Trudy and I needed a new everything table. You know, the one we all have for dining, games, projects, homework, whatever might require a large, flat surface. An everything table! It also couldn’t take up a huge amount of space in our small Brooklyn apartment. After much searching, we discovered the Transformer Table, a modern take on our parent’s old dining sets.
You remember the type: pull from both ends and the table opens, revealing rails to which extensions can be added. Our table works the same way, only it closes down to about 2’ deep to sit against a wall and opens to accommodate a dozen.
I like the idea of a table that is always opening to make room for more seats, more dinnertime conversation.
Exercise: Take a moment and think about who might be sitting around your expanding table.
I imagine an ever-expanding table is the sort of table Jesus expects his followers to set. It’s certainly the example he sets, especially at his last Passover meal with his friends and students. With his family.
Shortly before that last supper, though, Jesus takes Peter, John and James to a mountain, ostensibly to pray. I believe Jesus’ real mission, however, was to jolt them into a new understanding of reality that would allow them to see and act the way Jesus does. Out of time, Jesus is trying to supercharge someone into his advanced state of being.
According to Luke, it doesn’t work:
28 About eight days after Jesus said this, he took Peter, John and James with him and went up onto a mountain to pray. 29 As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning. 30 Two men, Moses and Elijah, appeared in glorious splendor, talking with Jesus. 31 They spoke about his departure, which he was about to bring to fulfillment at Jerusalem. 32 Peter and his companions were very sleepy, but when they became fully awake, they saw his glory and the two men standing with him. 33 As the men were leaving Jesus, Peter said to him, “Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us put up three shelters — one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah.” (He did not know what he was saying.)
Luke 9.28–33 (NIV)
By the time this important scene takes place, Jesus knew his inevitable end was near. Chased back to Jerusalem by religious and political authorities, each with their own reasons to stop his movement, he decides to make one final, grand gesture: Reveal his God nature to Peter, John, and James, and fervently pray at least one of them understands this is about their transfiguration, too.
One of the numerous meanings of this passage — the Jewish, mystical meaning I think Jesus is always speaking from — is about expanding human consciousness. Not merely for our own aggrandizement, but especially for the evolution of humankind into beings who invite one another over to the ever-expanding table. Beings like Moses, Elijah, and Jesus.
Pay attention to verse 32: but when they became fully awake, they saw [Jesus’] glory and the two men standing with him. For a moment, anyway, the disciples wake up — their consciousness expands and they glimpse the Realm of God, the alternate reality that Jesus is always talking about creating.
Awakening requires blending sometimes contradictory religious ideas into a welcoming whole.
It’s an idea known as syncretism, and the orthodoxy wants us to believe it’s a very, very bad thing to “pick and choose” ideas from different religions. But that is a control mechanism meant to keep people involved in a particular church by scaring the hell into them. People who say theirs is the only truth are liars. All the time.
The truth is, we must learn tolerance — what John Locke called the greatest of all Christian attributes. That’s why the expanding table is so important. Without it, we get locked into our own little spaces. We stop growing and, if left to fester without any new input, we begin to think we’re the only ones that know the truth. We even lie to ourselves.
A Jew of the era hearing or reading about the Transfiguration would have immediately understood Luke’s syncretic analogies: Moses represents the Law, Elijah the Prophets, and Jesus is the one who ties it all together. The transfiguration mountaintop experience represents the entirety of Scripture for Jesus and his Jewish people, and he’s asking them to make room for even more. For new ideas and different people. Jesus asks them — asks us — to expand the table.
Most hearers of the era also understood the thinly veiled reference to the Sadducees and Pharisees. As the Temple leadership, the Sadducees spent the majority of their time studying the Law. The Pharisees considered themselves the most orthodox of Jews and preferred the Prophets and their own alternative interpretation of Law and moral conduct, the Mishnah.
Jesus envisions a much more inclusive Judaism, one with an infinitely expanding table the size of the universe, and it includes everything Moses, Elijah, Jesus, and everyone in between teaches.
For me, the transfiguration is one of the most profound of any account and the most crucial teaching of Jesus’s ministry: Open your minds. Expand your consciousness. Learn from each other. Transform.
The Divine manifestation cannot be confined to any single religious ideology, or any one chain of thought even within a single religion. That’s why, when Peter asks about building individual shelters for each prophet, Luke writes Peter doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Because he doesn’t! Peter is still caught in old-way thinking. The prophets belong here, the Law there, Jesus over there. We still tend to segregate our spiritual philosophies into little cubbyholes the way Peter wanted to build separate shelters. I think the transfiguration scene is, in part, Luke’s response to that dangerous idea.
Today, as people with access to all the world’s great religious philosophies, our tables might include Jesus, Moses, Elijah, Mohammed, Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Baháʼu’lláh, indigenous medicine women, and hundreds, if not thousands of others. I know that given the opportunity, I’d invite every great spiritual mind of the last 10,000 years over to my table to break bread and chat. What life-changing, reality-shifting things we might learn by listening to all the great spiritual manifestations of God from throughout history, instead of trying to compartmentalize them in their own, restrictive shelters.
Amen.
Question: Which of your spiritual concepts might be too sheltered?
