‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’ When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear (Mt.17:6). ⧾
On the second Sunday in Lent we always read the Gospel of the Transfiguration of Our Lord. We do so in order that our focus may be directed towards the glory of Easter and Our Lord’s victory over sin and death through His Passion and glorious Resurrection. The Preface of the Mass instructs us about the meaning of this mystery: After he had told his disciples of his coming Death, on the holy mountain he manifested to them his glory, to show even by the testimony of the law and the prophets, that the Passion leads to the glory of the Resurrection (Preface of the Second Sunday in Lent, The Roman Missal). More importantly however, at the intimate, interior level of our personal relationship with God, we recognise that the Cross in our life and specifically the Sacrament of the Cross which is the Eucharist are the means by which our life is conformed to and transformed by the grace of God. We describe this as the Paschal Mystery and through it we are given to share in the life of God. The effect of this Mystery in us is our personal transformation in Christ. We worship God and in so doing we are transformed into His likeness.
The Transfiguration describes what is rightly termed a theophany, a manifestation of God. In the Transfiguration Jesus is revealed as God’s Son, the Beloved. It is an act of self-disclosure in which a personal God reveals what we could not know about Him by ourselves. God reveals Himself not as an impersonal cosmological principle, an indeterminate force. He reveals the Trinitarian Mystery. This truth is permanent and definitive and it is the foundation of our Christian life. In his monumental work, The City of God, St. Augustine explains the importance of worship as exemplified by the posture of Peter, James and John who fell to the ground in the presence of God. It is nothing but folly, nothing but pitiable aberration to humble yourself before a being you would hate to resemble in the conduct of your life and to worship one whom you would refuse to imitate. For surely the supremely important thing in religion is to model oneself on the object of one’s worship (The City of God, VIII, 17). These words were an answer to the pagans of his day who objected that the God Augustine believed in, the very same God we believe in, was too demanding. The common objections we hear in our day is that you don’t have to be religious to be a good person; and the god that many profess to believe in just wants us to be nice and of course, to recycle. Such a god is not one before whom we fall down in worship and adoration, and such a god in time, becomes irrelevant. In truth, there is no worship involved in this, and by consequence nothing and no one to emulate and model oneself on. In this vacuum there is either idolatry of the self or despair. These errors to a certain extent have crept into the Church, and if unchecked, they have the power to lead us also down this path of meaninglessness and despair.