Majestic Voice
High on the holy mountain in today’s Gospel, the true identity of Jesus is fully revealed in His transfiguration.
Standing between Moses and the prophet Elijah, Jesus is the bridge that joins the Law of Moses to the prophets and psalms (see Luke 24:24-27). As Moses did, Jesus climbs a mountain with three named friends and beholds God’s glory in a cloud (see Exodus 24:1,9,15). As Elijah did, He hears God’s voice on the mountain (see 1 Kings 19:8-19).
Elijah was prophesied to return as the herald of the messiah and the Lord’s new covenant (see Malachi 3:1,23-24). Jesus is revealed today as that messiah. By His death and resurrection, which He intimates today to the apostles, He makes a new covenant with all creation.
The majestic voice declares Jesus to be God’s own beloved Son, in whom the Father is well pleased (see Psalm 2:7). God here gives us a glimpse of His inner life. In the cloud of the Holy Spirit, the Father reveals His love for the Son, and invites us to share in that love, as His beloved sons and daughters.
Shadowed by the clouds of heaven, His clothes dazzling white, Jesus is the Son of Man whom Daniel foresees being enthroned in today’s First Reading.
He is the king, the Lord of all the earth, as we sing in today’s Psalm. But is He truly the Lord of our hearts and minds?
The last word God speaks from heaven today is a command—“Listen to Him” (see Deuteronomy 18:15-19). The word of the Lord should be like a lamp shining in the darkness of our days, as Peter tells us in today’s First Reading.
How well are we listening? Do we attend to His word each day?
Let us today rededicate ourselves to listening. Let us hear Him as the word of life, the bright morning star of divine life waiting to arise in our hearts (see Revelation 2:28; 22:16).
Saint John Damascene
Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration
In former times, the smoke and tempest, darkness and fire on Mount Sinai (Ex 19,16f.) revealed God’s extraordinary condescension, which showed that he who gave the Law was inaccessible… and that the Creator is made known by his works. But now everything is filled with light and radiance. For the architect and Lord of all things has come from the bosom of his Father.
He has not left his own domain, namely his seat in the Father’s breast, but has descended to be with us slaves. He has assumed the condition of a slave and become man in both nature and expression (Phil 2,7) so that the God who is incomprehensible to man might become comprehensible. Through and in himself he manifests the splendor of the divine nature.
Formerly, God united man with his own grace. When he breathed the spirit of life into the man newly formed from the dust, when he gave him all the best things he had, he honored him with his own image and likeness (Gn 1,27). He gave him Eden as his home and made him near brother to the angels.
But since we obscured and obliterated the divine image beneath the mud of our uncontrolled desires, the Compassionate One entered into a second form of communion with us, even more certain and exceptional than the first. While still remaining in the heights of his divinity he yet accepted what is beneath him, creating human nature within himself. He mingled the archetype with its image and today reveals his own beauty within it.
His face shone like the sun for he is identified in his divinity with immaterial light; hence he has become the Sun of justice (Mal 3,20). But his clothing became white as snow since they take on this glory on the surface, not by union, by relation and not by nature. And «a cloud covered them with its shadow», thus making available to the senses the shining radiance of the Spirit.
Pope Benedict XVI
Angelus Address, August 6, 2006
This Sunday, Mark the Evangelist recounts that Jesus took Peter, James and John with him up a high mountain and was transfigured before them, becoming so dazzlingly bright that they were “whiter than the work of any bleacher could make them” (Mk 9: 2-10).
Today, the liturgy invites us to focus our gaze on this mystery of light. On the transfigured face of Jesus a ray of light which he held within shines forth. This same light was to shine on Christ’s face on the day of the Resurrection. In this sense, the Transfiguration appears as a foretaste of the Paschal Mystery.
The Transfiguration invites us to open the eyes of our hearts to the mystery of God’s light, present throughout salvation history. At the beginning of creation, the Almighty had already said: “Fiat lux – let there be light!” (Gn 1: 2), and the light was separated from the darkness. Like the other created things, light is a sign that reveals something of God: it is, as it were, a reflection of his glory which accompanies its manifestations. When God appears, “his brightness was like the light, rays flashed from his hand” (Heb 3: 3ff.).
Light, it is said in the Psalms, is the mantle with which God covers himself (cf. Ps 104[103]: 2). In the Book of Wisdom, the symbolism of light is used to describe the very essence of God: wisdom, an outpouring of his glory, is “a reflection of eternal light” superior to any created light (cf. Wis 7: 27, 29ff.).
In the New Testament, it is Christ who constitutes the full manifestation of God’s light. His Resurrection defeated the power of the darkness of evil forever. With the Risen Christ, truth and love triumph over deceit and sin. In him, God’s light henceforth illumines definitively human life and the course of history: “I am the light of the world”, he says in the Gospel, “he who follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (Jn 8: 12).
