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Live
Letters Transfiguration
of the Lord |
The Catholic Telegraph
August 4, 2000When the Feast of the Transfiguration falls on a Sunday, its liturgy supersedes that of the Sunday in Ordinary Time. The live letter assigned to this feast is from the Second Letter of Peter, a book of the New Testament that we otherwise hear from only once in the three year cycle of Sunday readings. In this letter the author, speaking in the name of Peter and expressing the tradition of Peter, is defending the truth of the second coming of Christ against unorthodox opponents who seem to have held that there would be no such thing. In the first chapter, from which our reading is taken, he is striving to establish the authority and trustworthiness of the apostle and of the tradition that he represents.
What the apostles had told their followers about the final coming of Christ was not some sort of abstraction or ideal or fable. No, the apostles themselves had experienced the power and the glory of Jesus when He was transfigured before their eyes. He had flashed with the splendor of God and had been identified by the voice of God as God’s own Son in whom the Father was well pleased. This was not story but truth, and the majestic splendor that Christ demonstrated in the transfiguration served as a foretaste and guarantee of what still lay in store in the future in His final coming.
Moreover, there is also the prophetic promise of God’s word. It is not clear whether the author is referring to some specific passage of the Old Testament (e.g, Numbers 24.17, Daniel 7.13 f.) or to Jesus’ own teachings about the final future reflected, for example, in Matt. 24.29 ff., or to the whole tradition of the Hebrew scriptures with their recurring theme of God’s unending care for His people. The point is that God has promised to come to put things right at the end of time and that the transfiguration of Jesus was a prelude and prophecy of that final intervention.
The writer encourages his readers to be attentive to all this and to allow the promise of Christ’s final coming serve as a source of illumination and encouragement for them.
The feast of the transfiguration is a feast of hope. The revelation of Jesus’ glory and majesty that the apostles experienced on the mountaintop was given to them in the context of Jesus’ upcoming suffering and death. They were thus given some means to see what lay beyond the mysterious and troubling events that Jesus had been talking to them about. They were reassured that there were dimensions to Jesus that were not always apparent, dimensions that linked Him to the very glory of God.
For the Christians in the generation after the apostles the transfiguration was important, too. They knew about the death and resurrection of Jesus. They knew that He had promised to come again at the end of time to take the world definitively to Himself. But so far nothing had happened. Was it all an illusion, a fairy tale whose real meaning was something quite different from what they had been taught? The transfiguration serves as a response to questions like these. Jesus really and truly presented Himself in glory to His apostles. They had seen that His power and His majesty were real. It wasn’t an abstraction or an ideal. Likewise, after Jesus’ public life had ended and He had returned to His Father, His power and glory were not an abstraction or an ideal. He was still the same Jesus who had suffered and died and risen from the dead, the same Jesus that the Father had invited the apostles to listen to. He had promised to return at the end of time. That promise was as real and true as the glory that the apostles saw on the mountaintop. Jesus would come again because He is who He is, because His return was part of what God had promised to His people.
Our inclination, many generations after the apostles, is not so much to disbelieve in the second coming of Jesus as to look on it as irrelevant. At some point Jesus will come and put an end to earthly life as we know it. He will, as it were, turn out the lights and we will all live happily ever after with Him in heaven. That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t seem to have much to do with my day to day existence.
Yet it does. The second coming of Jesus is not merely the conclusion of earth’s history but also its fulfillment. Each day contributes to God’s plan for creation, a plan that is directed to God’s uniting to Himself all that He has created. Nothing that is, nothing that happens in the world is useless, irrelevant, disposable. It’s all directed somehow toward a final state in which all of us and all of our actions will be given final validation by being united to the risen and glorious Christ. Today, therefore, is not just one more twenty-four hour period in the history of the world. Today is one step forward in the cosmic life of Christ, one more pace toward the full acknowledgment of our worth and value in Christ that will be fully and finally expressed when Christ comes at the end of time.
And the Christ who comes will be the same Christ whose transfiguration we celebrate today.
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Conversation Questions
What reason do I have for optimism in my life?
How does my life help prepare the world for Christ’s coming in glory?
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