Get There Through the Cross

Today's Transfiguration Feast gospel reading (Luke 9:28-36) recounts an experience from the inner circle of the apostles, Peter, James and John. These three went up on a mountain to pray with Jesus, according to Luke, and there they saw Christ transfigured, his divine glory revealed. The gospel author says that Christ appeared surrounded by light and talking with the Old Testament saints Moses and Elijah.

How do we achieve this glory? We get there through suffering, by uniting ourselves with our Lord in the glory which is the Cross. The Gospel story itself provides a clue that this is so. This is what Jesus is discussing with Moses and Eljah during the vision, his Exodus, which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem. On the tip of our Lord's tongue, witnessed by both the Law and the Prophets, are his intention to enter the Will of His Father, even though it lead to his death.

Likewise, we are called to journey toward the Cross. Benedict XVI tackled this difficult subject during an Angelus Lenten Meditation in March:

"At the Transfiguration, the Pope recalled, “Jesus listens to the Law and the Prophets who speak to Him of his death and resurrection.” In response to that discussion, the Pope continued, “Christ enters more deeply into this mission, adhering with all of Himself to the will of the Father; and He shows us that true prayer consists in uniting our will to the will of God.”

Jesus recognizes that “in order to reach glory He will have to pass through the Cross,” the Pope said. The Lord recognized that reality and accepted it. So too for Christ’s followers, "prayer does not mean evading reality and the responsibilities reality brings; rather it means a complete assumption of those responsibilities, trusting in the faithful and infinite love of the Lord.”

In Christ, prayer is always effective, Pope Benedict continued. He noted that in the Garden of Gethsemane, Christ asked the Father to save Him from death.” That prayer was answered, the Pontiff reminded his listeners. “The proof of this is the Resurrection.”

Union with Jesus in prayer is essential for all Christians, the Pope concluded “Only those who pray-- in other words those who entrust themselves to God with filial love-- can enter into eternal life, which is God Himself."

On Swooping Birds and Transfigured Messiahs

I love Sunday's Lectionary readings (Lent II, year C), which link an Old Testament theophany, Abram's Covenant Making (Genesis 15:1-20), with a New Testament one, Jesus' transfiguration (Luke 9:28-36). A theophany is an incident of God's self- revelation.

The Genesis account is incredibly earthy, even scandalous and humorous. It recounts God's instructions to Abram (his name change to Abraham comes later, in chapter 18) to lay out a sacrifice. Abram does so, but then is forced to wait all day, guarding the exposed carcasses which eventually attract carrion. The New American Bible translation here is anemic (what else is new?). For verse 11, NAB translates "Abram stayed with them." A better rendering (one followed by all other major English translations) is the infinitely more picturesque "Abram shooed them away."

What a testament to the scandalous earthiness of Abram's religion!

This YHWH is no mere God of the intellect, satisfied with a vague internal locution giving Abram bragging rights over the land. God demands physicality in the form of a sacrifice. What is more, that physicality becomes darned inconvenient to Abram. I visualize the elderly patriarch running frantically to and fro, trying desparately to keep the birds from making off with the sacrificial animal parts. Eventually, Abram falls into an exhausted sleep while only God himself completes the cutting of the covenant by walking alone between the sacrificed animals.

Likewise, in my mind, the Transfiguration is an earthy oddity in the New Testament. Recorded in all three synoptic gospels, it falls squarely into the middle of Jesus' earthly ministry, and, like an embarassing sore thumb, sticks out amidst the more pedestrian teaching and healing accounts. We moderns don't really know what to do with it.

The Transfiguration sits there, a solemn testament to the complex spiritual-physicality of Jesus' passion and resurrection. In all of the gospel accounts, this dream-like event is inextricably linked with the first direct prediction of Jesus' coming death to his disciples which follows. In fact, here in Luke that very passion is the very topic of conversation among Jesus, Moses and Elijah during the vision itself. How odd, how compelling, to find in the middle of the gospels something which both seems out of this world and yet so compellingly connected to it.

How like our God, the God of blessed bread and broken body, of shed blood and uplifted cup, of cleansing bath and clean conscience!