but ash;
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is,
Since he was what I am,
And this JACK, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
IS immortal diamond.
Friends this is the heart of the gospel.
It is found in the very middle of the story, this revealed diamond, this golden nugget. That all of
humanity shimmers with divine essence. It is WHO we are.
And it is the most precious message you can give to anyone.
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The Mountain in the Middle of the Gospel
Sometimes when I’m preaching a sermon, I will ask myself, even as I am preaching it: is this relevant and
real? Does it matter to you listeners? Is it important? Especially in our world, when there’s so much
noise and confusion, and when every single second there’s more information about the world around
us, and more gurus who all want you to buy their program for self improvement.
But this weekend, as terrorists stormed a mall in Nairobi Kenya, makes me realize how relevant these
concerns actually are! Because the terrorists asked the people in the mall if they were Muslim. It could
have been any religion, but they picked their own. And those who were, and could pass the test, were
set free. Those who were NOT, were killed in cold blood.
Will there be a day when ALL the religions put down their extremism, and embrace the divine essence
which lives in us all?
For years I have loved the image of faith as being like a mountain, with MANY pathways to the top. But
this mall shooting makes me realize that STILL, after all this time, some people think THEIR WAY is the
only way. And they will kill people for the fact. How bizarre and absurd, especially when EVERY religion
purports to be a purveyor of the truth of the soul!!!
It’s times like this that you understand why so many in our world have abandoned religion! There are
far too many crazy people out there.
AND the secret does not have to be kept: the secret of the human soul is beautiful and rich, and
deserves to be embraced by all the world’s religions!
Our Christian mythology
In the early days of the church, in the first 400 years or so, there was a huge argument within the various
factions of Christianity.
To be short and to the point, there were the Athanasians and there were the Arians. (please note: these
were followers of Arius, a real live bishop, not the Aryan nation so embraced by Hitler!) The Arians believed that Jesus
was a man first and that he became divine in the full realization and revelation of his life. In other
words, he BECAME divine as he lived out his mission. He became God-like. The other group, the
Athanasians, thought the opposite; that the person of Jesus was divine at birth, that he was not
exactly human, that he did not really die because he was not really all human. They’re the ones who
translated the birth stories ( I should say they mistranslated the stories) just to prove that he was
divinely born. (OK: another sermon on that is required, but not today!)
These two positions became polarized over time and the different bishops of the early church fought
vociferously for about 300 years!!. Each side put together its own record; each side interpreted the
gospels from their point of view.
The Arians, who obviously did not have a high Christology, because they did not believe that Jesus was a
god, but that he was a divine human being, were finally deemed to be wrong. It was Constantine who
declared their view heretical. It was Constantine who ordered that Arius be excommunicated and sent
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The Mountain in the Middle of the Gospel
away into the wilds of Africa. And it was Constantine who ordered that all the records, all the history, all
the interpretive material, housed in the libraries in Alexandria, be destroyed.
And then traditional Christianity grew up with a high Athanasian Christology, the creeds were written to
confirm these views, and the rest is history.
The secret knowledge, this idea that God’s love and God’s grace reside in the center of
the human soul, this idea that the body is a vehicle for the soul’s expression, and that
the soul’s expression is actually the divine soul becoming live and present in the world,
was buried again.
Buried in the deep layers of human unconscious. And the best way to understand the human
unconscious is to tell stories and make myths that make it real again, in our own time. This may be the
most crucial thing we might do as a church: to make new myths and tell new stories for the sake of the
health of the next few generations to come.
Carl Jung, in our time, recognized that the buried myth of the Cosmic Christ (the human man who
became divine so that all people could see themselves as divine) is the one who would be the
Redeemer of all souls. Great! But the problem with this is that most people in the church and indeed
most people outside the church, can only imagine the historical Jesus as the Christ. The objectified
Christ, the one outside of us. The real search, the real journey, the real revelation comes he says, when
we withdraw our projections from the historical Jesus, and allow ourselves to find the cosmic Christ
within each one of us.
Jung said that when the Christ remains outside of us, as an ideal, or as an act of worship, then the
deeper levels of the soul are never engaged. And when the deep levels of the soul are not engaged,
then people hang on to rational dogma or a set of external rules, as the rule for life.
And that’s not what it’s about at all!!!!
Closing
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us with a mythical story about the revelation of the Christ within, the shining shimmering
presence of the Christ spirit which lives in each of us, like a diamond in the rough. It leaves us grappling
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The Mountain in the Middle of the Gospel
for and reaching for THIS Christ in the middle of our lives, not after they are over, but in the here and
now.
But here’s the HOPE: it becomes visible when WE, in our little lives, reveal to others, our own inner
capacity, our own inner potential, our own inner power, latent perhaps but definitely present, to be
creatures of great love and grace.
And when we find that place of sweet bliss within us (as Campbell calls it), we will be the exact
opposites of those three disciples Peter, James and John.
We’ll run down the mountain, not with a secret to keep to ourselves, but with the core teaching of
Jesus that will change the world.
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