Transformed, Part One

Two men went up to the Temple. But what exactly was the Temple? Was it analogous to a cathedral of today, which would signify a sharp division between Imperium and Ecclesia, between the City of Man and the City of God.

It was built by Persians to be the principal administrative building of their province, Yehud. Under the Romans, Judea was as diverse and conflicted as the varied people living in it. It had been a semi-autonomous vassal state until about 6 A.D., when it fell under direct rule as a Roman province following the general outcry of Judeans because they wanted to become Roman. In 37 A.D. a statue of the Roman emperor was placed in the Temple. This was a general trend, for the people longed for Roman identity.

The Temple collected its taxes. The Judean supreme court met there. A Temple constabulary was maintained. These were civil, administrative functions of the province. It kept alive its centralized control of Judea compelling people to pilgrimage to Jerusalem three times a year for the feasts of Sukkot, Shavuot, and Pesach, the Babylonian word for Passover. (Our word Pascha is a transliteration of Pesach.) And it was the place where sacrifice was carried out, which was a civil as much as it was a religious custom, required from the start by the Emperor Cyrus the Great at the founding of the Temple. For this Temple would be no "second" Solomon's Temple as much as it would be a projection of Babylonian-Persian power into the Levant.

Two men went to to the Temple representing the two predominating religions of first-century Judah: Judah-ism, the hybrid religion of Babylon-Persia, and Roman-ism, whether expressed as secularism or paganism. Both were civil religions. The Jews saw Cyrus the Great as the anointed of God and worshiped the laws he vouchsafed for them. Meantime, the Romans worshiped their emperor, and certain members of the imperial household, as gods.

You recall that Jesus took the disciples to Banaeus at Caesarea-Philippi and sat by the Jordan's springs where He asked them "Who do say that I Am?" They would have been looking out at the Grotto of Pan and the enormous temple to Augustus Caesar next to it.

In one sense, the Pharisee and the Publican are contrasting images. That's what we would have learned at Sunday School. One is proud, and the other is humble. You must not exalt yourself. You must be humble.

Nonetheless, they are a matched pair separated from the Divine by delusion and fantasy. And let us not forget, they come to our attention as characters in a story told by the Son of God.

The Pharisee cannot take his eyes off a mirror of flattering images — not a reflection of oneself in the harsh light of self-examination, but an image compiled by tallying points. "The fruits" (Mt 7:16) of this path through life, Jesus would say, are folly and vanity. You shall know them by their fruits. It is in the nature of this path that leads to folly and vanity.

The Publican has also deluded himself — that by advancing through the ranks of Roman society, he would attain something of lasting value. (Everyone wanted to be Roman!) He saw the respect accorded Roman officials, their fine clothes, their sumptuous residences, their air of cosmopolitan sophistication. (Why, they had been to Rome!) And he wanted it for himself.

But we meet him at a crisis point: the moment when the illusion has been shattered. He has broken through to the truth. And seeing himself as he really is, he is humiliated .... and humbled before God. He has nowhere to turn, so he turns to God. But because Judeans had largely torn down the religion of the Patriarchs, including the ancient Temple on Mt. Gerizim, all that remains is this temple on Mt. Zion. We might say, only the day before he was another man entirely, not every different from the Pharisee.

What has propelled these men along this path? They saw how their neighbors were doing and congratulated themselves that they were doing it better. They had set false goals for themselves, whose rightness was confirmed by general opinion. And they labored on, advancing to the front of the herd (for humans are herding creatures). And when the Publican made his way to front, when he had arrived, we would say today, no longer seeing a sheep in front of him, what did he behold at long last? Vacancy.

This is a common experience among those who have achieved their material goals. They feel an emptiness. Perhaps you have been there, maybe after receiving your final promotion. And now looking out over the span of your years as well as the future ahead, you asked, "What did it all mean?"

You see, they had fallen for the devil's bargain. They had given away everything they had, even their life and soul. And in return, they received .... thin tissues of nothing. The devil's bargain, as it was in Eden and as it is today and forever. The path they chose had seemed so substantial, so full of institutional solidness, so filled with meaning. Yet, it turned out to be a dreamworld.

The Pharisee had not broken through from the illusion yet. He is still in the earlier stages of vanity, exulting in its false images, which only he can see but which is plain folly to everyone who hears Jesus' parable. (Jesus doesn't have to explain the Pharisee to anyone.) And this is the point about the Pharisee. The story is a proto-version of "The Emperor's New Clothes." The Pharisee stands before all in laughable nakedness, which everyone can plainly see .... except himself.

Yes, Jesus holds him up to ridicule, for the problem is so widespread. Fantasy is the main thing about our world. The ruler of this world (2 Cor 4:4) is the father of lies (Jn 8:44). In the twenty-first century, dietary supplements, cosmetics, a new wardrobe, plastic surgery, even a new gender promise to tear down the barriers holding us back from "the real you." Each fantasy has its own seductive music and illusory images, and all lead to grief .... and loss of life in the sense that years or decades can be wasted under their spell.

This is the lesson Jesus has set out to tell. Indeed, St. Luke presents the parable as the middle section of Jesus' three-part meditation on illusion, including the stories of Persistent Widow and the Wealthy, Young Ruler. Jesus closes the book on the problem of fantasy by convicting the Pharisee and young Sadducee (the ruler) by their own law, which had been the basis for their point-tallying. Jesus quotes the Babylonian Talmud (the central document of Pharisaic Judaism) from the section dealing with fantasy:

The following is drawn from the original:

An elephant (or camel) passing through the eye of a needle, Jesus says, is pure fantasy. Likewise, the estimate we take of ourselves by tallying points is illusion.

Both the Pharisee and the Publican are rich, but the Publican has broken through. He is broken-hearted, filled with regret, contrite. And we infer that he will now walk away from this many-colored illusion and, like Zacchaeus (who appears the beginning of the next chapter) he will get real; he will make amends, and he will give to the poor fourfold.

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If we can distill Jesus' ministry down to one word, that word, proclaimed from the beginning, inaugurating this ministry, is Metanoeite. We must be transformed .... not into someone or something else, but to our truest selves, which is our earlier selves, when we were new, closest to the God Who created us, Yes, we need to a "make over," but a "make over" to our own essential selves,

As we considered last week, we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven, until we retrieve our former hearts as children. We must retrieve childhood — before pretension, self-flattery, upward-mobility, and adulterated life took hold of us. Do you remember that heart? You paid no mind to what you wore. You did not know what social class you were in. You had no interest in smoking or drinking or drugs or sex. And you looked out on a world filled with friends. Yes, some you have yet to meet. But inevitably everyone would be a friend once you met them. This is the Kingdom of God. We are born into the Kingdom with His Image set upon us and a beautiful world set before us.

To ensure that no one misses the point, Jesus places His excursis on the heart of the child (Lu 18:15-17) directly after the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican (Lu 18:9-14) and directly before the story of Wealthy, Young Ruler (Lu 18:18-28). After that, immediately comes the story of Zacchaeus, which is the Gospel story par excellence of the recovering the heart of childhood:

Jesus had prepared the whole world to understand this message. He would have us cleansed of all wrong desires. Our baptism would wash away the filth of the world. He sent a man fragrant of the morning of the earth crying in the wilderness,

For Eden was the newness of the world. And the whole world resonated with the truth of his words. The baptism of John swept over the Levant like a second flood of Noah (1 Peter 3:20-21).

And why? Why should these words ring so true? Because we are all children of Eden. Eden is encoded in our DNA. St. Paul wrote that God's ways are written on the fleshly tablets of our hearts before they were engraved in stone (2 Corinthians 3:3). Even today the words "return to the garden" have power. We can vaguely detect that fresh scent, that morning dew, that pristine goodness. Why, just stepping into a garden like that we feel cleansed.

And what does "Eden" mean? What is the essence of the garden where man communed with God? It always and only means closeness to God, a return to the untarnished new that God first made.

Similarly, the exhortation, "Be transformed," begs the question, "Into what?" And the Forerunner replies, "Into your pure self," for what does purity mean other than closeness to the One Who alone is good (Lu 18:19), to the One in Whom are no shadows at all (James 1:17), to God in Whose clarity all illusions vanish. Indeed, what does the Incarnation of God mean if it does not mean this? God sent His Son to live as one of us, to be with us. And that is the meaning of His Name: Emmanuel.

Those who followed Jesus, were the ones who accepted His invitation into intimacy — to love Him and to love each other. By this you will be known as my disciples, He said (Jn 13:34-35). And He called them His friends — the ones for whom He would lay down His life (Jn 15:13).

Now, Jesus and the Twelve are from the historical Northern Kingdom. They are not Judeans (excepting Judas). They saw Judah and Rome as different sides of the same coin. Both represented the foreign and the false and certainly "the way of the world."

This point is made vividly following Jesus' arrest as He is shuttled back and forth between Pilate and Herod. Ultimately, there is no difference between these two.

Babylonian and Roman laws undeniably do make for well-regulated life on earth: do not kill, do not steal, do not commit adultery, do not covet your neighbor's wife, do not covet your neighbor's property, do not give false testimony against your neighbor. Collectively these laws — established by Babylon in the eighteenth century B.C. and enforced by Rome through the second century A.D. — was known as the Pax Romana. They meant peace and prosperity for two centuries throughout the empire that Rome ruled.

Jesus said they were necessary, but not sufficient, to gain Heaven. Indeed, as the path to salvation, they are a dead end. As Jesus declares on the Mount of the Beatitudes, they cannot reach unto the Kingdom of God. The glittering city of Rome will not save us. Mighty Babylon will not save us. And we vainly offer sacrifice in the Temple to achieve union with God.

What about us today? I suppose we count ourselves to be free of foreign influences. We look back and think we can detect a pure, Christian heritage. But that is a delusion. The Founding Fathers were not Christian but, in fact, were Deists as were well-educated men everywhere in the West. They did not believe in a God Who could hear their prayers.

Those who were Christian held to a faith much changed since the time of the Apostles. And we are their heirs. We hear their beliefs on the radio, on television, and in the public square. Our culture is soaked through with it. This is the first exposure nearly everyone has to American Christianity, but it is not the Christianity of the Apostles.

I will ask the favor of an intermission on this controversial point. The second half of this reflection I will offer next week on the Sunday of the Prodigal Son. But permit me to come full circle. For the Pharisee and the Publican represent the two Christianities of today.

The Pharisee believes that you can stand blamelessly before God by offering blood sacrifice. Protestants and Evangelicals (800 million people worldwide) profess this belief saying you must be "washed in the blood of the Lamb." The idea is that Jesus offered Himself as a blood sacrifice on the Cross to "pay the debt" of our sin.

Roman Catholics (more than 1 billion worldwide) also believe that Jesus' blood sacrifice is the basis for the salvation of the world. This is expressed in the phrase, Sacrifice of the Mass, which is said to reenact the sacrifice at Calvary and which is a fountain of salvation replenishing the world with its saving effects.

By contrast, the Publican is justified before God (Lu 18:14), Jesus says, on account of his transformation. The Publican's change of heart is what Jesus had envisioned from the moment He proclaimed, "Be transformed! The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!"

Two figures. Two Christianities. A religion of sacrifice and a journey in transformation. Next week, we will complete the puzzle.

In the meantime, I leave you with a burning point from the Scriptures, a concentration of intense Divine light and energy:

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.   Amen.