URC Daily Devotion 2 March 2023

St Matthew 17: 14 – 20

Reflection

Summit fever is a real condition, and it can apply to any situation where enormous time and resources have been spent on achieving a goal that you grow mentally or physically ill.  An experienced sherpa for climbers to Mount Everest says: “Most people don’t die on the way up the mountain or even at the summit. They die on the way down.” This is because most climbers don’t know how to conserve energy; there is much more energy needed on the way down than the journey to the summit.
 
Perhaps this is what the disciples are experiencing.  I sometimes wonder if the disciples who had gone up with Jesus had time to tell the others what they had just seen.  About 30 years later Peter would reminisce about the transfiguration in his epistle; but right now, perhaps they were all still trying to process the experience.  I can attest to that: some pastoral situations that clergy and laypeople encounter can blow our minds and overwhelm us, no matter how much “religion” we have in us.
 
Perhaps the worried father of the epileptic child was expecting too much from the disciples, believing they could do what Jesus could do. We can all attest to that too, as the Church too often fails to live up to Jesus’ reputation.
 
It’s a powerful moment to process – the disciple’s trip back to reality. The whole story comes with a staggering life lesson. There are some who think that their spiritual experience warrants their authority. However, any religious experience that has no interest in reaching people and building community is, as Jesus articulates, not driven by faith.
 
Some use religious experience as an attempt to capture God, even hold God hostage. But God is always moving, so whatever we bottle up about God will always be surpassed by the new thing God is doing. True faith doesn’t merely believe but believes enough to act, to bear witness, to get angry at injustice and imagine justice.
 
Prayer

God give us enough energy to use our experience with You in the world. May our encounters with you never blind and deafen us to the needs in the valley. Amen.