Let us allow Jesus to be transformed

Jesus takes his chosen disciples Peter, James and John to a mountain wilderness to reveal to them the truth about his deity. He does this after his teaching period, Peter’s messianic confession, and before the final journey to Jerusalem, where he was to be crucified. The transfiguration of Jesus, accompanied by some kind of sensually perceptible signs: “His face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light”, happens during his prayer. Then Jesus talks with the great prophets of the Old Testament: Moses and Elijah – as Luke writes – about what will happen in Jerusalem. From the cloud comes a voice: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, listen to him.” Students are amazed, confused, and then fearful. Jesus reassures them: “Get up, do not be afraid!” After his transformation, he commands them to be silent about this event, “until the Son of man rises from the dead.”

Let us try together to consider the essential message of today’s Gospel.

The initiative to meet Jesus belongs to him: it is Jesus who chooses the people whom he wants to make himself known to, and the time, place and manner of revelation. Jesus entrusts his greatest secrets to a few, having prepared them in advance by teaching and being with him. He waits until those he chose mature to reveal to them another deeper secret. Place of Transfiguration: the mountainous wilderness is not accidental. You have to let Jesus take you to separate places, follow Him where He wants to take us. Loneliness, seclusion, silence, the symbol of the mountain create privileged conditions for meeting God. In Luke’s Gospel it is said that Jesus on the mountain began to pray and that was when He was transformed.

During the transfiguration, Jesus does not speak to his disciples, he does not tell them anything: he allows them to simply experience himself, as if in silence. The Transfiguration reveals not only the divinity of Jesus, but also the mystery of the Holy Trinity. The Holy Spirit, although not mentioned directly in the pericope, is apophatically present in Jesus’ prayer and in giving the disciples a spiritual gaze, thanks to which they see Jesus in divine glory. Divinity appears to the disciples as a captivating beauty. In the luminous cloud, which can also mean the symbolic presence of the Holy Spirit revealing the Father’s voice: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased, listen to him.” The Holy Spirit is the mutual love of the Father and the Son, and it is precisely as Love that the Triune God reveals himself to us. It can be said that Jesus is silent during the Transfiguration, so that the disciples can hear His Father’s voice. The transforming power of Jesus’ prayer is made available to the disciples and becomes their prayer in the Holy Spirit. The presence of Moses and Elijah additionally tells the disciples that their Master is the one whom the prophets announced and the chosen people awaited for centuries. The God of Moses and Elijah, the God of the living and not the dead, is also the God of Peter, James and John, the same and only God.

The discomfort of the students and their subsequent fear are perfectly understandable: meeting God face to face is fearful, even frightening. God reveals himself as radically Other, coming from beyond time and death. Man in the presence of God worries, because for his carnal nature, eternity means the end.

The exegetes agree that the experience of Jesus’ transfiguration, the revelation of the fullness of his divinity, was to prepare selected disciples for the near experience of the passion and death of their Master. Being witnesses of his shameful death, they were to remember in faith that Jesus is eternally living God, the one who would rise from the dead. As we know, the experience of Jesus ‘transfiguration did not prevent Peter from denying his Master in the moment of trial, but we can rightly assume that his quick conversion and acceptance in faith of the event of Jesus’ death and resurrection was due to this experience.

What does God’s Word mean to tell us? The meaning of Christian existence is to live in closeness with Jesus in the Holy Spirit, with God the Father. God is Someone real who makes Himself known and wants to be known. Our whole life makes sense as long as it is openness to meeting Him. As Karl Rahner says, man is an event of a self-communicating, or revealing, God. Our moral life, although it has its autonomy and goodness, essentially serves to open and prepare us for the direct experience of an encounter with God. Prayer and contemplation are necessary preconditions for experiencing God. And a certain seclusion, tranquility and loneliness create a privileged context for this meeting. Ultimately, it is always Jesus who chooses us and when and how we meet.

But it is up to us whether we are able to recognize this choice and be free to obey God the Father, who encourages us to listen His Son. Obedience to God, understood as a voluntary submission to the guidance of the Holy Spirit out of love for Jesus, is a fundamental and necessary condition for God’s revelation in our lives. The encounter with God, even if it is directly and completely lonely, takes place in the space of common tradition – Moses and Elijah – and community – Peter, James and John – that is, of the Church. In every real encounter with God, there is an announcement or memory of his death and resurrection, the cross of Jesus, in which not so much death is revealed, but precisely – as St. Paul – glory to God. The meeting with the true God here on earth foreshadows His glorious coming and life with Him in eternity.

One may doubt whether the theology of meeting with God outlined here, read in today’s Gospel, is not reserved only for the chosen few, saints and mystics. Yes, each of us, by virtue of God’s election, has a different calling and is called to a different fullness of holiness. Both St. Thomas and St. John of the Cross agree that there is a hierarchy of full possible union with God, that is, some people are called to a smaller, and others to a greater closeness with Him, but each receives the grace of a personal fullness according to his own, designated by God, measure. Not everyone is Moses or Elijah, Peter or John, but each of us is a beloved and unique child of the same God who, in Jesus Christ, became one with every human being and for whom we wish to be transformed.

In Lent, a privileged period of God’s grace, let us desire to meet and experience the closeness of Jesus. Even if everything in our life seems to be distracted from Him, distracting us, and everyday life appears to be a current of unbeatable ordinariness, in which we do not expect to meet Jesus revealing his deity to us. It is worth remembering that this meeting is really the meaning of Christian and human life. Nothing else. All the rest of our life: relationships with others, the quality of our actions, personal happiness, peace of heart are only a consequence of meeting Jesus or not having Him.

Today’s Gospel is for us to wish to go with Jesus to a lonely and lonely place, to pray in silence, to get to know Him better, as God for you and for me. Let us allow Jesus to be transformed.

Number of views:
145