The disciples
who were with Jesus made a little error. The gospel writer even says so. Peter,
James and John all wanted to be able to concretize and define their experience.
They could not sit with the mystery and the unexplained nature of it. Their
response was to erect booths or tents so that it the experience could be
contained and to some extent understood.
I guess they also felt that the buildings could help convey their
experience. But in some ways what they were trying to do was to limit God, to
define God in their terms and in their own space and they were doing so for
very real human reasons.
This
is just what we do whenever something of importance happens, we tend to want to
put up a monument, partly in order to honor the people, partly to aid our
memory of the incident, but also in order to make it confinable and
explainable. It has been argued that the Church is nothing more than a
historical monument to God. Not something vibrant and alive, but rather
something more to do with memory and our inability to cope with the freedom of
God and so we make a structure in the hope of being able to contain God.
"Then alone do we know God truly, when we
believe that God is far beyond all that we can possibly think of God.” (Thomas
Aquinus)
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