It was with some nervousness, mixed with excitement, that I knocked on the door of my father’s office.
My father looked up from his work.
“May I speak to you?”
“Yes,” he said, “come in, come in.” He stood up. “Let me turn this off.” He was referring to the Beethoven Piano sonata that was playing on the portable CD player.
After turning off the music, my father settled into the easy chair that was in the corner of his office and turned his attention to me.
I couldn’t help smiling. I was brimming over with the news that I was about to tell him… but I was also a little scared.
My father saw – or rather, he somehow, mysteriously, understood it all. Somehow, he understood the expression on my face. Somehow he picked up on the odd mixture of excitement and fear that was about to burst from me. And somehow, somehow, he knew what was underneath it all – even though, a moment before I came in, he’d had no way of anticipating it.
“Dad…” I said “I have something to tell you…”
He looked at me for a moment and smiled.
“Can I guess what it is?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that you are going to be a father.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am going to be a father…”
*
Today is Transfiguration Sunday.
Owen just read the story of the Transfiguration for all of us.
We hear this story every year.
Jesus takes three of his disciples, Peter, John and James, and together the four men climb a nearby mountain. Interestingly, from this point on, the story unfolds from the perspective of the three disciples. When they reach the top of the mountain, Jesus begins to pray, and when he does this, the disciples see something extraordinary. The text says that: “…the appearance of his (Jesus’) face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.”
Next, the disciples discover that the party of four men has suddenly increased to six. Two others have appeared as if from nowhere. These two are not strangers. Somehow the disciples know that the two new arrivals are Moses and Elijah, two of the most important prophets of the Jewish religion.
Moses and Elijah have a little conference with Jesus right there at the top of the mountain. In the middle of all this, the disciples, for some reason, get sleepy and fall asleep. When they wake up Moses and Elijah are taking their leave, and, for the first time, one of the disciples – Peter – finds his voice and proposes, somewhat unrealistically, that the disciples build three tents – one for each of the exalted figures.
As if to shut Peter up, a cloud then descends upon the men and they are overcome with fear. A voice from the cloud says:
“This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
When the cloud departs, it is just the four men again – Moses and Elijah, and the voice of God are all gone. Jesus is not shining anymore. He is back to his old self.
**
Was it something in my eyes? Is there, perhaps, a very special look in a young man’s eyes when he comes to tell his father that he too is about to become a father?
Or was it something about how I carried myself that somehow expressed a brimming excitement?
Perhaps there was some unique timber in my voice when I spoke… something never heard before.
How was it that my father knew what I was going to tell him that evening?
I have often wondered.
It felt kind of miraculous.
As if both of us – he and I – had tapped into something mysterious and eternal which is part of this movement of the generations.
I don’t remember exactly what happened next, except that I know that my father and I were at ease with each other enough to have been able to sit together in stunned silence for a few moments without feeling uncomfortable.
I do remember something else that happened that evening though – something that was as memorable as my father’s amazing guess. This other thing – a brief exchange of words between my father and I, was a snippet of conversation that I will always remember as being among the most significant interactions my father and I ever had.
I am deeply grateful to him for it.
It was quite a simple conversation. Nothing earth shaking, in itself. It went like this:
I asked my father a question.
“Do you think I will be a good father?” I asked.
“Yes!” he said without hesitation. “Of course!”
**
One of the great questions that has caused almost all of the important philosophers in human history to clutch at their hair in frustration is the question of innate human nature.
To be sure, every human being is capable of being good, and every human being is also capable of being evil. No one questions this observation. It is equally obvious that both good and evil are circumstantial – that is, they are the result of the accumulation of good and/or bad experiences that happen to each person as they live their lives.
The big question is this – do we have a baseline nature? When an infant first comes into the world, does it start out good, only to become corrupted later? Or, on the other hand, does a newborn child enter the veil of tears in the state of essential badness?
During the Enlightenment – the period of history when philosophers in Europe bent their impressive noodles to plumb all manner of eternal conundrums, there were three philosophers who had distinct positions on the question of innate human nature. These were two Englishmen: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and and Frenchman: Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Thomas Hobbes’ believed that, by nature, humans are a bad lot. Left to our own devices, we would inevitably kill each other in an effort to survive. “The life of man,” Hobbes famously wrote, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” The only reason we have not long since done each other in, is because the rules of human society are enforced by powerful monarchs who threaten us, and keep us in line.
John Locke disagreed with Hobbes. Locke thought that we humans are not born bad – he suggested that each of us is born with a tabula rasa – which is latin for “blank slate.” In other words, the human condition, at birth, is like a blackboard that has not been written on. Life might fill that blackboard with lovely poetry, or vicious, ugly lies. “We are like chameleons,” Locke wrote: we “take our hue and the color of our moral character, from those who are around us.”
The French thinker, Jean Jacques Rousseau was on the other end of the spectrum from Hobbes. According to Rousseau, human nature begins in a state of virtue, and it is only from the traumatic influence of experience, that evil enters into our souls. Personal fulfillment, for Rousseau, was not an epic quest or spiritual journey, rather it was a matter of stripping away the defects of human society to return to one’s original state. Why should we build our happiness on the opinions of others, he wrote, when we can find it in our own hearts?
What do you think?
Like all eternal problems, it is hard to come to a solid conclusion, but it is easy to have an opinion.
Though each of these philosophers had different notions of how human nature begins, all three agreed that how we end up depends on how we interact with, and what we learn from, other human beings.
**
So what does all this have to do with the Transfiguration?
All this talk of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, speculates about the essence of human nature. But, in the tradition of the Christian church, the story of the Transfiguration marks that moment in Christ’s life story, when he came fully into his divine nature.
The story is filled with imagery that brings Christ close to God… climbing a mountain (as Moses did at Sinai) brings Christ close to God. Meeting and conferring with the great prophets of old, places Christ in the prophetic tradition, and brings him closer to God. Being filled with light, and being addressed by a voice from the cloud – this narrative symbolism brings Christ into progressively more intimate relation with God.
In this story Christ is being “transfigured” into his divine nature, but on his way up the mountain, he is a man.
Christ is, somehow, both mortal and divine.
In his divine nature, he is separate from us, but doesn’t his mortal experience express something essential about our spiritual journey?
What can we learn about our human nature by attending to this story: the story of Christ coming into his divine nature?
Well… One thing I noticed when I read through the story this time around – is that Christ’s transfiguration is not a solitary experience.
I might imagine that the experience of becoming one with God might be a solitary experience.
But there are five other people present in this experience – the two prophets, Moses and Elijah, and three disciples, Peter, John and James.
I can see that these people have roles to play in the narrative and in the religious tradition. The prophets represent Christ’s Jewish heritage – to live into his messianic role, Christ must be the culmination of Jewish prophecy.
The disciples, in their own right, are the witnesses. They are us. They are the ones who see, are awe stricken, and are tasked with bringing the vision of the divine Christ into the world.
Isn’t this interesting?
Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau all agreed that it is the presence of, and the interaction with other human beings that corrupts our original human nature – but here, in this story, Christ does not escape human corruption in order to become divine – rather he brings humans along.
Becoming divine is not a solitary experience.
It is an experience that happens in community.
Why is this?
**
I agree with John Locke, that there is little doubt that there is a direct connection between the trauma that people experience, and the way that they live in the world.
Evil grows from evil.
Children who experience physical or sexual abuse. Young people who grow up in war zones. Women who survive rape. Boys who are taught, from earliest age, that they must never show their emotions. There is no lack of reasons why trauma can cause the seeds of evil intention to grow in our souls.
To be sure, Hobbes too was on to something. Let us call it like it is! When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials appeared last week in Peterborough, and shut down a Mexican restaurant in their search for an “illegal Alien,” we saw a direct, and uncomfortably local, expression of that philosopher’s cynical belief that human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
When I talked on the phone with Pat Bullock, Pat called it a moral outrage. She called it “a Gestapo raid.”
“Is this,” she asked, “the United States of America?
We humans are capable of unspeakable cruelty. Make no mistake, the trauma that will result from this fearful time will be stubborn. It will not go away easily.
That said, I don’t think Jean Jacques Rousseau was a flowery-eyed idealist. He was onto something too.
Goodness is part of us. Love is a natural expression of our nature.
Isn’t it?
When we are loved. When we are believed in… we find our way to the good.
It happens quite naturally.
When I asked my father if I would be a good father, he said
“Yes! of course!”
In that moment, my father made it perfectly clear that he believed in me, totally. His “of course” told me that being a good father was just the natural course of things. His love for me was, itself, the answer to the question. “Of course” I was going to be a good father. What else would I be?
That unsolicited, totally natural expression of faith in me, changed my life. It transformed my desire to be a good father, into the reality of being a good father.
It was a holy moment. A moment when God was present in a pure glimpse of love.
It was kind of like the moment, in today’s story, when God offers an unsolicited, totally natural expression of faith in Jesus, saying:
“This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
Now I am sure that Christianity is a religion that can benefit from solitary meditation…
but I believe, that our faith – Christianity – comes fully alive – moves closest to God – when it flourishes in community.
That’s why Jesus brought the disciples up to the mountain. He needed them.
We cannot glimpse God – and Christ certainly cannot become God, without the presence of love
And we cannot know the true, transformative power of love, without each other, in all our gorgeous… sacred diversity.
Amen.