Luke 9:28–43
In jails and prisons, there are plenty of Bibles. The fat paperbacks line chapel bookshelves, dozens of translations. New boxes arrive every month. Guys I knew in a super-max facility used stacks of these hefty volumes to lift inside bedsheets when weights were taken away.
The problem with these phonebook-like bricks of recycle paper is that the wild variety of witnesses in our tradition’s collected scriptures gets flattened, reduced to: The Holy Bible (Book, from the Latin). For my friends reading and trying to pray in jails and prisons, the most radical and liberating voices in the scriptures can merge into a murkier “The Bible Says” — where often, the interpretation of what “The Bible Says” upholds the carceral, punitive status quo.
This is a bummer, a scriptural boxing and caging—which the gospel story of the Transfiguration brilliantly abolishes.
In Luke’s gospel, Jesus’ disciples follow him up the mountain where they see his divine glory unleashed, shining through his flesh, his face, his clothes. Then mystical apparitions of scriptural heroes Moses and Elijah show up. The disciples witness the embodiments of The Law and The Prophets talking with their living lord and rabbi, Jesus.
Peter—so often the mirror of our human impulses—in his thrill offers to build three dwellings, or shelters, sukkot, for these three holy teachers. Maybe it was an act of honor, sacred hospitality. Maybe it was to commemorate this epiphany, to contain the mystery, as we do, with altars and memorials. Either way, Peter “Bibles” them: he wants to put a familiar religious structure around these voices.
This is when a larger cloud of the Divine wraps around them all and says to all of them—not just the disciples but to Moses and Elijah as well: “This is my Son, my Chosen. Listen to him!”
Here, the voice of God resists our containment, our boxes. The voice of God exalts the person and message of Jesus as the fulfillment of all biblical voices. In this moment of radical reorientation, both those before Jesus (the Law and the Prophets) and after (the Apostles) are instructed by God to listen to Jesus.
No matter what we and our incarcerated friends read in the scriptures, no matter what images of God or human actions may seem to support systems of oppression, none of it can overrule or cancel out—or even be held in debate with—the liberating words and mission of Jesus.
May we all hear God’s loud preference here—and so join Moses, Elijah, Peter, James and John as we all learn let go of what we thought we knew and listen with greatest attention to God’s chosen, liberating, healing, forgiving, Hades-abolishing, execution-undoing embodiment in Christ.
Chris Hoke is the creator and director of Underground Ministries in Washington State, which equips churches and businesses to practice resurrection and abolition through re-entry relationships alongside men and women returning from prison.