"The Body and the Life Everlasting"

Three Forerunners: Moses, Elijah, and St. John the Baptist. Here in the broadest pattern are set out the great stages of salvation.

The beginning is Eden, where the term history has no meaning. For here is a luminous now of continual creative and generative action — things coming into being in perfection and harmony with one another. No better, no worse. No last year, no next year. No yesterday, no tomorrow. Like Heaven, a brilliant now of beauty-in-being which never fades .... so long as Eden's denizens embrace God's holy ways.

It is the fall from grace when history's clock first sounds its unstoppable ticks: when good always worsens, when all things living are doomed to follow an inexorable path toward withering death and hideous finitude. With the fall, history begins, and the goal of history (indeed of all human lives) which is always to regain what was lost, union with God, begins. And now our Three Forerunners come into view.

Next month (September 4 on the Holy Calendar), we celebrate the Feast of Moses the God-seer, the pinnacle of human wisdom. Today, we celebrate the Feast of the Glorious Holy Prophet, Elijah. (Feast days including John the Baptist seem never to be far from us.) So, first the Law, then the Prophets, and finally St. John Baptist, whose vocation it was to announce the fulfillment of these first two stages of history and the approach of the Advent of God into the human lifeworld. At his birth John points backward, being the greatest of prophets (Mt 11:11, Lu 7:28). And he points forward to the One in Whom human history will be fulfilled.

He was the man of Eden, the natural man who ate manna in the wilderness, whose fragrance of purity drew all men to him and caused a revolution of godliness in Palestine, a yearning to return to the Garden and place of harmony with God. The Apostle Peter deemed it a second Noah's Flood ... the baptism of John.

In the world East of Eden before the Flood, man was left to his conscience chastened by the penalties of Adam and Eve. God's moral laws had been written on the fleshly tablets of his heart (Rom 2:15). But this was not enough to lead man back to God, and the great experiment of love-in-freedom was ended with "many waters" (to borrow Madeleine L'Engle's phrase).

Perhaps no theme rings so frequently and joyfully through the Psalms as thanksgiving for God's Law:

Do you see how we need this third party. So many of us will say, "My sins are between me and God" (a sentence that gives itself away by putting God second). Unfortunately, we prevaricate, rationalize, justify ... we lie to ourselves: "You see it was just a little adultery. It was just a little theft. It wasn't so great a crime." This morning in our Epistle lesson, we read,

The prophet who loomed largest in the imagination of Israel in the first century was Elijah, whose feast we celebrate today.

The ultimate divine power shown on the earth indisputably is the raising of the dead. To raise the dead?! To suspend the laws of biology and physics?! To turn back the greatest and most menacing power confronting humankind?! Who will raise the dead?! Before the birth of Jesus, Elijah stands alone in wielding this power .... and Elisha upon whom Elijah set his mantle, granting a double-portion of his spirit (2 Kings 2:9). The Holy Archangel Gabriel speaks of Elijah's power, which alone can wake the world from its perilous torpor:

All that has gone before rises to a peak on the Mount of Transfiguration. In the days preceding this most extraordinary event, Jesus had asked His Disciples, "Who do you say that I Am?" They replied, "Some say Elijah" (who is to precede the Christ), but Peter in a moment of divine clarity says, "You are the Christ." Soon after, all debate ends as they trek up Mount Hermon, which is nearly two miles above sea level at its summit.

Half-way to Heaven, you might say, the Disciples are led far above the world, into an otherworldly experience. There would have been snow all around. Jesus Himself changes as if covered with crystalline hoarfrost. Peter is overwhelmed wishing to build booths (like the ones carved into the mountainside at Pan's Grotto where Jesus had seated them a few days earlier). Any shelter would have seemed right in this cold and forbidding place! And the booths would be to honor ones whom Peter deemed gods: Moses, Elijah, and the Son of God. Soon Father God's own voice is heard, attesting the Divine Identity of His Son. Here, surely, is the Olympus .... nay, the Mt. Sinai of Prophets. On God's one hand, the Law (Moses) and, on the other, the Prophets (Elijah) ... and, in a sense, John the Baptist, who has vanished saying to Jesus, "You must increase, and I must decrease (Jn 3:30)." Moses, Elijah, Jesus of Nazareth.

Yes, the Son of God meets with two of the forerunners who had prepared a way for Him in the wilderness, beginning in the wilderness at Mt. Sinai's base. But there is something else here that few if any have noticed. Moses and Elijah are the two who were assumed directly into Heaven. Elijah's assumption is depicted vividly in 2 Kings:

The Cave of Machpelah, the Tomb of the Patriarchs — of Abraham and Sarah, of Isaac and Rebecca, of Jacob and Leah — located in Hebron is accounted to be the second holiest site in the Jewish world after Mount Zion itself. Surely, if Moses had had a grave, it would have been accorded at least equal honor. But there is no grave, for as commentaries preceding New Testament times tell us, Moses was assumed directly into Heaven. This is the point of Jude 9, where St. Michael the Archangel debates with Satan concerning the body of Moses. Not his dead body. The subtext is whether a human body, any human body, might be holy enough to enter Heaven.

Finally we ascend to the overarching meaning of the Transfiguration of the Lord Jesus, and the meaning of the figures of Moses and Elijah in this scene. All of these things are about one thing: the dignity of the human body and its place in God's Heaven. Meeting Elijah and Moses is the One Whose life must irresistibly change everything as His Incarnation touching the earth changed everything, flipping the telos, or blueprint, within each man and woman from a destiny of death to one of life. For with Jesus, fully God, becoming fully man, the nature of God is touched with human nature, or φυ'σις (physis), as we would say in Greek.

Jesus, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, is fully man. God's own nature is touched by human nature. Does Jesus cease to be human after His mighty resurrection and glorious ascension?! Of course not. This is the point of His breaking bread and eating with His Disciples, of Thomas being invited to put his fingers into the wounds upon Jesus' hands and side. It is His Body on which our meditations must focus. The body is to be glorified and resurrected and received into Heaven. Astonishing! The fleshly man becoming divine in a new and redeemed form we cannot imagine:

When we behold Elijah alighting into Heaven in a chariot of fire, we are meant to see the apotheosis of our own nature and bodies, our holy bodies, over which we stand guard. No wonder that the Apostles on Mt. Hermon, who saw the Transfiguration of Jesus with their own eyes meeting with Moses and Elijah were able to say with all their hearts,