In his new book, An Immovable Feast, Tyler Blanski employs a metaphor that captures what is exceptional about Christianity’s claim to truth.
Blanski suggests that some people might think of all world religions as attempts to scale a proverbial mountain atop which is the true God. All religions, according to this perspective, claim to be different paths up the mountain. Some might say they are the true way. Others might regard all paths as fundamentally different ways of achieving or reaching the same thing—the heavenly mountaintop.
Except this is not the case with Christianity. As Blanski explains,
A problem with the Unknowable God perspective is that it didn’t account for Jesus.
Christianity claims that God is not hiding up on a mountain waiting for us to find our own way to him. In the Person of Jesus Christ, God came down the mountain, as it were, and showed us the way back up to God. Jesus is the way to the Father. And after he ascended back up to the Father, he left behind his apostolic Church to hand out maps … (An Immovable Feast, 205-206).
One reason this metaphor is so compelling is that it is very biblical. Within the story of Scripture itself we can see God ‘coming down’ from the mountain.
The paradigmatic story, of course, is the account of the Israelites at Mt. Sinai in Exodus. There, God is actually on top of the mountain and one must climb it in order to reach Him—an experience that is reserved for one privileged person—Moses. Otherwise, what the rest of the Israelites witness is a God of awe-inspiring distance:
On the morning of the third day there were peals of thunder and lightning, and a heavy cloud over the mountain, and a very loud blast of the shofar, so that all the people in the camp trembled. But Moses led the people out of the camp to meet God, and they stationed themselves at the foot of the mountain. Now Mount Sinai was completely enveloped in smoke, because the LORD had come down upon it in fire. The smoke rose from it as though from a kiln, and the whole mountain trembled violently (Exodus 19:16-18).
Already, in the Exodus account, God comes down from the mountain, in a manner of speaking. First, He delivers His words—his Ten Commandments—to Moses who, in turn, presents them to the people. Second, He manifests His presence within the tabernacle, a precursor to what will later become the temple in an ancient Israel.
But, even in the tabernacle, the people remain sequestered from a direct encounter with God. Only Moses is permitted to enter into His presence. And, of course, the temple itself was built on a mountain, according to 2 Chronicles 3.
Indeed, throughout the Old Testament, the mountain remains the place where God meets man. In 1 Kings 18, for example, Elijah’s sacrificial confrontation with the priests of Baal occurs on a mountain. In the next chapter, he flies to Mt. Sinai, but this time hears God not in the thunder audible to Moses and the Israelites but in a barely discernible whisper. Thus, the mountain is the setting in which we see the full spectrum of God’s communication with man—from thunder to whispers.
In later books, the high mountain remains a key reference point in the spiritual geography of ancient Israel. Both the prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, for example, allude to the high mountain as God’s special place (see, for example, Isaiah 2:2 and Ezekiel 20:40).
The New Testament presents Jesus in ways that clearly convey that God has changed the way He relates to His people—and it does so by alluding to many of the mountain stories of the Old Testament.
In his book, Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI explains that in the Gospels Jesus of Nazareth presents himself as a ‘new Torah.’ This is particularly evident in the Sermon on the Mount (notice the setting!) where Jesus offers the Beatitudes as an interpretation of the Ten Commandments, according to Benedict. As Jesus Himself said in Matthew 5:17, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”
A similar dynamic is present in John 1. At Sinai, Moses carried the words of God down to the Israelites. In Jesus, the Word of God has become flesh. In fact, Jesus is portrayed in the gospels as a sort of new Moses, according to Benedict—the perfect mediator between God and man. Jesus’ association with Moses is intensified in the account of the Transfiguration, which takes place on a mountain and also includes the figure of Elijah, another mountain prophet of the Old Testament. (Incidentally, we Catholics celebrate the Transfiguration on August 6!)
But the Transfiguration and the Sermon on the Mount are hardly the only times mountains play into the gospel accounts. In fact, throughout the gospels we see Jesus repeatedly withdrawing to a mountain to pray in intimate communion with the Father, only to come down from the mountain to resume his ministry. The Greek word for mountain appears about 65 times in the New Testament and roughly two thirds of the mentions are in the gospels.
In a way, the biblical story of Christ is one extended account of God repeatedly coming down the mountain to enlighten, encourage, save, and simply encounter His people.
The word gospel, as many readers probably know, means ‘good news.’ The Good News of Christianity is that God has finally come down from the mountain in the most full, profound, and unequivocal way possible. If we as Christians say we know the way up that mountain, it’s only because God has marked out the path by first descending to us.
Stephen Beale is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island. Raised as an evangelical Protestant, he is a convert to Catholicism. He is a former news editor at GoLocalProv.com and was a correspondent for the New Hampshire Union Leader, where he covered the 2008 presidential primary. He has appeared on Fox News, C-SPAN and the Today Show and his writing has been published in the Washington Times, Providence Journal, the National Catholic Register and on MSNBC.com and ABCNews.com. A native of Topsfield, Massachusetts, he graduated from Brown University in 2004 with a degree in classics and history. His areas of interest include Eastern Christianity, Marian and Eucharistic theology, medieval history, and the saints. He welcomes tips, suggestions, and any other feedback at bealenews at gmail dot com. Follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/StephenBeale1