Before I begin I should elaborate on this first reading from Genesis. In part of the narrative, God makes this agreement with Abraham as to his destiny and the destiny of his progeny, namely that through Abraham every nation of the world is going to be blessed and Abraham's offspring are going to be this infinite number: "...more than sands on the seashore and stars in the sky". Then, we get all of this strange talk about cutting up all of these animals and having the flame move through them. This is a symbolic way of talking, given the culture of the time, about the covenant between Abraham and God being ratified. Abraham did his part - - splitting open all of these animals - - and then God, the divine presence, comes and passes between these two halves. So, this is what that is all about. But the heart of this passage, the heart of the whole message to Abraham, is based of course on this business that God is going to use Abraham as his agent to save the whole world so that through the Jews, as Paul will say, "salvation comes".

All right, so now we must connect this passage from Genesis with this famous passage from Luke, which is paralleled in all of the Synoptic Gospels, and which is always read, in one version or another, every second Sunday of Lent. Remember, last Sunday we had the Temptation narrative in order to get us primed up for what Lent is all about - - this great desert experience where we are supposed to clarify who we are and what we are all about. Then, today, there is this big anticipation, which is of course the Resurrection. Most scholars believe that the Transfiguration narrative, this business of Jesus beginning to glow, is simply a retrojection of a resurrection vision into his pre-death existence. Thus, we are not talking about history, we are talking about theology here: that the Transfiguration is simply an anticipation of Jesus' resurrection. But how do we connect this Transfiguration story with this promise that is made to Abraham? So, this is what we need to address.

If it is the case, and I think that it is, that what is being talked about in this passage from Luke is the Resurrection, then it is important that we understand what the Resurrection meant to these earliest followers of Jesus. And to understand the Resurrection we have to understand the reasoning behind his murder. This reasoning was very simple. We get it over and over in the Gospels: that Jesus was a troublemaker and the particular form of trouble that he indulged in was simply his breaking of all of the social taboos. He was not only upwardly mobile, he was downwardly mobile, he was laterally mobile - - Jesus was all over the place. There were no distances between himself and the people around him. He played fast-and-loose with some of the hallmarks of Jewish legitimacy. For example, keeping the dietary laws and the Sabbath regulations. Why? Jesus disregarded these laws because they kept people from coming together. Consequently, he made some of the other Jews angry and he threatened the orderly class system of the Roman occupiers and the whole Roman Empire. So he had to be done away with. But when the followers of Jesus proclaimed that God had raised him from the dead, what they were saying is this: God has validated this way of being human. They believed that God had validated this deep, deep suspicion (which I think everybody harbours) that we human beings all belong with each other. Therefore, all of the defence mechanisms that we erect to protect, defend, and distance ourselves from each other, as well as the sick reasoning behind these mechanisms, are going to give way and God will have what he/she intended: the creation of a human family. Jesus had to be killed. However, in raising this man who behaved this way, the man who has been called the "Universal Brother", God is saying, "This is what I am all about. This man exemplifies what it means to be fully human". This is why, as Paul will say repeatedly, Jesus, the descendant of Abraham, fulfilled the promise made to Abraham: that through Abraham's descendants the world is going to come together.

Typically, in the New Testament, the poor are the people who are the most difficult to get together with. The poor and poverty is not just an economic category, it is a social category: the diseased, the handicapped, women, and slaves, or anybody who is socially impoverished. In today's world we would probably call them the disempowered. So, it is incumbent on us to make a kind of imaginative leap and say, "Well how can I get together with all of the people who seem to be my inferiors?". I think it is a fairly strenuous effort to spend time and try to be the sister/brother to the poor. I have not been very successful at this but this is what I have tried to do. This may sound idiosyncratic and neurotic of me, but I can play around with this idea in my head and say, "Yeah Trojcak, this is not a fun job but it can be accomplished".

I would like to suggest, because we so readily oversimplify the breaching of these barriers between ourselves and the poor, we try something more difficult! That instead of trying to be absolutely connected, transparent, and unified with the poor, we think about the rich. Interesting thoughts occur when your imagination works in precisely the opposite direction. For example, Donald Trump gives a billion dollars to the U.N. (but he made a billion dollars between January and September of last year anyway). And then our friend Bill Gates gives 400 million dollars in Microsoft computer software (with the remote advantage of course that computer users will have to buy more computer software in order to run their computers). So, the rich are really alien. And then, as if from heaven, I fell upon this quotation. It is a statement about power. It deals with the idea that money is power and that even more than political power, economic power is real power more and more in our world. The statement that I am about to read was made by someone who is very wealthy and this is the way in which this person speaks: "Power is sexy not simply in its own right but because it inspires self-confidence in its owner and a shiver of subservience on the part of those who approach it". This is wonderful. I could not believe my good luck in running across this statement from Mrs. Conrad Black in her self-description and the description of her family because it illuminated all kinds of things. Why is it easier for me to imagine getting together with the poor? This is easier to imagine because the poor are absolutely and essentially non-intimidating and, therefore, it is not a great leap of the imagination to say, "I could probably get along with these people". In contrast to this, the rich are essentially intimidating and Mrs. Black puts it out beautifully. The rich have power. And how rich do you have to be before you have this kind of power? In my opinion, not very. You do not have to be a mega-zillionare, and you do not have to have a 42,000 square foot house like Gates does, because when I read this statement there was this little uneasy voice sticking in the back of my head and it said: "Trojcak this sounds somewhat like you". For example, I can go into the classroom and intimidate people and make people shiver, if not with subservience, at least with fear of one sort or another. I can do this routinely. But I still think it is useful to imagine Bill Gates and me sitting down as coequal human beings because it forces me to see the gap; the incapacity of my ability to imagine what God said he/she wants to bring about. This is enormously useful because frankly I am a Pelagian at heart. I figure that "I can bring this off by myself. I can be with all of those other people!". But I understand that I cannot. By talking about herself, her husband, and probably all of the other Donald Trumps' of this world, Mrs. Black helps us to see the danger of possessing power. But most importantly, her statement illumines all kinds of dark corners in ourselves and the kind of power we exercise or want to exercise over other people and the distances that these exercises of power create. And then finally, this recognition does what these passages from the Scripture and the world in confrontation is supposed to do to us: it moves us to God. It moves us to a recognition of our own incapacity and yet it increases our suspicion that this is really what life is supposed to be about and to know full well that it is only God who is going to bring this about.

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Created: 30 Nov 1996
© Copyright: R. Trojcak, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002
London Ontario Canada
Last Update: September 05, 2005
Comments: rtrojcak@hotmail.com