The Gospel of the Transfiguration is always proclaimed on the second Sunday of Lent. This year is comes from Mark’s Gospel, where it follows right on the heels of Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah and Jesus’ first prediction of his upcoming violent execution. This prediction shakes Peter, who “thinks not as God does but as men do.”
Then, six days later, Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a “high mountain” – the place of vaster horizons – and reveals to them God’s thoughts. Those High thoughts (cf. Is. 55:9), revealed hiddenly in the Law of Moses and the Prophets, are brought to full Light only in Jesus who, as the beloved Son of the Father, came to unlock their meaning with the Key of the Cross.
As the eternal Word who shines with the splendor of Truth, Jesus is the Mind of the Father. In him, whose name means “God rescues,” the hidden thoughts of God’s own redeeming confrontation with evil will be fully laid bare only in the folly of the “word of the cross” (1 Cor. 1:18). This crazed divine wisdom can be understood only by disciples willing to obediently follow the Messiah along the way of suffering and the cross, i.e. in their own confrontation with evil “according to the pattern shown you on the mountain” (Ex. 25:40).
Disciples are to be like Abraham, who was willing to give up all control of what he loved most, his only beloved son, by surrendering Isaac back to God in a symbolic sacrifice — prefiguring God’s own willingness to do the same with his beloved Son.
For God so loved the world that he gave over his only begotten Son (Jn. 3:16).
The Transfiguration is also a revelation of the whole Trinity, as the Father’s voice thunders and the Spirit overshadows the incarnate Son, bright revelation of Jesus as God’s mercy. Here we see a Trinitarian confrontation with evil that will find its triumph in the resurrection of the Crucified God.
…how much more shall the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify your conscience from dead works to serve the living God (Heb. 9:14).
During Lent, we are invited to renounce our dead works and enter more fully and radically into this paschal economy – by works prayer, fasting and almsgiving. We are to embrace our own crosses and deaths as points of surrender, pledging to give all that we love back to God as he wills, trusting he will give it all back to us again in the Age to Come.
Only then are we truly free, ready do his will, no matter what.
Only then can we be transfigured and reveal to the world the light of God’s merciful love in the face of evil.
Neal Obstat Theological Opining 