This week of Lent has a somewhat strange and otherworldly character. The world of Abraham is so far distant that child sacrifice was considered acceptable and not surprising. The shock for Abraham was not that he should be asked to sacrifice a child, but that this child was his only one. The child was given to him when he had lost all expectation of being able to continue his family line – which in those days was the ultimate success or failure. You lived on in your descendants, and the more the better.
By the time of Jesus expectations had changed, although being childless was still a clear sign of God’s disfavor. Like other external signs, such as leprosy, this showed you must have sinned. That’s what the Jews of this time thought the Law and the Prophets were all about – the danger of sin and how to avoid it. But Jesus takes Peter, James and John to a different world – literally. They see Jesus in his power, as the preeminent expression of God’s plan, along with Moses and Elijah (the representatives of the Law and the Prophets), in a world that is so different they don’t know what to make of it.
We don’t live in the world of Abraham – in fact if we stop to consider it, it is utterly abhorrent. Nor do we have any expectation of seeing the world as Peter, James and John were given the privilege of doing.
So what do we take from these stories? Or do we just sit in bemused stupefaction – a bit like Peter, James and John themselves. And similarly, feeling a bit confused about what “rising from the dead” might really mean?
Of course we can find many things in these stories, but perhaps the thing that links them is that they tell of direct encounters with God – sometimes this is called the numinous. We know we aren’t going to have the experiences of Abraham or the apostles. But we can experience the numinous. Our experience of the otherness of God may be in dread or in awe, in the fear of being asked to make an unimaginable sacrifice, in the awareness of something completely outside our normal experience when under extreme stress, or in less exceptional circumstances as when we are moved beyond our normal sensations by a sunset or visiting a great cathedral.
Everyone, even those with no ‘religious’ foundation, can be surprised by the numinous. I’m not sure it is something that we can or should seek out. It’s rather something we must always be open to. So when we have such an experience it doesn’t catch us by surprise and leave us confused and wondering what to make of it.
When we experience God, which we will in some way, we are prepared because we know what it means to rise from the dead. It’s nothing to do with coming back to life, it’s everything to do with how we live life. As Paul says, “God is for us“, so he gives us everything we could possibly need. We know exactly how to walk before the Lord in the land of the living.