Listening

Jesus took Peter, James, and his brother, John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him. . . While he was speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them, then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” (Matthew 17.1-3,5)

A very good friend of mine loved mountains. Although he was raised in Texas, where, for the most part, everything is flat, he was drawn to mountains late in life, particularly the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. He routinely traveled there, eventually bought a postage stamp-size parcel of ground atop a mountain, and found contentment in his cabin on the mountain.

He explained it in simple terms, telling me that he felt closest to God in that space, not down below, a peacefulness coming into his spirit when he was on his mountain that he could find nowhere else. His restless soul–and all our souls are restless until they rest in God, as Augustine said–calmed and quieted itself on the mountain, as the sounds of a nearby stream, the sights of the blue sky above, and the songs of the birds in the high trees surrounded him, embracing him like a mother would a child.

It came as no surprise, then, that when he died he chose to be buried on the mountaintop, not in a graveyard that didn’t have a mountain in sight for hundreds of miles, although it did have some majestic old oak trees scattered across the flat ground. He knew he would rest in peace if he awaited Judgment Day on the mountain, something he wasn’t so sure of if he awaited the Second Coming in a ten-acre graveyard on the edge of town.

Probably unknown to him, what he experienced on the mountaintop was an experience as old as humankind. For some reason, mountains have always spoken a special language to earth-bound humans, a language without words, but filled with the chimes of creation and the echoes of eternity, a celestial language because it is there, on a mountain that heaven touches earth. 

And in that meeting place, as all ancient peoples understood, the Most High God speaks into the restless souls of his creatures, his heavenly voice found in the sounds of silence and in the voice of the wind as it sweeps through the trees, rustling leaves and shaking limbs. Ancients always believed that a person could hear God on a mountain with crystal clear clarity, unlike down below where the busyness of civilization drowned out the Divine voice.

So, the Lakota Sioux considered the Black Hills a sacred spot, desecrated as they saw it by engraving presidential faces on its granite walls, just as the ancient Hebrews believed Mount Sinai to be steeped in divinity. After all, Moses spoke to the Most High God atop Mount Sinai and Elijah the prophet heard the same Divine voice in the whisper of the wind as he sat in a cave on the mountaintop. If you want to hear what God has to say,, according to human history, you better go to a mountain.

It makes perfect sense, then, that Rabbi Jesus should find himself atop a mountain a short while before his persecution and crucifixion in Jerusalem. Scholars, who generally delve into minutiae, aren’t sure which mountain he climbed–Mount Tabor, Mount Hermon, or Mount Meron–but ordinary folks such as you and me are probably content with what the evangelist Matthew says in today’s selection from Scripture when he simply states, “Jesus took with him Peter, James, and John his brother, and brought them up into a high mountain by themselves.” We don’t need to know how many feet it stood.

Matthew, writing for fellow Jews, is continuously weaving a narrative of Rabbi Jesus as the new Moses, so the mountaintop experience that he narrates for us bears close similarity to the one that Moses knew on Mount Sinai. Just as Moses’s face shone brightly after his encounter with God, so Rabbi Jesus’ face shone like the sun. Likewise, just as God speaks from a cloud to Moses, he speaks from a cloud to Rabbi Jesus. And, in the same way that God instructs the Hebrews that “you shall listen to him,” referring to his spokesperson Moses, so here God says to the three disciples, “Listen to him,” referring, of course, to Rabbi Jesus.

Theophanies are always difficult to explain. We have neither the vocabulary nor the vision to describe a manifestation of God to mere humans. Oftentimes, those who have such an experience are left mute, as was Zechariah in the Temple of Jerusalem, which, not coincidentally, was also built atop a mountain. In the passage we have heard, the evangelist attempts to describe for us the occurrence on the high mountain, using vivid imagery to relay the impenetrableness and the inexplicableness of the experience, as we all do when we attempt to explain the unexplainable.

One thing is clear. Something happened on the high mountain and those who experienced it believed themselves to have been in the presence of the Most High God. Enough said. So what are we to make of it? Among other things, Matthew seems to want to draw our attention to the words that the voice from the cloud says as the experience ends. He writes, “A bright cloud overshadowed them. Behold, a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.’”

Everything up to that point has been bells and whistles. The thing Matthew that wants us to take from the mountaintop experience is found in three words–listen to him. Already at Rabbi Jesus’ baptism, the voice has announced, “This is my beloved Son.” So, we already know who he is. He is the beloved Son. Now, on the mountain, the Most High God tells us what we are to do. We are to listen to his beloved Son.

Of course, it is not coincidental, at least in my mind, that the most important prayer in the Hebrew religion is the Shema, which begins with the words, “Hear, O Israel,” those words taken from several texts in the Hebrew scriptures in which Moses relays to the slaves the words that the Most High God has spoken to him on the mountain.

Now, Matthew makes the same point, the Most High God telling the disciples that they are to listen, to hear what Rabbi Jesus tells them because he is the beloved Son who speaks on behalf of and for the Lord God. He is the human voice of the Divine God. His words come from the heart of God, directing us on our way, guiding us in the darkness, bringing us to the everlasting light.

This, then, is the first and foremost responsibility of the disciple, the one who wants to follow the path of Rabbi Jesus. We are to listen to him. Nothing precedes it and everything follows from it. It is impossible to be a follower of the beloved Son if we do not listen to him. Only after we have listened to him can we live like him and love like he did. We become informed and formed by listening to him.

The opposite also is true. If we do not listen to him, then we cannot be his followers. The reason is simple. Failing to listen to him, we do not know his words that would guide us on his path and mold us into his likeness. If we do not listen, we are like an airplane pilot that attempts to fly a plane without the benefit of his instrument panel. 

It is for this same reason that Benedict of Nursia, the founder of Western monasticism, begins his “regula” or Rule for his monks with the word, “Listen.” He understood, as any adherent to the ways of Rabbi Jesus, that listening is the first door that we must open if we are to follow in the footsteps of the beloved Son. 

Beautifully expressing this same belief, Benedict writes, “Listen, carefully, my child, to your master’s precepts, and incline the ear of your heart. Receive willingly and carry out effectively your father’s advice, that by the labor of obedience you may return to him from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience.” 

The mountaintop experience of Rabbi Jesus reminded his followers who he was–the beloved Son–and called them to be who they were–listeners. If they abided by the command from the voice in the cloud and listened to the words of Rabbi Jesus, following them faithfully, then they would become his disciples. Should they fail to listen, then they would never become real followers, only counterfeits.

So, looked at from this way, the mountaintop experience of Rabbi Jesus may say less about him and more about us. While it reiterates his identity as the beloved Son, it also puts front and center our own identity as his followers. If done rightly, we listen to him, with multiple levels of meaning to our listening, eventually coalescing into a way of life that puts into practice the words of the beloved Son, our lives an ever-flowing source of generosity, goodness, and good will towards all others.

That same light that shone around the beloved Son on the mountaintop flickers within our hearts, put there by the Most High God who also calls us his sons and his daughters. If the flicker is to become the flame of God’s love, then we have to listen to his beloved Son who calls us by his words and by his way of life to truly live as sons and daughters of the Lord God who dwells in the high heavens and descends to the mountaintop to speak to us.

Frozen in place, frightened by the inexplicableness of the experience before them, the disciples gazed upon the radiant light on the face of their Teacher and they saw who he was in the interior core of his heart. He was the beloved Son. More importantly, as they heard the voice in the cloud address them, they also saw who they were to become. They were to become faithful followers of the beloved Son.

To do so, they would have to listen. And in the process of a lifetime of listening, they would gradually become who they also were called to be. That step-by-step, day-by-day listening, done faithfully and practically, would slowly bring about their own transfiguration, moving them from potentiality to actuality, from caterpillars to butterflies, from hardened hearts to hearts of flesh.

Today, then, the experience on the mountaintop would ask us to check our hearing. How well are we, in fact, listening to the beloved Son? And if we are not listening well, why aren’t we? It was with good cause that Rabbi Jesus, on more than one occasion, said to his followers, “Blessed are those who have eyes that see and have ears that hear.” The story of the Transfiguration is simply telling us the same thing in another way.

–Jeremy Myers