Second Sunday of Lent
“Jesus took Peter, John, and James and went up the mountain to pray.” Lk. 9:28
What if …
What if … the Transfiguration, so powerfully described in today’s gospel, was not really about a dramatic, dazzling change in Jesus, but was instead about the radical change that took place in the apostles – they could see Jesus differently?
What if … this classic story we heard today is ultimately a tale about you and me – and about moments in our life when God opened the eyes of our souls, and we were able to recognize the divine within and around us?
For example, I remember many years ago taking a course in theology that changed my whole understanding of God. It was a stunning experience. It was like a veil had been lifted – a kind of “transfiguration.”
I could see differently.
Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, tells the story about how he was doing something as simple as standing on a street corner in downtown Louisville when a transfiguration experience happened to him. The city and the people walking around began to glow. “There is no way of telling people that they are walking around shining like the sun.” What he discovered in that moment was that “the gate of heaven is everywhere!”
Perhaps what today’s gospel is trying to get us to see is that the Transfiguration of Jesus isn’t a spectacular special effects incident that took place a long time ago. It’s instead a sweet glimpse of heaven that can come to any of us right now – if we are able to see it.
It can happen to a mother, for example, when she first views the baby she gave birth to. It can happen to a person reading scripture when suddenly their eyes open wide at words that speak to a deep place within them. It can happen while listening to a great symphony or enjoying a walk on a brilliant autumn day or watching the delight of children on a Christmas morning or standing in awe before a masterful piece of art.
We sometimes call it a “Eureka moment.”
One writer, originally an admitted agnostic, tells this story about himself.
He writes: “I visited Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris as a student one time. It happened to be a Sunday afternoon organ recital. I knelt, transfixed by the cathedral’s ancient, incensed majesty. My senses suddenly became overtaken by the presence of God, by sight and sound so immense and soaring, I found myself crying. I didn’t grasp it that day, but I suspect God knew I needed to be awestruck. Maybe we confused and tepid believers occasionally need Jesus to take us up the mountain. Maybe we need a sign from above, a dazzling face on someone we thought we knew, a commanding voice from a shining cloud that envelops us.”
Transfiguration moments are experiences of enchantment that open our everyday mind to the heaven that is already present.
If we can see it.
Scripture describes these moments continually.
The Acts of the Apostles, for example, tells us that Transfiguration is the awareness that “we live and move and have our being in God.” It is the gift of wisdom that Moses received when he too went up on a mountain, just like the apostles in today’s story, and suddenly realized he was “standing on holy ground.”
What Moses also grasped was that the famous “burning bush” he saw was not an earthen plant on fire, but the gift of vision in his eyes.
Like the apostles in today’s gospel, he could see differently.
To again quote Thomas Merton, “Life is this simple: we are living in a world that is transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.”
If we allow ourselves to see it.
Unfortunately, again like the apostles in today’s gospel, we are often asleep. Consequently, we tend to miss the clues, the hints, the suggestions of Something being afoot that is beyond our everyday recognition, something that is way more than what meets the eye.
This is what Lent is really all about: a time to sharpen our inner eyes so that we can better see the “holy ground” already present in our lives; a time set aside to prayerfully ask:
What if …
What if I could see differently?
What if I could truly be transfigured just like those apostles in today’s Gospel story?
What would I be able to see?
Ted Wolgamot, Psy. D.
NOTE:
“God sees everything and answers in such a way that you cannot hide. There is no such a bunker, where you can hide from the God’s answer. Even if you destroy all our Ukrainian cathedrals and churches, you will not destroy our faith! Our sincere faith in Ukraine and in God.”
(Valodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine)
