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Last week we saw Jesus being tempted, like the rest of us.
It was so human. Now, this week, we see him transformed
into dazzling white light! Not so human. What is going
on?
I want to describe an Ignatian prayer experience that
could shed some light on this Transfiguration.
Imagine yourself sad and discouraged, wishing God would
help you. You want your faith back, which used to be
strong. But you do not find it. You go along in your
normal patterns. Now, suppose that all at once you find
yourself moved and attracted to God in a way you cannot
doubt, a way that is beyond you but also within you. After
the experience, you cannot really doubt that it was from
God, even though you do not really understand it.*
This would be an important moment, wouldn’t it—a
transformation (though brief) of your experience of God, a
reshaping of it.
Call it a "transfiguration."
In such a prayer, unusual as it is, God gives us a brief
vision of how things really are at their core, impossible
to describe here. But maybe the experience is to keep us
from getting discouraged, or letting our attention drift
away while he is teaching us.
Now apply such an experience to the scene of Jesus’
Transfiguration in Sunday’s Gospel.
The apostles suddenly behold Jesus with his divinity
shining forth. It breaks through their usual filters.
Their experience of Jesus is being transfigured. For a
moment they see Jesus in the complete union with the God
that he is.
Notice that I said, “in the complete union with the God
that he is,” not a union that he “has.” In Jesus, divinity
and humanity are completely at one with each other. Daily
onlookers saw only the human, but in this passage, Jesus
is showing the apostles his whole self, divinity in its
complete oneness with its humanity.
Why such a sudden revelation to them?
Perhaps this scene is just one stage of the instruction he
had been giving to the apostles throughout the whole
Gospel. Just before our passage he had finally taught them
what a real Messiah is. He said that the “Son of the
living God” (or in other words, the Messiah) “must go to
Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief
priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third
day be raised” (Mt 16:13-23). A shocking revelation for the apostles, and for us
too.
Maybe the apostles were at last ready for it, after so
many months, and maybe we are too.
But notice Peter objecting vehemently, taking Jesus aside
and rebuking him. “God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall
ever happen to you.” Maybe that is your reaction too and
mine as well! Jesus responds. He goes so far as to call
Peter “Satan” for resisting the new revelation. Suffering
and death are not foreign to Jesus, the Messiah. They are
of the essence. Such a hard lesson this is for each of us.
Suffering, death and resurrection are at the heart of
love!
I suppose the Transfiguration was the way for Jesus to
reassure them and us that such awful sounding things
actually fulfill his divinity. They are God’s love shining
forth. How many of us have time to even think of such a
miracle, such a transfiguration?
Go and pray.
John Foley S. J.
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*Ignatius Loyola describes this kind of prayer
experience as follows: “ … an occasion when God our Lord
moves and attracts the will in such a way that a devout
person, without doubting or being able to doubt, carries
out what was proposed. This is what St. Paul and St.
Matthew did when they followed Christ our Lord.” From
The Spiritual Exercises, #175. See, for instance,
Mt 9:9.
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