Homily for Feast of Transfiguration

Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration

Aug. 6, 2023
Collect
2 Peter 1: 16-19
Matt 17: 1-9
Villa Maria, Bronx
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

(by Albert Bloch)

The feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord is one of those few feasts or solemnities during the year that can supplant an ordinary Sunday celebration.  Like Sunday, it’s a feast of our Lord, and this particular feast anticipates the glory of his resurrection.

In the collect or opening prayer, we prayed, “O God, in the glorious transfiguration of  your Only Begotten Son, … you wonderfully prefigured our full adoption to sonship.”

In the transfiguration of our Lord Jesus, God the Father reveals once again—it also happened at his baptism (Matt 3:17)—that Jesus is his beloved Son.  The collect, however, ties this wondrous event to our adoption as God’s sons and daughters, to our being adopted into the divine family thru our relationship with God’s natural Son.  How that’s so isn’t so obvious.  The collect even refers to “the mysteries of faith,” and surely that we are God’s adopted children, also beloved, is a mystery of faith.

St. Peter writes, “We possess the prophetic message that’s altogether reliable” (2 Pet 1:19).  The message he refers to is, of course, the Father’s proclamation, “This is my beloved Son with whom I’m well pleased” (1:17; Matt 17:5).  That divine voice scares the bejeebers out of Peter, James, and John, Jesus’ most beloved disciples.  But the voice, the message, is meant for them, not for Jesus.  It’s a reassurance for them that Jesus is beloved like Moses and Elijah, that he walks in their prophetic footsteps.  Remember:  a prophet is one who “speaks for” God, which Moses and Elijah surely did.  And so does Jesus, the voice assures the 3 trembling apostles.

But in the gospel account the voice speaks further.  The apostles are commanded, “Listen to him” (17:5).  They’re to listen to him when he teaches them and the crowds, as he’s been doing thru the parables we’ve been hearing for the last several Sundays; and when he predicts his coming passion, death and resurrection; and when he tells them now, “Don’t be afraid” (17:6).

They shouldn’t be afraid, because when they listen to the Father’s beloved Son, who keeps company with Moses and Elijah, who’s the Lord’s final prophet, they become part of that exalted prophetic company.  They take possession of the reliable prophetic message.  They make it their own.  This is a mystery of faith.

So do we take possession of the message when we listen to Jesus.  Then we begin to become God’s adopted children.  We begin to become co-heirs with Christ (collect) of the kingdom of heaven.  With St. Peter, we attend to Jesus’ message and to our destiny “as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts” (1:19).  At the Easter Vigil liturgy, Christ is proclaimed as “the one Morning Star who never sets,” who will return from death’s domain to “shed his peaceful light on humanity” (Exsultet).  Jesus’ transfiguration is an early glimpse of that brilliant light, the light into which we, too, are invited.  The entrance way is Jesus himself, “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) of believers—of those who listen to him and follow him into God’s kingdom, into divine fellowship, into divine adoption.