Epiphany Last, Year C | Luke 9:28-43
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
February 27, 2022
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
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I have trouble dealing with some of the miraculous stories and incidents reported in the Bible. It isn’t that I don’t believe in miracles—I do. And while I want us to be able to understand them from an ancient perspective, I have no interest in explaining them away. However, I think that the Bible’s miracles are intended to point us toward some sort of action—something that encourages us to walk in faithfulness and makes a tangible difference in our day-to-day lives and relationships. My problem is that I can’t always figure out what exactly that is. The Transfiguration isn’t alone in its challenge to me, but its seemingly static nature is one that particularly confuses me. And pairing it with the story of the boy and the entity only Jesus could cast out doesn’t help with any sense of clarity.
Luke’s version of the incident with the boy may sound strange to us, but it actually makes a lot of sense within its cultural context. Tradition tells us Luke was a physician, and throughout his Gospel he shows a great deal of interest in medical details and the means by which Jesus cures individuals. He, too, recognizes the reality of miracles, but he also describes them within the context of medicine and science as he understood them. What we think of as supernatural tales of demons and exorcisms fit perfectly well into the epidemiology of his day.
Throughout recorded history, “miasma theory” was the predominant scientific understanding of how disease both spread and was cured across most of the planet. The thinking was that air could somehow become corrupted, and if a person breathed in that air, the corruption might become lodged within the body and spread its process of decay, resulting in disease. Though it lines up a bit with our understanding of pollution and airborne infections, miasma theory isn’t quite the same thing. Since the advent of “germ theory” in the mid- to late-1800’s, we’ve learned more and more about how microbes like bacteria and viruses can infect us and lead to a variety of illnesses with recognizable symptoms as our bodies attempt to fight back. We’ve also learned that if we can target the “germs” with antibiotics, we can help our bodies’ natural defenses. And through vaccinations we’ve even learned how to train our immune systems to respond ahead of time through a practice run scenario.
Miasma theory knew nothing of microbes, and though it has similar aspects to parts of modern scientific understanding, its concept was much simpler at the core. “Bad” air made you sick while “good” air could cure you. Bad air was known primarily through smell—think of the strange breath you get with certain sicknesses or the stench of a decaying body. Miasma theory posited that the air itself, either inside the body or out, was the source of disease. If you could replace the stinking air with clean, good-smelling air that counterbalanced the bad in the right way, you could eventually cure the illness.
With its focus on air as the means of both spreading and curing disease, ancient societies didn’t always distinguish between air, a light wind, breathing, or what we think of as “spirit.” In Roman-era Greek, they were all the same word: pneuma. You can still hear that word in English terms like “pneumonia” and “pneumatic tires.” Air, wind, breath, and spirit, though invisible and generally intangible on their own, were all very physical things, and they shared an existence in the ancient mind. Unfortunately, as we later began to distinguish more strictly between them, we also began misreading and misinterpreting what Luke and Paul and other biblical writers had to say.
When we read in the Bible about “unclean spirits,” like in today’s Gospel, the most straightforward translation of those words—and the translation you would find in nearly any other context apart from the “spiritualization” of a religious text—is “foul” or “impure air.” The same goes for the Holy Spirit, which is essentially “sanctifying air” or “purifying breath.” The presence of the Sanctifying Air forces out the corruption of every type of foul air, thus resulting in the healing, restoration, and sanctification of an individual or community.
That isn’t to say that people didn’t think these “foul airs” were devoid of personality. They recognized the recurring similarities between certain ones and considered them to be the manifestation of unseen entities. These were known as daimon, which is where we get our word “demon.” But daimon and demons aren’t quite the same thing. Over the centuries, Western Christianity has congealed its understanding of the “spirit world” into a dualism: “angels” are good, and “demons” are bad. But just like some modern non-Western cultures, the ancient world had more subtle distinctions of the mysterious and unseen. So daimon weren’t necessarily or inherently evil. Everything that escaped from Pandora’s box—the good and the bad—were daimon. For a modern mind, we can think of daimon and gods as personifications of different attitudes, psychological concepts, and ideas. While daimon generally weren’t considered as significant or powerful as gods, their status could be disputed among different cultures: we know the Romans revered and honored some Greek daimon, such as Faithfulness,[1] as “full” gods.
So ancient people weren’t more foolish or ignorant—or even necessarily more superstitious—than we are today. They just understood and explained the world around them using different mental constructs than we do. And unless we begin to understand their idea of the “airy/windy/breathy/spiritual” world and its interaction with and influence on the visible “natural” world, we can’t possibly begin to accurately interpret our own sacred texts.
I’ve been hoping to talk about this for some time, especially with our recent I Corinthians readings involving spiritual gifts and spiritual bodies, but other aspects of our texts seemed more pressing. However, with the Transfiguration, Paul’s spiritual body discussion and his emphasis on the physicality of the “airy” world becomes particularly important, because what the three apostles witness at the Transfiguration is a veil lifting or even worlds colliding: the merging of the airy with the visible natural world.
And although I’m still not sure I quite get it, maybe that’s what Luke is trying to point us to today: the non-competitive coexistence of what we like to distinguish as “spiritual” and “physical.”[2] In reality, our daily life and our religious life are not distinct categories that we can keep separate from one another. Both exist at the same time, whether or not we can see it. Religious life often seems ephemeral, and many of us like to keep its practices tucked away to specific situations like church attendance or private prayer. But those times it does spill into “real life” we find that it’s world-shattering, carrying untold shock and amazement. Unfortunately, moments like that rarely last long, leaving us to silence them or even doubting their existence as we try to reason them away or as the experience itself begins to fade.
And maybe that’s why Luke follows the Transfiguration with the story of the boy and the entity that only Jesus could remove, to show us that even without the fanfare of shining faces, shimmering clothing, time-displaced prophets, and voices from mysterious clouds, the natural and the airy/windy/breathy/spiritual worlds continue to coexist—that our actions in one continually affect the reality of the other, whether or not we can see it.
We who follow Christ are called to keep the reality of God’s reign in the forefront of our mind and continually work to reveal it in the world of human relationships and behavior—which brings me back to our discussion of agape a few weeks ago. If you remember, when the Bible says “God is love,” the love it’s speaking of is agape—“love as action.” We encounter God not in theory or theology or ideas or arguments—God may be the subject of those things, but God isn’t in those things. God is love-as-action, which means we find ourselves most clearly in the presence of God through service to others, in our efforts of comforting and feeding and clothing, in both offering and receiving help, because those moments where we manifest love-as-action are where God is present. God actually exists within and through them.
We may long for the flashy miracles, for the glow and the glory and awe, and we might catch momentary glimpses of God at those times. But we can never find, experience, or share God’s full reality until we come down from the mountain and unveil the coexistence of the airy within the natural through embodied works of love.
[1] Greek Pistis/Roman Fides
[2] Termed “natural” in Paul’s writings