+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Genres go in and out of fashion across all media. When, after all, was the last really popular Western film, or glam metal album, or didactic novel? My guess is the answer to each of those is Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven in 1992, The Darkness’ Permission to Land in 2003, and Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World in 1991. Give me a moment to sit with my nostalgia for the popular culture of the 1990s and early 2000s, which is sadly increasingly the measure by which we “geriatric millennials” judge the world as it is.
Perhaps the genre which has fallen on the hardest of times, though, is what is called the “Gospel harmony.” More-and-less successful attempts at taking the four Gospels and blending them together to present a single, cohesive narrative have been undertaken since very early in the church’s life. The first was probably Tatian’s Diatesseron in the middle of the Second Century A.D., and the genre flourished in the Reformation Era. Modern approaches have been more experimental, and my favorite (which you may have noticed if you’ve paid especially close attention to the bulletin cover art I choose) is James Tissot’s harmony by way not of text but illustration.
In all events, this approach fell very much out of favor with the rise of the historical-critical method. Instead of harmonies we now see synopses, in which the text of each Gospel is placed side-by-side for the the sake of comparing and contrasting them. The question, really, seems to be whether the four Gospels speak with one voice or with four or more. I think that’s a misleading question, though.
Personally (and take this as Fr. John’s perspective, not necessarily as “Gospel truth”), I think the best answer to that question is this—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John speak with one voice from four perspectives. They’re all equally inspired in the proper sense, all equally imbued with ultimate truth from the same spirit who is the Holy Ghost. Yet each retains a perspective on the events given how each writer received the message, whether by being present in the moment, recording eye-witness reports from others, or by given supernatural insight (I believe all three of those modes are active at various points). I am not, and probably will never be, convinced that there are outright contradictions to be found across the Gospel accounts, meaning that I think they could at least theoretically be “harmonized”, but those points at which the narratives depart from each other can teach us something, too, so long as we’re reading faithfully, appreciating the Canon of Scripture as a whole to be authoritative, and ask with some intellectual humility why, for example, Mark and Luke include something which Matthew does not.
And now I’ll finally get to the point for which all of that is meant to serve as a sort of hermeneutical foundation. There is a clause present in the accounts which Mark and Luke give of the Transfiguration which is absent from the version we just heard from Matthew. After Jesus is transformed into a luminous figure before his eyes and joined by those who stand for the Law and the Prophets, but before the voice of the Father comes to affirm Christ’s status as Son of God and Messiah, Peter exclaims “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Eli’jah.” In Mark and Luke there is then an aside. Luke adds “not knowing what he said.” Mark goes further, imputing a motive; Peter didn’t know what to say because he was afraid.
Some would claim that Luke and then Matthew are here cleaning things up to make Peter seem less like a craven dope. I don’t buy that, largely because they don’t seem interested in retroactively rehabilitating Peter elsewhere, but also because I don’t buy the claim that Mark is the earliest Gospel and Matthew and Luke are using it as a source and editing it; that was the standard assumption among historical biblical critics until fairly recently, but it’s been increasingly questioned in recent decades. (Pro-tip: you can tell when a biblical scholar stopped keeping current by how strongly he or she insists that Mark must have come first.) I tend to think that Mark gives the fullest account, including the embarrassing slip and the motive behind it, because Mark was told the story by Peter himself. This is the ancient, traditional view, and it’s more-and-more acceptable among scholars who are open to questioning nineteenth century assumptions. So perhaps Luke couldn’t be certain of Peter’s having been motivated by fear (who can peer into anyone else’s soul, after all) and Matthew was uncomfortable even saying for certain whether or not Peter said it in ignorance. Maybe Matthew assumed something that we, too, should consider. Maybe Peter said the right thing, it was just the wrong time and the wrong place.
To show that even my own stubbornly held interpretive assumptions can be changed, I know I’ve preached sermons in the past on this text that amounted to the following: it’s nice to abide in the glory of God for times of spiritual refreshment, but you’ve eventually got to go down the mountain and start walking the way of the cross. Now, there’s some truth to this, unless you’re a cloistered monk or nun, whose whole job is to stay in the booth with Jesus and Moses and Elijah; that is a gift and a valid vocation, which is not mine and probably not yours. That said, the polar opposite approach can easily lapse into works-righteousness, into the deadly idea that each of us needs to go get crucified as if the one sacrifice weren’t enough, and into the historically disastrous belief that we can build the Kingdom of God ourselves so long as we’re good enough. Maybe the occasion for building booths and simply abiding with Jesus are more frequent than I’ve suggested in the past. Maybe, instead of descending the Mount of Transfiguration today to enter into “the hard work of Lent” ™, what some or most of us will commence on Wednesday is more like dwelling in booths on the mountaintop with our Lord for forty days. Jesus and the disciples didn’t have that luxury that time, but maybe poor Peter would be right if he said it today.
When I was in college I took a course from a man named Harvey Sindima. He was a pretty severe, almost puritanical minister and theologian from Malawi, where, I gather, Presbyterians had not started feigning ignorance of the man when you brought up John Calvin. He literally failed every student’s first assignment every class every year, probably to motivate us to work harder and to remind us that we were totally depraved. I hated the man at first, and then I came to love him.
Professor Sindima knew that I was considering seminary and ordination and we had a long talk once about this. He asked me all sorts of questions about why I wanted to do this, why I though I should be allowed to, who did I think I was, that sort of thing. And I gave all those answers that callow youths discerning a vocation typically give, which mostly amounted to “I want to be nice and help people.” “No. no. no.” seemed his continual refrain. Finally, he said those words which I believe God gave him, just as he had the Psalmist:
One thing have I desired of the Lord,
which I will require:
even that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life,
to behold the fair beauty of the Lord,
and to visit his temple.
In that moment I realized the nature of my vocation. And now I am convinced that this is not only the priestly vocation, it is the Christian vocation.
This doesn’t mean that we’re quietists. It doesn’t mean that we’re not called to do external work which God enables by doing the internal work in our souls. We strive for justice. We preach the Gospel to the nations. Sometimes we take up our cross in order to follow. But also dwell on a mountaintop with the Lord. We also behold the beauty of his courts. We also retreat into that quiet place in our souls where Jesus has taken up residence, that we might relate to him as the very joy of our hearts. If you’re still looking for a Lenten discipline, maybe this year you can build a booth, not three maybe, but one, where with Moses and Elijah you can adore the one who is the Law and the Prophets in the flesh, who is our priest and our king.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.