When words fail...
The Last Sunday After
the Epiphany
Year B
Mark 9:2-9
If you were to speak about a gorgeous sunset on the
Pacific coast of Canada what would you say?
Once you realize that you have fallen in love, how ever would you put
that into words?
On the other hand, what do people do when something
terrible happens? Don’t they oftentimes
stand there completely stunned and mute?
They might say, afterwards, “I was at a loss for words” or “words
failed me”.
Despite being the second book of the New Testament, the
Gospel of Mark was the earliest of our complete written Gospels. It is an exercise in “explanatory language”
designed to be read by Christians rather than “persuasive language”
meant to be read by unbelievers (that was the job of people on the ground; of preachers,
catechists, evangelists and deacons). It
was an exercise in using Greek words to describe what people had first seen,
heard and felt - up close and personal – of making things explicable to a new
generation.
Mark’s style is terse.
His sentences are short. One
thing follows another. This happened.
Immediately the other thing happened.
Which led, straightaway, to that other event. In the middle of Mark’s Gospel, however,
amid stories lending themselves to a written record of events, we find the account
of Jesus’ Transfiguration on the slopes of Mount Tabor. It has been described as a piece of John’s
Gospel transplanted into the midst of Mark. The veil is pulled to one
side for an instant. Glory is
revealed. An ordinary hillside becomes a
doorway to heaven - open and mysterious. It is not for nothing that generations of
painters have treated it as their subject for the episode evokes a visual
tableau. Even the words are the slaves
of the visual picture which arises in the heads of the reader. Christ is there at the center. See him set amid other figures from the
Biblical narrative. The movement was
like this. The light changed like
that. If you think, says Mark, that
words will sum it up, dear reader, just look at poor Peter for whom words
failed utterly. In response to his
insecurity Peter began to babble – desperately trying to fill in the insecurity
of the visual moment with mere words.
Then Peter said to
Jesus, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here;
let us make three
dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and
one for Elijah.”
He did not know what to say, for they were terrified.
What struck you about Notre Dame Cathedral or the Grand
Canyon or a piece of art or for that matter the opening of Brahms’ First
Symphony (auditory, and not visual, but which has no words). What on earth would you need to say to
explain your feelings when you watch your little granddaughter? You’d just point. Isn’t it obvious?
Do these things not remind you that the chain of time in
which you live – the ordinary things of earth made of flesh and stone and light
point to something beyond the ordinary and that to be there in that Presence
shining through the ordinary is perfectly sufficient, thank you very much.
