Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — March 7, 2004

I believe it has been more than once remarked, memorably by C.
S. Lewis, that Christianity encompasses equally the mysterious
and the reasonable aspects of religion—what Lewis called
the thick and the thin and I call Blood and Light. On the one
hand dangerous incomprehensible powers with definite but
capricious will; on the other, the ideal, the perfect, the
sweetly reasonable. On the one hand, awe and propitiation; on
the other, contemplation and abstract thought.

It has been said, more or less scornfully I think, that
Christianity is Platonism for the masses, a way of bringing the
Ideal into the world. And so far as I understand these things it
seems that many theologians of the early Church thought in those
terms. And the greatest theologians of the Middle Ages certainly
pursued the aspect of Light with great purity of purpose. But we
cannot forget that at the core of the Christian story and of
Christian theology is a bloody sacrifice, a place where the Light
is temporarily eclipsed by the Blood through which it must pass
in order to conquer the darkness.

Today’s Old Testament reading, from Genesis 15
reminds us that blood and
darkness were a part of God’s dealings with man from of
old:

And [Abram] said, Lord God, whereby shall I know that I shall
inherit [this land]?

And he said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old,
and a she goat of three years old, and a ram of three years old,
and a turtledove, and a young pigeon.

And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst,
and laid each piece one against another: but the birds divided he
not.

And when the fowls came down upon the carcases, Abram drove
them away. And when the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell
upon Abram; and, lo, an horror of great darkness fell upon
him…

And it came to pass that, when the sun went down, and it was
dark, behold a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp that passed
between those pieces.

In the same day the Lord made a covenant with Abraham, saying,
Unto thy seed have I given this land….

This is a very strange narrative. Contemplated for a few
minutes, and entered into imaginatively, it is a little
frightening. Abram asks a question: how am I to
know…? And the answer is a series of incomprehensible
or at least unexplained phenomena. What is the purpose of the
sacrifice? Why are the birds not divided? What happens to Abram,
or what does he see, in his sleep? Why the fire and the torch?
The writer simply recounts these events as they would have been
seen by a bystander, then moves on, with no comment on their
meaning. But afterwards something is different. A covenant has
been made. One conclusion—or, I suppose, a conjecture
merely—that we might make is that Abram was not supposed to
see or to understand in any rational way. He was to know only
that he had been visited by a potent mystery, and he was to know
it by experience, with his senses, as well as by words, with his
mind.

A thread from the Genesis passage is continued in
today’s Gospel, Luke 9:28-26, the account of the
Transfiguration. Peter, John, and James, like Abram, are taken
into darkness—“overshadowed”—and when
they emerge things have changed. Something is revealed, and it is
both less and more than in the Genesis passage. There are no
cryptic signs or instructions, only a suggestion from Peter which
seems giddy and irrelevant, and no floating fires. But there is a
greater mystery: not just the hand of the supernatural touching
our world—a phenomenon which would probably
have been less amazing to the men of that time than to ourselves—
but the entry or elevation of the man Jesus into
the realm which has heretofore only come down to us,
and then the voice of God the Father himself
telling them who Jesus really is.

In contrast to the Genesis passage, the theme here is
Light—the transfigured Christ and the light of knowledge
brought by the Father’s words. It is only the bystanders,
not the protagonist, who fall into sleep and are blinded by a
supernatural darkness. There is no Blood. That comes later.