Today’s Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent tells us of the Transfiguration of Jesus (Matthew 17:1-9). St. Matthew did not write his account in a bubble, far removed the Jewish traditions of his day. It is not by coincidence that Jesus brought three of his apostles with him into the mountains for His identity to be revealed to them. The mountain was a traditional place of revelation in the Jewish faith, as we see in the life of Moses (Exodus 24:1) or the life of Isaac (Genesis 22:2). St. Matthew’s description that Christ’s face radiated like the sun is similar to the description of the face of Moses descending from the mountain, whose skin shone because he had been talking with God.
The appearance of Elijah and Moses with Jesus reveals that Jesus is the fulfillment of the long line of prophets, and that Peter, upon witnessing this, cries out, “Lord, it is good for us to be here!” The text reveals something of great importance about the identity of Jesus Christ. Specifically, it unites Jesus to God. For it is not the skin of Jesus that shone, as the skin of Moses had, from speaking with God but, rather, the light shone from Jesus Christ himself, “His clothes . . . dazzling white” (Matthew 17:2). In other words, the glory of God did not shine ON Jesus, as it did for Moses, but FROM Jesus, who is God, and mysteriously, also God’s Son. God himself declares from the ‘bright cloud’, with a voice so well known to the Hebrew scriptures, that, “This is my Son . . . listen to Him.” Finally, it is the “wonder” and “awe” normally reserved for God that the apostles offer to Jesus. He is truly the “Lord.” The God of Israel is now both conceptually and actually united with their rabbi who is, in fact, God, as God’s son. We see Jesus then, in a sense, enthroned in all his glory as the psalmist writes when describing the Lord’s enthronement, “The Lord is King . . . Clouds of thick darkness are all around Him … His lightnings light up the world . . . Light dawns for the righteous and joy for the upright of heart.” (Psalm 97)
We see the beautiful way in which this text unites so perfectly the insights about God found in the Hebrew Scriptures to Jesus, and how this same text mysteriously unites Jesus to God Himself. What are we to take from this Gospel passage to the altar of God and, with His blessing, into our lives and out into the world? What does it mean to know that, as St. Paul writes, “at the name of Jesus every knee shall bend, in heaven and on earth, and under the earth . . . every tongue confessing that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father”? (Philippians 2: 10-11) The Transfiguration invites us to a disposition in which we see the world in a new way.
First, that in every way, the world is, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manly Hopkins wrote, “. . . charged with the grandeur of God.” That somehow our world is infused, corrected, renewed, restored, and fulfilled in God’s Son. As such, our worldview might easily be effected in that all that we are, all that we have, and all that we do, is unified in Christ Jesus our Lord. What a sacred world we have and what a great responsibility we have to use it for the sake of the One who has given it to us, Who has restored it, and Who will come again. After the Transfiguration, we can never look at the world the same way again.
It is in Christ’s transfigured state, in His full divinity and His full humanity, that we gain a glimpse into the eschatological reality of the world that is to come for us in the resurrection. In this fact we find a second point for our own personal reflection. For the Transfiguration is part of St. Matthew’s narrative that seems to me the most imaginative. Not that it is the most unlikely, but rather that it involves fully our imaginations. We see the light and glory of what is to come for us all if we embrace Christ, and in seeing this, we can imagine ourselves in that light, there with the Lord. Is not imagination such a valuable tool in helping us to live good lives? Is it not our imagination that allows us to envision the possibility of who we might be, who God’s loving yearns for us to be, and who we were created to be? After all, the Catholic moral life is not formed by simply learning a series of rules, but by realizing, through Christ, our potentiality for holiness. A potential made most fully, and most “wholly” manifest in the light of the Transfiguration.
So as we approach the altar of God on this holy feast, let us offer to him what we have learned today from the Gospel of St. Matthew, namely that: (1) we know His son to be the fulfillment of a promise made long ago and ascribed in the living history of Israel; (2) that deeper understanding of Christ which comes from recognizing His sonship; (3) a special recognition that God is united anew to all created things; and (4) that we are invited, and indeed ‘united’ to the life and works of Christ our Lord, so as to shine with a holiness that lies ready to be awakened in each of us.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!