Upon God's Holy Mountain

Our approach to Scripture if often "text-oriented." That is, we focus on individual words to open up the hidden roads from passage to passage. But St. Luke, our proto-icon-painter, departs from the other Evangelists conspicuously conceiving these holy events in term of images revealing divine mysteries.

Now, this is not news to our readers. We have been exploring this aspect of Luke's art for the past ten years: his two, companion icons (a dyptich) of Gabriel's divine visitation to Zacharias and then to Mary; his depiction of Pentecost as an "operatic" stage set featuring a locked upper room opening out onto a many-peopled Jerusalem — sweeping, grand spectacle; his other "arias," assigned to Mary (the "Magnificat,"), to Zacharias (the "Benedictus"), and to Simeon (the "Nunc Dimittis"), anticipating grand opera by more than a thousand years.

Last week, we were again ushered into the holy precincits of his expansive art, taking in another dyptich: the Sermon on the Mount hinged to its companion icon, the fiery summit of Mount Sinai. St. Luke actually depicted only the former. The latter he implied. But the contrast between them was the mystery he sought to unlock. It was the contrast which absorbed him. The work could well have been titled "God upon His Holy Mountain" — a bold contrast between the God-Who-Is, Who-Is-with-Us, and the distant, forbidding figure worshipped in the Jerusalem Temple.

St. Luke has recorded these great and divine works of art, but, of course, the great Master Who painted them is our Lord and God, Jesus. The depths of His art are manifold and complex. The God revealed by Moses is indeed unapproachable, but the Laws Jesus gives from the Mount are not less rigorous but rather more so: prohibitions not merely on murder but even on anger, not merely on adultery but even on lust or sexual fantasy, not merely on giving false witness but even on giving any oath. We are to love our enemies and do good to those who mean us harm. The point of the two-paneled icon is, God does not seek merely slavish rule-followers. He seeks friends (Jn 15:15). He wants our hearts to be transformed that we might enter into true fellowship with Him. His goal is nothing less than we should become His adopted children.

The image of the mountain is crucial if we are to understand the next chapter in Luke's Gospel, as we find the Lord roaming about Galilee doing what we might call "the works of the Holy Mountain": — healing incurable diseases, raising the dead, and announcing the good news.

When John the Baptist heard of it, he sent two of his disciples to ask the Lord what these marvels might mean. And Jesus replies quoting from the Book of Isaiah, holding ever in mind "the works of the Holy Mountain":

When the messengers departed, Jesus then turns to the multitude and continues in the same text, Isaiah:

We know this way, it is the Highway of Holiness described in Isaiah. What the multitude, in fact, beholds are the miraculous works of Isaiah coming to pass before their very eyes:

At this pointm a funeral procession passes by: the only son of a widow has died. The Lord has compassion on her and touches the funeral bier and speaks to the dead son, we might say under these circumstances, with the Divine breath:

With these words Jesus annuls the claims of death. What we have just witnessed is nothing less than the Lord's victory over death. That is, we have beheld the highest trajectory of God's actions possible on earth. Let us return to the Book of Isaiah:

Now, what is the surface of the covering which no one can escape? What is the rebuke suffered by all people? What is this veil spread over all nations? What is the universal cause for tears upon every face? And what is it that only God can take away from the earth? It is death. Only God could be victor over death .... upon this mountain.

The scene of these marvels, Nain, is positioned on the northern slope of Mt. Moreh. This name means where the Teacher, or Prophet, would pronounce his oracles, that is, the place where God speaks. This is also a place where God demonstrates compassion on a scale which only God could express. Yes, death represents an extreme of human suffering. But the most poignant death of all in the first-century Levant was the death of an only son borne by a widow. For these circumstances — no husband to care for her, to provide for her, to protect her .... and no sons to take her husband's place — such a person quickly became the face of the blasted and the lost, vulnerable and begging on street corners. In like proportion to this tragedy, which St. Luke takes pains to emphasize — "the only son of his mother; and she was a widow" — He has restored not only life, but the whole web of life for this family, with now the restored promise of a wife and children for this "young man," another detail St. Luke is careful to include.

In the words of Isaiah, in His Holy Mountain, "God will swallow up death forever, / And the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces." As the people of Nain rightly declare,

And we might say with them,

Now, the books that played a leading role in the life of the Second Temple were the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah, preeminently, which are the books of the Persian governor and his scribe; the Books of Esther and Daniel, describing life in Babylon; Chronicles, a second writing of the Moses story; Malachi, which reveals the influence of Ezra; Haggai, a Second Temple foundation text; and Zechariah, another work lending Divine endorsement of the Persian agenda, which was the building of the Second Temple and the building up of their cult. Jesus never cites these books nor quotes from them.

By contrast, the work that is manifestly the most cherished among the Essenes, a group that repudiated the Second Temple, was Isaiah. It is through their care in preserving it that we have the Great Isaiah Scroll today, which is the only complete copy of Isaiah we possess from the first century. It is the only scroll among the Dead Sea Scrolls (which the Essenes left behind) to be preserved in its entirety. And, of course, it is the only text which Jesus chooses over and over again to reveal His Divine Identity: saying in another chapter of Luke's Gospel (upon reading from Isaiah),

Luke has been more than bold in these chapters. Or I should say he has been courageously faithful to the God Who speaks plainly. Holding aloft our Gospel lesson this morning, we might say with one voice with the people of Nain, "God has visited His people!"

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost.