Dear Friends,
Today, I want to think about the Transfiguration of Jesus
with you. The liturgical feast of the Transfiguration is this Wednesday, August
6th (Matthew 17.1-9). Certain
words come to mind when thinking of this significant event told in the Synoptic
Gospels: radiance, awe in the apostles, the connectedness with Elijah and
Moses, towering figures in the Hebrew tradition.. Jesus and his disciples were
headed for Jerusalem ,
when they paused at Mt Tabor. There
Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James and John. In Jerusalem , dire experiences would happen,
including the passion and death of Jesus. Before the Resurrection, Jesus and
his followers would need the strength of the Transfiguration to steady themselves.
The experience of transfiguration is not just for Jesus, it
is for us. We are called upon to witness to the transfiguration of Jesus, but
also to witness to transfiguration in human life and to help it happen, however we can.:
to be the radiance of Christ for others
to be the
voice of the Father of Jesus for others, saying to them “You are my
beloved.”
The antithesis of transfiguration is disfiguration, and so
we come to August 6th, 1945, when an atomic bomb was dropped from
the belly of the US
airplane, Enola Gay, over the city of Hiroshima .
On that day, transfiguration gave way to disfiguration:
devastation, death, horror,
disbelief. The face of God was scarred beyond
imagination. God’s beloved, the innocent
ones were unrecognizable in the aftermath .
Its horror was underscored with death- dealing emphasis on August 9,
when Nagasaki
was bombed with an even stronger atomic bomb.
Today, we see the disfigurement caused in newborns whose
mothers were on drugs, the distended bloated bodies of the starving in
impoverished parts of the world, the wounded in war-zones, our own veterans.
People of good will do not inflict diabolical evil on
others. But unless we are alert and God-centered, we can and do disfigure
others by our blindness to the radiance
of Christ in them. On the other hand, we can use the power for good that we
have. We can encourage people whose faces are disfigured by boredom, horrendous
life experiences or masked with indifference. We can bring a glow of dignity to
those who have been humiliated. We can speak words of hope and bring a
realization of true worth to those whose faces reflect a belief in their own
unimportance.
Transfiguration is a human venture today as well as the
divine experience of Jesus in distant Galilee over two thousand years ago. “Be attentive to it
as to a lamp shining in a dark place.” (2 Peter 1.19)
