At Caesarea Philippi Jesus told the apostles that he would suffer and die and on the third day rise again. A week later, transfigured upon a mountain, he told Moses and Elijah.
Present when he told them were Peter and James and John, whom he had chosen to have with him when he raised Jairus’ dead daughter to life, and whom he would choose to have nearest to him in Gethsemane. We tend to think of them as principals at the Transfiguration, almost as though the whole incident had been staged for their sake. Strengthened and comforted by it they certainly were; but they were not principals. Jesus conversed with Moses and Elijah: the three apostles were asleep part of the time and contributed nothing. Only one of them said anything at all: Peter said that it was a good thing they were there—they could make three shelters, one for Jesus, one for Moses, one for Elijah; but he himself tells us, through Mark (9:5), that he was too frightened to know what he was saying.
Let us glance quickly at what happened as told in the opening verses of Mark’s ninth chapter and Matthew’s seventeenth. Read especially Luke (9:28-36). He gives the most detailed account, and we wonder who was his informant. Of the three who were there, Peter tells us what happened through Mark (and find it again in 2 Peter 1:17-18—be sure to read it); James was long dead; could it have been John? Apart from “we saw his glory, he glory as of the only begotten of the Father”, he says nothing of the Transfiguration in his own Gospel. It may be that Luke had a ready told all that John had to tell.
As at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus had climbed some way up a mountain to pray. As he prayed he was “transfigured”—the Greek word is “metamorphosed”—his face shining like the sun, his garments dazzling white, like snow. It is not clear at what point the three apostles went to sleep, but when they were fully awake they saw their Lord “in his glory”, and Moses and Elijah standing with him, they too in glory. The three were speaking of the death that he would die in Jerusalem.
Moses was Israel’s law giver, dead these fifteen hundred years. Elijah, greatest of prophets, had been whirled up into the sky eight hundred years before; and the prophet Malachi had said (4:5) that God would send him “before the coming of the great and awe-filled day of the Lord”. Where had they come from?
Of Elijah the destiny is wholly mysterious. About Moses there is no such mystery. He was simply one of the greatest of those who had died at peace with God. Heaven was closed to these until Calvary should expiate the sin of the race. The soul of Moses, and the souls of all of them, were in a place of waiting—limbo, the border region, we most often call it. Abraham’s bosom, Jesus called it in the parable of Dives and Lazarus; paradise, he called it to the thief who appealed to him on the Cross.
Supremely Moses represented the Law, and Elijah the prophets. What happened on the mountain established the continuity between Israel of old and the Kingdom, now at last to be founded, in which Israel was to find its fulfillment. It seems strange that the representatives of the Kingdom were, as they would be likewise in Gethsemane, asleep part of the time, and frightened when they were fully awake. It was no very stimulating account Moses would take back to limbo of the men on whom the Kingdom was to be built.
But for these—long dead or newly dead—who had been waiting in all patience till the Redeemer should open heaven to them, Peter, James, and John must have mattered little compared with the news Moses brought back that their redemption was at hand and how it was to be accomplished. What Jesus had told at Caesarea Philippi to men living upon earth, he now told through Moses to the expectant dead. Through Moses the Law had been given to the children of Israel. Through Moses the Gospel, the good news, reached limbo.
As Peter finished his proposal to build three shelters, a luminous cloud overshadowed them, wrapping them round so that once again they were afraid. A Voice came out of the cloud saying: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased: hear ye him.” The last three words, establishing our Lord’s authority as teacher, were new. All the rest had been said by the same Voice at Jesus’ baptism in Jordan.
Peter, James, and John had been afraid—afraid when they saw Jesus and Moses and Elijah all white and luminous, afraid when the cloud wrapped them round, afraid when the Voice sounded from the cloud. With a touch of his hand and the words “Arise and fear not”, he recalled them to the world they were used to.
As they raised their frightened faces, they saw “no one but only Jesus”! He told them to say nothing of what they had seen on the mountain till the Son of Man (still his own phrase for himself, used of him by none of them) should be risen from the dead. Among themselves, they wondered just what that “risen from the dead” might mean. They had seen the daughter of Jairus and the young man of Nain dead and alive again. But they could not imagine how all this could apply to him who had raised those two.
And there was another problem, which they did discuss with Jesus himself as he and they came down the slope next day. They had just seen Elijah, and with this talk of Jesus dying, they would remember that Elijah had not died like other men; and they would remember that Malachi had said that Elijah would return and restore a sinful people to virtue before the day of the Lord. It was all very puzzling, and they put the puzzle to their Master. His answer, to the effect that Elijah had already returned in the person of John the Baptist, might have been clearer to them, had they known what the angel had said to Zechariah in the annunciation of John’s birth (Lk 1:17)—”He shall go before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah … to prepare unto the Lord a perfect people.” At least they would have remembered that Elijah had lived in the desert, preached repentance, and rebuked rulers.
Frank Sheed (1897-1981) was an Australian of Irish descent. A law student, he graduated from Sydney University in Arts and Law, then moved in 1926, with his wife Maisie Ward, to London. There they founded the well-known Catholic publishing house of Sheed & Ward in 1926, which published some of the finest Catholic literature of the first half of the twentieth century. Known for his sharp mind and clarity of expression, Sheed became one of the most famous Catholic apologists of the century. He was an outstanding street-corner speaker who popularized the Catholic Evidence Guild in both England and America (where he later resided). In 1957 he received a doctorate of Sacred Theology honoris causa authorized by the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities in Rome. Sheed wrote several books, including Theology and Sanity, A Map of Life, Theology for Beginners, and Christ in Eclipse.He and Maise also compiled the Catholic Evidence Training Outlines, which included his notes for training outdoor speakers and apologists and is still a valuable tool for Catholic apologists and catechists.
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These days, all kinds of people get all kinds of awards. Some deserved and some not. In many cases, it’s just people backslapping others, who hold the same ideas. In this country, if you said, Frank Sheed, people would reply: Frank who? Sadly! This would include many Catholics. For myself,however, Frank Sheed is one of Australia’s greatest sons.
Stephen in Australia.
I love Frank Sheed to pieces, and have a few of his books. But he has a major error in this writing. He claims that the Apostles slept most of the time on Mt. Tabor. Not true! They slept in the Garden of Olives. They were wide awake during the Transfiguration!
In Luke’s account, the three apostles are asleep on the mountain before they wake to find Christ transfigured.
Also St. Elias did not die . St. Elias is still living. He will be killed by the Antichrist near the end of the world.
Certainly St. John the Baptist went in the spirit and power of St. Elias, but he was beheaded and died before Our Lord. St. Elias and St. John the Baptist are two different persons.
Elijah was the fiercest of prophets, having first ridiculed Jezebel’s prophets with sarcasm, then slaughters them, in the hundreds [he must have had assistance or did he?] slitting so many throats by the blooded stream. Ahab was representative of fallen Israel given over to Jezebel’s worship of demonic Baal, a parody of our human condition. Moses was a prophet known for patience and intercession. The great mediator most like Christ leading the Israelites out of Egyptian Hades. Elijah witness to the true God. It seems the Justice and forgiveness of God is manifest in both prophets, in Elijah God’s wrath. Christ the revelation of God the Father’s meekness immediately recognized by fierce Elijah in the soft whisper. Moses’ illumined face veiled, a precursor, Christ’s illumined face unveiled at the Transfiguration.
Elijah, Ēlīyyāhū, means my God is Yahweh. Christ was often thought to be Elijah. If John the Baptist witnessed Christ, Christ witnessed the Father by self revelation. The key to interpretation of the Elijah Christ similarity is made clearer by Sheed, as cited in Olson’s essay, “They had just seen Elijah with talk of Jesus dying would remember Elijah had not died like other men”. Hope of our resurrection. Chariots of Fire was a great song.
Prophet Elijah is a father of Carmelites. I noticed a tendency: if there is a first reading during Mass about Prophet Elijah or other Old Testament’s prophets, our priests never say anything about the first reading, never! I suspect they cannot relate to the prophets at all. Of course, they are so zealous and “non-inclusive”.
This leaves me very angry.
Anna, priests in general have surrendered their sense of prophetic mission, a mission that requires a blood signature, as the witnesses to Christ [witness to Christ the essence of true prophesy] realized thru history.
Don’t be mad. Just ask father why he does this because the first reading OT and Gospel are connected. The OT reading is a “type” and NT is its fulfilment. It’s a pity if Father doesn’t give catechesis on the three which are the promise OT. Fulfilment is the Gospel and epistles is the continuous.
The transfiguration is the most beautiful theophony again on a “mountain “ ( Tabor). The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit present at transfiguration.
The voice, the God man, the words of the Father, and the cloud forming the “ tent of meeting.”
It’s a glorious imagery of the heavenly reality.
Yes, I understand this yet I am still angry when they literally obliterate the prophets and the Old Testament. Especially when they begin going on about “a prophetic mission we all share.” I am sick of hypocrisy, Fr Peter. Those things make me tired and apathetic. Too much of that everywhere.
Anna don’t be mad. “ prophetic mission” is our own call to
The work we are to in our situation the prophets went before doing the work they were called to do. At times they rebelled. They didn’t want to do it. Usually God calls those who even for a moment can say an almost divine yes. But are given the help to do it.
John, one of the only three witnesses to the Transfiguration, was also the only apostle or gospel writers who witnessed up close the Crucifixion. We know that John’s Gospel came several decades after the three Synoptics. Why the delay?
On this point, are we possibly reminded of the 14th-century mystic and anchoress, Julian of Norwich who, while for a day or two hovering at death’s door, suffered some sixteen visions (“shewings”) of the Crucifixion?
Finally, she sees, from the point of view of God in eternity, that the sublime Transfiguration shines through the excruciating Crucifixion—as the same divine event, but separated in time. The same event? So overwhelmed is Julian that she takes some twenty-five years (!) to write her “Revelations of Divine Love,” first a shorter version and then a longer one (and the first book written, or possibly dictated, in the English language by a woman).
During his decades of delay, did John assimilate a similarly compressed insight into the alarming mystery of Salvation history? Writing his own mystical account of the whole Jesus Christ (the fourth Gospel)—with remembrance of the Transfiguration engulfing the impending Crucifixion?
Only after several decades of contemplation on his (unique) apostolic “experience,” finally scribbling mere words to proclaim the Word’s infinite charity from all eternity, now revealed within a very fleeting moment of historical time?
Way back then in 2022 I missed, or perhaps better gave little interest to CWR Staff’s [it took a slew of minds to come up with the idea of a Gospel for the dead] major premise. The idea of the great Moses, who talked face to face with God bearing a form of facial glow transfiguration being imprisoned in Sheol is now, two years later, startling. Was the temporary exit to appear with Elijah on Mount Tabor a sort of rare walk in the prison courtyard for a breath of fresh air? Was Moses irritated that Elijah went straight to heaven?
All these important questions put aside, it makes sense to say that Moses [and by inference Elijah] now became a messenger to the righteous incarcerated in Sheol [or Limbo as the article suggests] that there is hope for resurrection. Although, I ask with the article’s writers, Where did the hell they come from?
Hidden beneath the camouflage of my comic relief sortie is the question of judgment, immediate and thereafter, and where we’re given accommodations while waiting for Christ’s resurrection and the opening of the gates of heaven. For instance, I would have otherwise thought the heroic believers like Moses, Judith, and Elijah went straight to heaven, that there was a retroactive resurrection effect. Or was Elijah told when he arrived on his fiery chariot that he now had to return and enter Sheol, that unfortunately the fiery chariot was simply for dramatic effect.
The question of double Jeopardy troubled me for years, raised anew by a young Jicarilla Apache who asked, Father, how do you explain the two judgments, at death and at the Final Judgment. My explanation was that there is no relevance to time when it concerns God’s acts, since God is pure act. In search of a better answer, perhaps a supporting one I turned to Aquinas who says there is no double judgment for our sins, rather that the Final, or general judgment is concomitant with the resurrection of the body. That this final judgment is that of the Body of believers from which the unrepentant sinner is forever cast out of, and receives his just punishment inclusive of his body.
As usual Aquinas makes better sense [Sheol was the ancient underworld of the dead, Gehenna and Hades akin to Hell, the place of eternal punishment. The authors of this essay speak of Limbo, which means undetermined, a word used after Innocent III in 1201 instructed the Archbishop of Arles that only those who commit unrepentant mortal sin go to Hell, not the unbaptized who do not commit mortal sin but are denied the beatific vision]. But I still wonder where Moses and Elijah returned to after Christ dismissed them on Mt Tabor.
And then there’s the simplifying/complicating point that Pope Benedict XVI identified “limbo” as an obsolete theological opinion and not a doctrine…
Your earlier remark makes sense: “…there is no relevance to time when it concerns God’s acts, since God is pure act.” Does our finite and temporal imagination of before-and-after get in the way? Consider that Mary was/is the Immaculate Conception, both in time and as already anticipated from before time began, such that—it is said—the angels fell precisely because they could not accept the superior status of a created being as being more than the choirs of created angels.
Historian Charles Norris Cochrane ponders St. Augustine:
“…he was confronted with the difficulty of conceiving [?] substance as spiritual, but with the discovery that this was possible, the greatest of his intellectual problems was solved. For he was thus enabled to perceive that, so far from being ultimate, ‘form’ and ‘matter’ alike were merely figments of the human mind; they were the spectacles through which men saw the corporeal or object world” (“Christianity and Classical Culture,” Oxford University Press, 1940, p. 396). Likewise, are ‘eternity’ and ‘time’ too much divided in our finitely temporal and spatial imaginations? What do we really mean by “world without end”? Or, by “through Him, with Him, AND in [!] Him…”
Is it possible that, since the Fall, we wear intellectual blinders? What does it still mean, if anything, when we still ask, “But I still wonder where Moses and Elijah returned to after Christ dismissed them on Mt. Tabor”? Return to?
SUMMARY: Just wondering, here, about your wondering! Time, what’s that? Space, what’s that? Where, what’s that?
In any event, we dare not flatten Reality into the ideology that “time is greater than space.”
Still we’re dealing with the question of where Elijah and Moses went after they left Mt Tabor. Time is certainly relevant in our experience, as it unfolds as known to God beyond time. And the question of where the unbaptized free of mortal sin dead are remains an unknown. If Limbo means undetermined, are we rejecting [Benedict XVI and apparently yourself] a doctrine, or are we refusing to accept that this issue is undetermined? If you can answer these questions I’ll award you a gold star.
Do I have to give a good answer, or will any “answer” suffice? If the latter, my answer is the universal solvent: “whatever”!…
“Where” is a maybe too much of a spatial sort of thing. I’ve read that people in comas (only that) can still hear what is said in their presence, but that they have no perception of duration during the long silences between. The case I recall was a woman in a coma for ten years, reportedly. Based on cheap talk around her bedside, after she awoke she amended her will. The added comment, again after ten years, was that she had no perception whatsoever of passing time. Ten years, only a moment!
It’s almost as if, in some non-spatial and non-temporal warp of ultimate reality, that the “particular judgment” and the “final judgment” are simultaneous, separated by less than a nanosecond–such that the effect of the Resurrection is retroactive except to our finite minds of “before” and “after.”
I read somewhere from a theologian (yes, another theological opinion!) that the bliss of the Garden might have lasted maybe only a moment. But, metaphysically, the span, so to speak, was still catastrophic, meriting all of of what is unveiled to us as salvation history.
About the “where,” what is a “moment”?
Realize too Peter that what is first realized by the intellect is being [see Aquinas’ treatise on Truth de Veritate in which he quotes Ibn Sina]. You apparently perceive being as miscible. Each being is distinct from the other. Each created being has its own status in God’s universe.
When you ask where? What’s that? That is, where Moses and Elijah go you’re thinking in terms of reverting within to one’s own being in which there is no time or space. That’s blending being into non distinction. All being created in God’s image has a definitive status to which it belongs. As we are immortal, separate beings we have a definitive relationship to each other as distinct from one another. We ultimately are determined for heaven or hell. Prior to that Final Judgment our existential status is on earth, or for the redeemed purgatory. We remain distinct to eachother and to God.
Insofar as theological questions regarding the status of non baptized free of mortal sin my personal belief is that they will be saved but denied the beatific vision. Otherwise the Church has not definitely determined that question.
Very good, but what now about other possibly intelligent beings likewise not gratuitously destined for the gifted Beatific Vision?
Part of Humani generis does NOT endorse any such baked-in destiny: “Some also question whether angels are personal beings, and whether matter and spirit differ essentially. Others destroy the gratuity of the supernatural order, since God, they say, cannot create intellectual beings without ordering and calling them to the beatific vision” (from Section 26?).
Thinking of possible EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE, what about multiple “intelligent” lifeforms amidst 100 billion galaxies and each with 100 billion stars (on average)—but NOT gifted with access to the Beatific Vision? This divine option leaves very much intact our partial understanding of the unique and alarming Incarnation in backwater Judea on backwater planet earth, as an astonishingly gifted event for our human race—fallen and restored.
Of course, there could be OTHER theological possibilities which leave the revealed and sure Deposit of Faith unmolested…(a) Perhaps Redemption is in some way multiple across space and time but, still, ONE DIVINE INCARNATION. Just as every Mass around the world is the unbloody renewal and extension of the SINGULAR self-donation and immolation on Calvary, while also and theologically “numerically distinct”? OR, too. with Blessed Duns Scotus, (b) might the Second Person of the Triune One have become singularly incarnate here (and even elsewhere?) ABSENT our particular fallen-ness and consequent need for salvation history? This by the infinite charity of the divine nature (1 John 4:8), which includes but is not necessarily limited to our historical and debilitating need for transcendent damage control?
Not unrelated to such modernday riddles, ST. AUGUSTINE devotes an entire chapter of his “Confessions” to space and time: “Perhaps it might properly be said that there are three times, the present of thing past, the present of things present, and the present of things future. These three are in the soul [!], but elsewhere I do not see them [….] In what space, then, do we measure passing time? [….] My mind is on fire to understand this most intricate riddle” (Book 11, ch. 20-22).
SUMMARY: Perhaps Pope Francis was a bit too hasty to say that he “would baptize a Martian.”
Our great Augustine sought to comprehend temporal procession within diametric parameters, an unfolding of destiny the human soul in its kinship to the divine is given the capacity to apprehend. A temporal reality that the intellect perceives by nature of the gift given. Otherwise we cannot strain to become God.
Take the sacred Doxology you question in context of spacial time, a truth of our adoration I delight in repeating each day of my life subject to the empty rhetoric of the historian you cite. Like Wittgenstein’s judgment, if we’ve reached meaningful comprehension, then Leave the damned thing alone.
The intellect understands truth through apprehension of opposites such as matter and spirit realities ordained as such by God. I leave the question of galaxies and possible creatures to those who chase fairy tales and seek to explore what may be in the dark shadows of closets. I stay with what’s evident to visual sight and intellectual. Insofar as where Moses and Elijah may have been they certainly were and are in a place I hope to be as well as others I pray will also be.
One last reply as we complete this joint treatise on the meaning and truth of existence. As to the unknown in the galaxies and possible life, what is known here on earth is definitive, and the rule for measuring the galactic unknown rather than the converse. The major cause for this is the crucifixion and resurrection of the Word of God. An act that cannot be duplicated nor surpassed nor diminished, the defining act that gives comprehension and purpose to the universe.
It is NOWHERE in my mind nor in my comments that “being is miscible”. And, nowhere do I question the reality of the Doxology. Even from an historical perspective, the incarnate Christ is the midpoint and center of all human history. So, I understand what Benedict means when he says that it was providential for St. Paul to cross over into the Greek world—into the coherence of faith and reason (unlike symbolic religion in the mystery cults or, say, Islam with its Qur’an). And, I too value that we “strain to become God,” but appreciate—as you do—the distinction that deification is by participation and not by a fused divine nature.
I also APPRECIATE the philosophical approach of “visual sight and intellect,” but also have struggled for decades with the likes of L.M. Regis, OP, University of Montreal, and his monumental and very dense “Epistemology” (1958). Where he recognizes and then explores the “mirabile” posed by the inner workings of “matter,” which at the atomic and sub-atomic level is known to be also statistical and probabilistic(!). About “things” atomic, my personal background includes in 1944 being born behind the desert barricade of the top-secret Hanford Nuclear Works which produced the Plutonium for Oppenheimer’s Trinity Project and the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Cognitive dissonance! I grew up in a world where the revolutionary science thing and its implications are colossal. I was also fascinated to learn that in 1942 a band of Native Americans (the Wanapums) was discovered on the banks of the Columbia River—never placed on a reservation—in the shadow of the rising nuclear reactors. The Stone Age meets the Atomic Age! Talk about your/our “understanding through apprehension of opposites”.
The consequences of “paradigm shifts,” legitimate and educational within the natural sciences, now contaminate the indiscriminate “synodality” thing within the perennial Catholic Church—now where such illuminati as Cardinal Hollerich conjure a “sociological-scientific foundation” for overturning natural law and moral theology. Now THAT is “miscible” fluidity!
REGIS more responsibly considers the paradigm shift of 20th-century, but then reaffirms the loftier Thomistic insight into being (your point). He concludes for us: “Epistemology receives its stability from being the product of a sapiential vision of man and the universe, a vision that includes science but of which science cannot even suspect the existence, for Wisdom has Itself defined Its dwelling place: ‘I dwell in the highest places, and my throne is in a pillar of a cloud.”
Also from Canada, the Catholic historian Charles Norris COCHRANE was a professor of Greek and Roman history at University College in Toronto, of whom the credible James Schall, S.J. remarked in a review in another book: “…Few people understood the relation of culture to politics, religion, and economics better than he. He understood the abiding realities of historical origins as well as the unique place of Augustine in the more general question of the meaning of history” (James V. Schall, SJ, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University).
SUMMARY: My path does not include long-term, formal and systematic exposure to philosophy and theology, although at least mentored for decades by two Jesuit and Dominican priest-friends. No Catholic schools or universities. More from outside the bubble, but I still catch glimpses and value deeply the community and exchanges on these pages of CWR.
A year ago, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, in Portugal, at World Youth Day, Francis assumed and claimed a new identity. He told the youth:
“Do not be afraid. I will tell you something else, also very beautiful: it is no longer I, but Jesus himself who is now looking at you.”
Plain. Clear. Blunt. No confusion here. No ambiguity there. Francis says that he, Francis, has become Jesus.
Did anyone hear a thundering or even a softly murmured rebuke?
APOSTOLIC JOURNEY OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
to PORTUGAL
ON THE OCCASION OF THE XXXVII WORLD YOUTH DAY
(2 – 6 August 2023)
http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/2023/documents/20230806-portogallo-omelia-gmg.html
Frank Sheed was an excellent writer imho. “Map of Life” is a valuable exposition of the two faculties of the soul – the Intellect and the Will – he even made diagrams – useful to people like me with an engineering background. As a fundamental way of understanding oneself it is invaluable.
“To Know Christ Jesus” is also good – the picture of the cover recalled it to my memory – and I know – Like Sheens “Life of Christ”- my person is imbued with its wisdoms.
I have never heard Sheed or Sheen ever mentioned from the pulpit.
Beaulieu you didn’t quite meet Fr.’s parameters but I think you should get the gold star. He put it out there and I saw this coming. Matter of fact your summations deserve more than one of the stars because at the end of the day it should be a fair deal! I think you’re not finished too but he has to be fair with that as well. Just my 2 cents.
Found this difficult to read in that odd, anticyclonic way of the Land Down Under.
I believe the Tradition is that the BVM alone is bodily assumed into heaven where also she is crowned for all eternity. Others are in heaven but not bodily and they are sustained in that by God’s power; among them, Enoch, Moses, Elijah, Joseph. In the Transfiguration Jesus is made manifest as the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets; signifying what the Spirit would accomplish. Jesus named John Baptist, the greatest of the Prophets; I would be glad to suppose he is in heaven likewise, not bodily. I have a partiality to Noah and I feel the same way about him. But you know it is difficult to put a limit on who is there for the time being non-bodily; since when Jesus gave up the Spirit on His death, the earth shook and tombs were opened.
Thereupon Jesus descended into hell and rendered a Judgment on it.
For it was in those few preceding moments before he died when it he was mocked sarcastically: “Let us see if Elijah returns to save him!” -when after in a short time the veil of the Temple was torn asunder for all time.
Not only is the BVM there crowned of all eternity the greatest of the saints and above the angels, she is the Queen of Heaven and holds her own court, Redemptrix Mother of God and our Saviour her own Son Jesus Christ. I said that Elijah and the rest of them now in heaven without body are sustained as such in the power of God. This comes through the BVM. And I AM THAT INTERESTED! It is the Glory of the Lord.
As a very mature female of 3 score years and many months I have spent many many years asking the question Why? Why did God create us? I can go back to primary school and remember nuns telling us that God created us to love, honour, and be with him forever. But still why? That was a good answer for 10-13 year old didn’t understand those words.
Through maturity the question was/ is still why?
I’ve spent many years on first three chapters of Genesis and slowly came to conclusion that the human’s story and maybe “why” found there. We have the meaning, creation, fall, promised of redemption all in those three chapters till the last word Amen.
With maturity the “ why” continued and beginning from chapter 4 in OT the unpacking began. As I continued unpacking more different “ whys” emerged , this to my more mature years.
As a person with few degrees in religious studies, psych, education, two MAs in theology and educational theology, the “ why” continued and I continue to ask that question
Time, eternity, why our planet chosen for habitation and redemption slowly some answers came to light which satisfied my soul. I feel them so clearly and deeply that I long for them.
However, there are still whys which don’t make sense.
Why do unbaptised sinless go to an indeterminate place? Though Jesus did say “ go out and preach the Gospel to all nations and remember I am with you to the end of time. So where and when is end of time and where are those who have been preached to go to wait. And what happened to those who cannot be preached to.? Will Jeremiah’s Jer 31: 31-33 “ I have placed my laws on your heart you are my people and I am your God”. Is this preaching and baptising? After all feast of Holy Innocents ( Dec 28) these innocents were unbaptised. And what happens to the over 50 ,000,000 abortions per year? What happens to these? They cannot be baptised are these in a place of happiness but behind entry into paradise. Parents after redemption in heaven ( where is this) but victims just outside?
The findings of the commission on the stays of unborn infants left the end “ indeterminate “ very much better.
I believe that there two places in OT and NT which might be answer but need more meditation, study, pondering before one of my Whys might be an answer
And answer to why is also written in OT. Why was Jesus baptised? So far an incomplete answer. Why did Jesus call out his feeling of abandonment? One of the prophets seems to have an answer
My whys still looking for an answer and I keep going back to places in scripture where maybe some why gives me assurance.