Our Lenten journey takes us from the temptation desert of last Sunday to today’s mountain of Transfiguration. Our leader in this journey is no other than the Son of God who wants to be sure that before He leaves us to return to the Father, we must have experienced with Him the two opposing spiritual forces and worlds—the spiritual field of darkness where the devil dictates and ravages soul and body; and the spiritual world of light where we tune to His frequency in order to hear the voice of the Father. He entered the desert alone because He has the ultimate power to defeat the cunning of the devil. He goes to the mountain with three of His disciples, who, at the time, were incompetent to face the devil, but received the privilege to behold His Glorious Face, with the assurance that, standing with Him alone, they can confront evil. That desert can be likened to this world ruled by the spirit of the devil, always charming and alluring but utterly destructive. The mountain is the spiritual terrain where God manifests Himself in glory and speaks in a clear voice, urging us to listen to Christ, His beloved Son. We are to choose the voice to which we must listen: the voice that promises to fill outer bellies while leaving inner nakedness, the voice urging us to bow to evil as we run in pursuit of earthly glory, reject reality to pursue illusion; or the voice of the Son of God, conqueror of evil, sin and death, giver of true freedom and peace.
The transfiguration—one of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary—invites us to another phase of Lent, where we turn our gaze on Christ rather than ourselves and the attractions which becloud the spirit, bury us in the subjectivity of the self, and impede the blossoming of grace in us. So unique is this event in the life of the early Church that it became one of the pervading themes in the spiritual practices of the oriental Christian Churches. We need a vision more than what our Western eyes and senses with their pervasive materialistic leanings can provide in order to glimpse the deeper truths of transcendent reality.
When they saw Moses and Elijah, the privileged apostles, Peter, James and John, were connected to the totality of salvation history—the law that establishes us as a covenant people, and the prophesy that makes us witnesses to the God of the covenant. Jesus’ conversation with Moses and Elijah reveals the centrality of the three and why Jesus is the fulfilment of all laws and prophesies. It implies that we have been given assurance about Christ’s Redeeming work and are to repose total confidence in Him. In this sense, the virtue of hope is rekindled as we now know that heaven isn’t just a fairytale.
We see the apostles—Peter, James and John—caught up in the luminosity of heavenly glory. Immediately, they want to stay and even propose to build houses for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. It doesn’t bother them with what equipment they would build houses on the mountain. Heaven is the land of possibilities; that is why without hammer, wood and digger, they thought they could erect a tent on the mountain. No fourth or fifth tent is necessary for themselves because they are already covered by the glory God (as a house). They echo the sentiments of the Psalmist who said: “One day within your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere” (Psalm 84:10). But it wasn’t heaven they saw, rather a vision of the likeness of the glory of heaven. What heaven is in reality, St. Paul tells us, “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor has it entered the heart of anyone, what things God has prepared for those who love him” (I Cor. 2:9). Having been prepared to face the Scandal of the Cross, the apostles learn that death is not an annihilation, rather the portal through which we must pass to glory. Even now our flesh must be transformed this Lent through penance until its innermost recesses are suffused with the life of the Spirit (G. Motte). Strengthened by this luminous glory, may we proceed without fear on our Lenten journey.
Fr. Chukwudi Jo Okonkwo