Whole, Divinely Human

The mystery of Jesus’ Transfiguration on Mount Tabor before his three disciples Peter, James and John, has an important place at the heart of the Christian community’s life of faith. Not only is this mystery celebrated on the Second Sunday of Lent, but also on the 6^th of August. These celebrations are based on the lived experience of the event by the disciples named above – that event which is so significant that it is related in the three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) and also in the Second Letter of Peter, which states “we were eyewitnesses of Jesus majesty” (2 Pt 1:16). St Leo the Great comments that in that event those three disciples were given a glimpse of Jesus’ divine identity in order to prepare them not to be dismayed when they accompanied him to the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, where they saw him agonized in prayer, and then, disfigured in his terrible Passion, albeit following from a distance out of cowardly fear.

Considering that John was present at Tabor, it is perhaps surprising that the Fourth Gospel provides no account of this event. However, the entire Gospel of John is, as it were, bathed in the light of Jesus’ glory. In the Prologue of this Gospel there is the affirmation: “we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (Jn 1:14). The ‘glory’ of this divine Son, however, was the reversal of the glamour of this world – exultation of pleasure seeking, human vanity or pride (cf. 1 Jn 2:16). His glory revealed the total outpouring of himself – the blood and water from his pierced side that is beheld and witnessed by the disciple who stood with the Mother of Jesus at the foot of the Cross (cf. Jn 19:35ff.)

All this background of the earliest Christian disciples’ experience in coming to terms with the true identity of him whom they were following, Jesus Christ, has its profound importance for us in Lent. For this holy season is meant primarily to focus our attention likewise on him, as the Way to the Truth of Life (cf. Jn 14:6). In order to be authentic followers or disciples of Jesus we must listen to him, as those three disciples at Tabor were told (cf. Mt 17:5). This implies, moreover, sharing in and entering fully into the Paschal Mystery of his Passion and Death, only through which we are led to the Risen Life of becoming the children of God (cf. Jn 1.12). To shilly-shally with the follies and foibles of our sinful inclinations, to hide in the shadows of our fears or doubts about facing Christ’s way of the Cross, would be to evade in a shallow manner encountering the reality of him, the Splendour of the Truth about being whole, divinely human, for he above all is the true Light coming into the world (Jn 1:9; 8:12).

We don’t stop at contemplating only the Lord Jesus in his glorious state. Neither do we stop at the Transfiguration in the fourth of the Mysteries of Light, which St John Paul II introduced as a new path to reflect upon the life of Christ in the Rosary with the Blessed Virgin Mary. But we pass on, to contemplate Jesus’ gift and mystery of the Eucharist, his Body given and Blood poured out to nourish and strengthen us to go on - as Abraham our father in faith was told to do (Gen 12:1f., the first reading for the Second Sunday of Lent). We have to leave our comfort zone of self, in order to discover his presence afresh in the beleaguered members of his Body in the suffering and the poor, to the victims of the world’s violence and cruelty, nearby, in our neighbour, the lonely housebound aged person… It is here, as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s contemplation led him to realize, that

                    Christ plays in ten thousand places,
                    Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
                    To the Father through the features of men's faces.

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Image above: The Transfiguration of Christ – Fra Angelico – Florence, San Marco Museum