Caging the Spirit

This week in the church we celebrate an event depicted in the Gospel of Matthew and which we label the "Transfiguration".  The gospel describes Jesus going to the mountain top with his select disciples and there being infused with the light of God and the disciples having a vision of Jesus with Moses and Elijah.  What most interests me in this story is the response of the disciples.  Having witnessed this overwhelming spiritual event, they immediately want to build a tabernacle and enclose what they witnessed.  This ineffable and indescribable event  is beyond their comprehension, so they want to reduce it to something that they can contain and control.  They want to put it in a safe place where they can keep it from escaping.

Isn't that what we often do with our spiritual experiences?  To often, a  moment of grace suddenly penetrates our lives so deeply that we too, want to tame it and control it.  We create theologies to explain it.  We build churches to contain it.  We create rituals to imitate it.  And we create rules to keep it in its place.  The experience itself is pure but our structures that we build around it reflect our own need for control.  The experience of Grace is universal, but our expressions of it are culture based and it is these expressions that so often lead to misunderstandings and indeed to violence.  We may act as if we believe that we are the only ones who have had the "legitimate" experience,and we are  willing to defend our own interpretation of grace and the structures that we have built around it even to the death,  and in doing that we violate the very grace that we think we are defending.  

Jesus did not allow the disciples to build the tabernacle.