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B.
DYBWAD BROCHMANN THE ART OF READING
THE BIBLE Chapter 13 On the Mountain of Transfiguration Let’s take a trip up on the
“Mountain of Transfiguration”. We will try to understand a little of the
fantastic ability Jesus had in using imagery and allegorical demonstrations. Also at this time the Savior made a “natural choice”, as He didn’t
take all twelve disciples. He only took three: Peter, John, and Jacob,
probably the three who were most
anchored spiritually speaking. There are two stories in The Gospel from the “Mountain of Transfiguration”, and we now present
both of them. In Luke 9:28 – 37: 28 “And it came to pass about an eight days after
these sayings, he took Peter and John and James, and went up into a mountain
to pray. 29 And as he prayed, the fashion of his countenance
was altered, and his raiment was white and glistering. 30 And, behold, there talked with him two men, which
were Moses and Elias: 31 Who appeared in glory, and spoke of his decease
which he should accomplish at Jerusalem. 32 But Peter and they that were with him were heavy
with sleep: and when they were awake, they saw his glory, and the two men
that stood with him. 33 And it came to pass, as they departed from him,
Peter said unto Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here: and let us make
three tabernacles; one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias: not
knowing what he said. 34 While he thus spoke, there came a cloud, and
overshadowed them: and they feared as they entered into the cloud. 35 And there came a voice out of the cloud, saying,
This is my beloved Son: hear him. 36 And when the voice was past, Jesus was found alone.
And they kept it close, and told no man in those days any of those things
which they had seen. 37 And it came to pass, that on the next day, when
they were come down from the hill, much people met him”. (Copied from the
Bible.com Website). In Matthew 17: 1-13: 1 “And after six days Jesus
taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high
mountain apart, 2 And was transfigured before them: and his face did
shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light. 3 And, behold, there appeared unto them Moses and
Elias talking with him. 4 Then answered Peter, and said unto Jesus, Lord, it
is good for us to be here: if thou wilt, let us make here three tabernacles;
one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. 5 While he yet spoke, behold, a bright cloud
overshadowed them: and behold a voice out of the cloud, which said, This is
my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him. 6 And when the disciples heard it, they fell on their
face, and were sore afraid. 7 And Jesus came and touched them, and said, Arise,
and be not afraid. 8 And when they had lifted up their eyes, they saw no
man, save Jesus only. 9 And as they came down from the mountain, Jesus
charged them, saying, Tell the vision to no man, until the Son of man be
risen again from the dead. 10 And his disciples asked him, saying, Why then say
the scribes that Elias must first come? 11 And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly
shall first come, and restore all things. 12 But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and
they knew him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise
shall also the Son of man suffer of them. 13 Then the disciples understood that he spoke unto
them of John the Baptist”. (Copied from the Bible.com Website). In Luke it says that the disciples were “heavy with sleep”. It probably means what the author has
maintained and what Christ Himself complains about, that people are
spiritually slow and tired. We sleep the heavy sleep of nature because we have grown up from below. I
think it’s difficult to understand religious peoples’ lack of wanting to
acknowledge that the Doctrine of Evolution is in complete agreement with the teachings of The Bible. Also in the Garden
of Gethsemane we hear the same thing, about heavy sleep, and that the Savior
wants them to wake up and stay awake. The stories from the Mountain of Transfiguration and from Gethsemane,
both mention that the people were heavy with sleep. It struck me, when I read
Giovanni Papini’s glorious book
about the Savior’s life on earth, that also his eyes were heavy with sleep
when he was going to write about the Garden of Gethsemane. He wrote something
like: “The dark of night rested over everything, which probably will never be
completely cleared up” – or something similar. But why was it “night” just
because it was night in the spiritual life of the world? Judas also went out
in “the night”, only because we slept and are sleeping the heavy sleep. Everything becomes
immediately easier and lighter when we first of all understand ourselves in
the way that Christ saw us: heavy with
sleep. There was and still is the deep sleep of nature and matter in us. We
are slow to wake up. We don’t wake up
by ourselves either. We have to be wakened up. In both stories (from
Gethsemane and from the Mountain of Transfiguration), it’s obvious that Christ takes the disciples with Him
because they are to experience
something, which they don’t immediately understand, but which later on
shall be explained in their and our conscience. We all know how “heavy sleep”
affects us – no matter how necessary it
is, and how much good it does. We also know how everything goes past us
in a halfway clear fog,, if we
experience something remarkable while we are so sleepy that we can’t quite
follow along. This is exactly how the story about the disciples and their
life together with the Savior appears. All of my life has been like I’ve been
dreaming, where I saw without seeing, and heard without really understanding
what I heard. How often don’t I receive letters from thoughtful women and men
who say: “When I read your book….. I discovered a lot of thoughts that I knew
about before, but that I wasn’t really clear about”. “Don’t you agree with me
that others can also see the same things?” Of course. But there is a big
division, or “a deep crevice” (Please refer to the chapter about daydreams)
between man unconsciously and unclearly suspecting something while sleeping
and dreaming, and being wide-awake and seeing clearly. (Look at the story
about the baby born blind, whose eyes were opened by Christ). In the times of
Columbus, people had suspicions
that there was land west of Spain. Columbus didn’t only have a suspicion, he had a dynamic consciousness that made it
possible for him to travel westward until he found the new land. The people of his time asked him: “Are you so dumb that you think we
couldn’t have done the same thing you did”? So, Columbus took an egg and
asked them if they could make it stand on one end. They said they couldn’t.
Then Columbus put the egg on its end, and slammed it down on the table. “Well,
we could have done that too,” screamed the dreamers. “And that is just the
difference”, said Columbus. “You could have done it, but I did it”. “Ye shall do greater things than these”, said Christ. But you have to
first wake up to dynamic consciousness.
If I didn’t know this, I would never be able to write a book like
this, and really look out over the limitations and thoughtlessness of the
helpless people in my own times. That’s why I think that there is both rest
and comfort to find in the teachings of The Bible regarding our slow growth
and creation. I can’t understand anything else but that people are still very
sleepy if they don’t see the same thing. Religious people often appear to me
to be like drinkers of intoxicants. You can see their condition already, by
looking in their eyes and listening to their speech - that they still are
going around sleeping and dreaming. They
do dream that they are saved, and often speak about their happy condition
in the same way that people do who have had too much sweet wine. Go in and
listen to the Salvation Army where
people first speak with “sweet tongues” about their love for Jesus, and then
they switch over to beating the drum and blowing in the trumpets for their
“salvation” or possibly for the Savior? Isn’t all of this the need of a
sleepy world for more spiritual intoxicants and a dream life? Don’t music,
song, and speeches play a similar role as stimulants and alcohol do to keep
the “happy condition” going? It’s understandable that others will have tall
cathedrals with somewhat cleaner air high under the ceiling, and prefer organ
music instead of trumpets and drums. As for myself, I prefer to sleep outside
under the open sky, because the cathedral seems to press down on me, and
because I don’t believe that the Savior was so happy about spiritual
foolishness and a life of dreaming. You can also go in, if you have
the mental strength for it, and listen to those who “speak in tongues”,
and see how they arrange things, especially the women and the feminine men. Doesn’t
that make you think of the inspiration of the more sober onlookers in Acts
2:13: “These men are full of new wine”? Or why didn’t Christ allow His disciples to experience a Pentecostal
celebration? Wouldn’t it have been a good idea if He could have been there
and controlled the atmosphere and limited some of the religious ecstasy that
we still see with many religious people, when “the spirit is over them”? When you’re sitting in a big cathedral and suddenly hear the organ
play with all the stops out, don’t you think of Acts 2:2? It says: “And
suddenly there came a sound from heaven like a rushing mighty wind, and it
filled the whole house where they were sitting”. The Norwegian Lutheran Church attempts, just like those who speak in
tongues, to create a religious atmosphere, and they use everything possible,
just as the Catholics do, so that people will become spiritually intoxicated.
But, the question is if Christ is as
interested in this spiritual intoxication as we think? Is God as religiously
interested as the people in the prayer meetings? I wonder if the fact
that we’re sleepy has anything to do with anything? Isn’t the Holy Spirit of Truth a fairly different kind of flaming and
lightening intelligence than all of these religious fanaticisms and dreams? Christ’s description of the
coming of the Son of Man seems quite different, i.e. pure and radiant as the light from heaven, compared to all
of this sweet, spiritual intoxicating drink. When Christ arranges a Pentecostal celebration inside of you, there is
no doubt with anyone about your sobriety
and abstinence. In Acts it tells us how
the new Holy Spirit grabbed the emotions and affected the Orientals about
2000 years ago. Then outsiders began to study if these people maybe had drunk
too much “sweet wine”, but I believe that this story is the objective truth and a description of
reality. I have exactly the same impression when I observe primitive
people in their understanding of the power of the Spirit and the life of the
Spirit. It is part of our nature to become eccentric and hysterical when the
Spirit of God will speak to us. The light of truth is agitating and it
“shakes us up”. That is why I had to be almost 65 years old before I could
write this book. I am very affected by being able to “see” the truth, and I
try to be an instrument for the Holy Spirit of Truth. I have heard so-called “psychoanalysts” say it often happens that when
their “patients” hear the truth about their own inner workings, that they
become so “shaken up” and unbalanced that sometimes they have the desire to
kill the analyst. This was the destiny of Jesus Christ, because He told them
the truth. (Read carefully in John 8: 37 – 45, that tells about the same
thing. Read also John 10: 31 – 34). The disciples that Christ took with him to the Mountain of
Transfiguration were surely carefully chosen, since not all 12 came; it was
surely those who were most “awake” concerning the available material. They
had also been the most sober,
otherwise the description of what they experienced couldn’t have been so calm
and to the point. It was, however,
strenuous; they felt tired. What they got to see was at any rate “a
little too much”. Their eyes were dull. Keep that thought, and try to see
that it is still nature’s heavy sleep in the spiritual life of the world. Try to believe me when I assure you that I would have liked nothing
better than to write this book about “The
Savior on the Mountain of Transfiguration” when I was 20, or 30, or 40, or 50
years old. I was closer to 65 before
I managed to do it, and still my work is unbelievably incomplete and
imperfect. “The cloud” is often used in The Bible as a symbol of unclear
thoughts, or as a mysterious phenomenon. God speaks now and then in “the
cloud”, also in the Old Testament. In 1 Kings 8:10 we read: “And it came to
pass, when the priests were come out of the holy place, that the cloud filled
the house of the Lord”, and in verse 12, Salomon says: “The Lord said that he
would dwell in the thick darkness” (in the unknown and hidden). In David’s
poetic work Psalms 68:35 it says: “Ascribe ye strength unto God: his
excellency is over Israel, and his strength is in the clouds”. In the Book of
Lamentations it says: “Thou hast covered thyself with a cloud, that our
prayer should not pass through”, etc. (It isn’t easy to answer somebody’s
prayer when you don’t know who and what you are praying to). It seems to me that the way people have worshipped God up to now is
that they have been praying to an unknown God, the God who hides from us in
the inconceivable, or Who is gone from us every time we misunderstand, so our
spiritual and mental life is obscured. All of this is explained symbolically
by saying that God “lives in the darkness”. His power lies in things we know
nothing about. The Savior also clearly says to the woman in John 4:22: “You
are worshipping what you don’t know”. So that means that God lives in the
cloud – the unknown. God is much closer to Christ. But when the Savior came
and made Himself known, maybe there weren’t anymore “clouds” in the heaven of
the Spirit? If the people weren’t complete before, they must see to it that
they were now? No. Christ, who is one
with the Creator and the creation, realized that He also must be hidden in”
the cloud”. This is what the disciples need to prepare for. Christ has to be religionized and
theologized. Creation is not complete yet. First now, when Christ is
“elevated” will He be able to “draw everyone to Himself”, but until then He
also needs to live “up in heaven – up in the clouds”. We don’t know how the Savior arranged “the cloud” on the mountain, but
it couldn’t have been that difficult since He manages the powers of nature in
a more complete way than we do. Warships can hide themselves in artificial
clouds in a minute. But Christ hid Himself in a “clear” cloud on the Mountain of Transfiguration
so we could “explain” the truth, and experience that the cloud wasn’t a rain
cloud, but a “clear” cloud, i.e. a very “clear picture” of everything. If we
look at our own mental state as a spiritual
dream state, this would be an explanation in symbols and, so all of this
symbolism is fairly natural. It is in the dream state that people experience
the pictures as reality. The language of dreams is exclusively the language of symbols. “Without a parable spoke He
not unto them”, says Matthew 13:34. Peter talks about it being good to be
here. What they were referring to was not where they were, but the condition
they were in. He asks if they shouldn’t build wooden houses there. He wasn’t
really conscious about what he was saying. It’s clear that Christ grips into
his spiritual life and creates a new impulse – a new sprout to a fruitful
spiritual life, a new attempt at more consciousness. Since it’s Peter who
asks the question about “three houses”, I have often thought about the three
great “Christian churches” – the Catholic, the Protestant, and the Reformed
Church. If this has anything to do with reality, the future will show. Just
let us blow ourselves up and act smarter than we are. We can hope in the
future that we can become as wise as we want to be and maybe believe that we
are now. When Christ disappeared in the cloud, the disciples they fell down in
terror. This is the same thing that happened with the “Church”, which has
shaking knees because the Savior has hidden Himself from them. But it (and we) hear a voice anyway, a
mighty voice that speaks out of all kinds of religious clouds and out of all
kinds of theological fog and dialectic (the art of debate) in over 2000 years. “This is my Son
in whom I am well pleased. Listen to Him”. You can say what you will about all the theologians and educated men
through church history, and you can criticize sects and religious “isms” as
much as you will, but they have one
thing in common. There is one and the same voice sounding from all of the
pulpits in the world, no matter how obscure, the contents with all of them is
the same: “Christ is the Son of God, the Loveable, with whom God is pleased. Listen
to Him”. That is why the Savior says in John 13:13: “Spirit of the Holy Father. Sanctify them through Thy truth. Thy word
is truth”. The role of “the
Church” cannot be denied, since the voice still sounds today from the cloud. No matter how foggy and sleepy the
world is, this profession of faith sounds over the whole world in all
languages. When the “voice in the cloud” ceases in the future, we will see nothing other than Jesus Christ
and His society. It is only now, while we are waiting and dreaming, and
write poetry around Him, that He hides Himself for us in the cloud. Many people ask: What is
religion? Well, religion is imagery about the real reality before we know
it and are confident with it. Theology is human poetry about the power of the
Spirit of God, just as the mythology of the ancients was human poetry about
the power of nature, the natural powers. Therefore, theology and mythology
are imagery that tells more or less the truth about an unseen reality. Since
we still dream as children about the coming holy society, the Savior is
helping us along the way to think correctly; therefore He uses the best possible
pictures and allegories. But a time
will come, He says, when we shall speak freely, “when the books shall
speak”, “when all the fog has disappeared”, etc. There are surely many other things to learn by reading about “the
Mountain of Transfiguration”. For now we have to be satisfied by seeing the
world “terrified” and “sleepy”, just as we were told the three disciples
were. We have mentioned this story
to show how we meant The Bible should be read and understood. We should never
forget that the whole book is a gigantic work of poetry; where the Spirit of
God the Almighty, Who is creative and automatically effective, makes Himself
known now, as always. Simple people, who learn that people are animals, are
obligated to tell us how “animals” can write The Bible for mankind. The Bible itself is proof of the big division between us and the
animals, and The Bible is the bridge between us and the Kingdom of God, which
is able to come nearer us over that “bridge”. Just listen to how I sit here
and “rewrite” reality because I have been inspired by the word of God. |