“Jesus took Peter, James, and his brother, John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them… and his clothes became white as light”
The heroes of ancient days made themselves gods; Sumer’s god-king Gilgamesh, Iran’s god-king Mazda, Egypt’s god-king Pharaoh. Ancient Israel’s deity says to their god-king Moses, “See! I have made you a god to Pharaoh.” All were War Lords arrayed in the shining armor of divine glory. Did they reveal their humanity to us? Or did they and their hagiographers invent a divinity for us? What is the intent of the hagiographers of Jesus of Nazareth? Do they too invent a divinity for Jesus and in so doing negate a revelation of humanity? Is Jesus named Christ to reveal one single physical body as Divine? Or is Christ meant to reveal every single physical body as Divine? Is our physical human body revealed as Divine in the nakedness of pornography, strip clubs, trafficking? It is not revealed as Divine in the nakedness of war; its decapitations, dismemberments, destructions. Seventy eight years ago today, the Second World War was closing in carnage with the bombing of Hiroshima, followed on August 9th with the bombing of Nagasaki. Tens of thousands of people were incinerated and tens of thousands of people had their clothing burned into their nakedness. Their skin hemorrhaged blood, their throats swelled, inflamed, their mouths vomited and their bowels erupted as they deteriorated into death. The god-kings, Hitler and Stalin and Truman and so many other politicians; the warriors Speer and Zavenyagin and Groves and so many other soldiers; the physicists Heisenberg and Kurchatov and Oppenheimer and so many other scientists had raced humanity into a grotesque abyss. War Lords and war criminals, one and all, each reveled in the control they commanded, the praise they received, and the shining armor of divine glory in which they were arrayed. In time, only Oppenheimer spoke and lived the naked truth that he had blood on his hands from the suffering inflicted on hundreds of thousands of human bodies. As an ally of the military and its burgeoning bombs, Oppenheimer was granted control, praise, glory. As a challenger of the military and its burgeoning bombs, he naively believed he could limit them using that same control, praise, and glory, but he was stripped and branded a traitor. In Oppenheimer, his opponents are portrayed as using his sex life, which harmed his wife and denigrated him. It makes sense that Militarism’s challengers are made to feel naked and ashamed for love and sex by men clothed in suits of slaughter and warfare who are unashamed of their hostility and violence, which harms everyone and denigrates all humanity. Oppenheimer is intrigued by Hinduism’s Bhagavad Gita which is set in the misery of war and glorifies it. Its death dealing is more than one line whose translation is contended, “Now I become Death. The Destroyer of Worlds.” In all the depravity that is war, glorified in too many texts over too many thousands of years, and enacted by too many War Lords in too many horrific violences – to the point of their willingness to chance annihilation – amidst all this, Hindu patriarchs protest that one line from their war book because it is portrayed in a movie as spoken during lovemaking. War Lords and their naked lust for enemies make dirty our naked vulnerability in sex and make foul our naked humility in love at the same time they revel in their perverting our human nakedness into skulls and crossbones. Transfiguration out of Militarism’s deadly degradation includes witnessing the sacredness of our vulnerable lovemaking with enemies and our fully exposed desire for peacemaking.
“The inmost self is naked. Nakedness is not socially acceptable except in certain crude forms which can be commercialized without any effort of imagination… Curiously, this cult of bodily nakedness is a veil and a distraction… It makes money. Spiritual Nakedness, on the other hand, is far too stark to be useful… (it is) the point where you become free.” (Love and Living – Thomas Merton)
Prayer: Beautiful Spirit, we ask forgiveness for our warmaking.
Question: How am I helping to end the perversion that is war?
August 06, 2023 Gospel Matthew 17:1-9 The Transfiguration