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The Last Sunday After The Epiphany (Quinquagesima)
O God, who before the passion of thy only-begotten Son didst reveal his glory upon the holy mount: Grant unto us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 9:28-43a
A Sermon by
Fr. Austin
on
Luke 9:28-43a
✛
It Is Not Easy to be Jesus' Disciple
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Many people have a romantic notion of what it would have been like to be a disciple of Jesus. They imagine: you were with Jesus every day, and you got to see the miracles and you got to hear his teaching, and it was easy. To which I say: rubbish!
Exhibit A is today’s gospel. It is in two parts. First is Luke’s telling us about the Transfiguration. Then, immediately after, is a story about Jesus healing a boy who had something like epilepsy. It was not easy to be Jesus’ disciple with regard to the Transfiguration; nor was it easy to be his disciple the next day when that healing occurred. And this, it seems to me, is one of the points Luke is making by putting these stories back-to-back. To follow Jesus could be a lot of things—exciting, demanding, uprooting, transformational—but it was not easy.
The Transfiguration was the high point in the midst of Jesus’ ministry, when, up on a mountain, his face became radiant and (according to Saint Luke) his glory was revealed. There, high on the mountain, it was clear that Jesus was God’s Son, that he was divine and human both. Furthermore, with the word “glory” Luke may be intimating that Jesus’ future resurrected body was revealed there in advance of his death. Yet whatever the Transfiguration was, from the point of view of the disciples we must ask: who saw it? Most of them—to be precise, 75%, nine out of twelve—did not get to ascend the mountain. So if you were a disciple, the odds were rather strongly stacked against your getting to see this wonderful thing. But if you were lucky and were in that select minority that got to be there, what in the event did you see? We are told, without any explanation, that those three disciples were: asleep! Can you imagine what the others might have said, had there been conversation about it? “You woke up just as Moses and Elijah were leaving? What dunderheads you are! How could you sleep through such a thing?”
Was it easy to be a disciple of Jesus? You were not likely to get to see the amazing transfigurational stuff. And even if invited, you were likely to miss it.
And wherever you were for that, without a break everyone was back on the ground dealing with the mess of life. It is a remarkable point that Luke silently makes: immediately after the Transfiguration, the disciples’ power is found wanting. Here’s the story. It is the next day. A man approaches Jesus with a son, his only child, a boy who is periodically overcome by a spirit who makes him cry out, that tears him and bruises him before it goes away. And the man tells Jesus that, concerning this spirit, the disciples were not able to cast it out. Even as the father is speaking, the demon overtakes the boy, but Jesus, exercising power where the disciples had failed, rebukes that unclean spirit. Jesus heals the child, delivers him back to his father, and there is amazement all around.
***
Thirty years ago on this weekend, the weekend before Lent (it was an early Lent that year too), I was ordained a priest. There are a lot of ways of thinking about being a priest, many of them (I fear) not wholesome, and a lot of them superficial and romantic. I find myself moving away from thinking about the priesthood as something “other” to thinking of it as something representational. It seems to me that a priest is called to be a representative human being.
As a result I find that I think increasingly not about how I am different from you, but how I am the same. Being thus with you, I think, too, about how difficult things are.
Even on the most mundane level. It is a lousy comparison with falling asleep at the Transfiguration, but I have fallen asleep at the City Ballet. You and I, we are some of the most privileged bipeds ever to walk on this planet. We can go to some of the most beautiful things ever seen on earth—and miss it. Eliot says, “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” It happens all the time: transcendence just washes over us.
And then, down in the muck of life, I can be with a person who has epilepsy, say, or some other human problem—difficulty with children or drugs, poverty, or whatever—and I just feel helpless. I reproach myself with the thought that I really ought to be able to do some good here, to make things better. The problems are vast and great, and one feels helpless, that there is nothing one can do.
There’s the good stuff, and we sleep through it, and there’s the bad stuff, and we can’t fix it. It is hard for us, just like it was for those disciples of Jesus.
***
Last week I was with some young adults and we were looking at this gospel passage. We all agreed that there is something in it even more difficult than anything I’ve yet mentioned. It’s when Jesus, down from the mountain, says, “O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you, and suffer you?” Even worse than the awareness that we missed the good stuff and we are unable to change the bad stuff, even worse is to hear Jesus frustrated and unhappy with us. He calls everyone there—the whole “generation”—“faithless and perverse.” And then it gets gut-wrenchingly scary, when Jesus asks how long he will have to “suffer”—put up with—us.
Is it hard for Jesus to be with us? Of course it was hard for him to endure crucifixion, but was it hard for him day to day, hard for him to put up with disciples who were slow and sleepy and weak? Was it hard for him, day after day after day, to confront the human mess of sickness and cruelty, self-absorption and indifference? Is it possible that Jesus sometimes thought, as you may have thought, when the fever was at its height, when the delirium ran through every room, when it seemed that you could stand no more—did Jesus sometimes think, When will this be over?
Can Jesus have ever wanted to be rid of us?
These are questions for which I do not know the answer. All I know is what Jesus did. He did not rid himself of us. He commanded the demon to depart from the boy, which it did, and every one of us was amazed. Amazed enough, that many of us kept following him. Where was he going? Down from the mountain of Transfiguration, he walked forth to his exodus, his departure. It is a road that more and more people follow every year. I’m not saying it’s an easy road; in fact, I’m with you, I know it’s hard. We fall asleep and miss the good things, and we ever feel that we cannot change the bad things. It’s ordinary, in no way spectacular, just a road, a walking, a following. But walk that road to its end and you come upon a cross and an empty tomb. On that cross hung, and out from that tomb arose, our true representative. In fact he hung there; in fact he rose from there. Was it easy for him or hard? It does not matter. What matters is, he did it.
