“Three important scenes of Our Lord’s life took place on mountains. On one, He preached the Beatitudes, the practice of which would bring a Cross from the world; on the second, He showed the glory that lay beyond the Cross; and on the third, He offered Himself in death as a prelude to His glory and that of all who would believe in His name”
Fulton Sheen The Life of Christ 1970: 158
Over the last few weeks we have been reading through what we generally know as the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus goes up to a high place to teach the assembled crowds how to live in a way that is pleasing to God and will bring about human flourishing. This morning we see Christ up a mountain doing something quite different. The world around us has a good idea of what it thinks glory is: most of the time it looks like human success and triumph, just think of people winning a gold medal at the Olympics, people waving flags, noise, pomp, pageantry, all fine and good in its place, but essentially something fleeting and transitory, it goes, it doesn’t last. As Claudio Ranieri the erstwhile manager of Leicester City knows all too well.
Rather than concentrate on human ideas of glory, this morning’s readings give us a glimpse of God’s glory. In the Book of Exodus we see Moses going up Mount Sinai to receive the Law, the Ten Commandments to show Israel both what to believe and how to live. Moses spends time in the closer presence of God, so that when he comes back down the mountain he is shining, he is transformed and transfigured by the experience. It’s an experience which takes time, God tells Moses to come up and wait there, he waits six days before being invited to come up further. He spends forty days on the mountain, which prefigures Our Lord’s forty days in the wilderness before the start of his public ministry and our own forty days of Lent.
Jesus takes his closest disciples with him to show them something of the glory of God. He appears with Moses and Elijah to show them and us that He is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets. Jesus is the Messiah, and the Son of God. Christ is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets because they all look to him, they find their truest meaning in Him, they are fulfilled by Him. That is why the Church has always read the Hebrew Scriptures in a Christological Way: they point to Christ, who is the Word made flesh. The Church has never abandoned them, for in them we see a richness of material, a depth of proclamation throughout the history of Israel and its relationship with God which points to Christ, which can only be explained by Christ, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, he is what the prophets look towards, and their hope, and their salvation.
When God speaks he tells us three things about Jesus: he is the Son of God, he is loved, and we should listen to him – He is God, the Second Person of the Eternal and Divine Trinity, who created all that is and who will redeem it. We should worship Him, and obey Him. He is loved by God, love is what God is, the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is one of love, and our human love is but a pale reflection of God’s love for us, shown by his Son Jesus Christ on the Cross, where he dies for our sins. We should listen to him , what he says and does should affect us and our lives. – We have to be open to the possibility of being changed by God, ‘to live is to change, and to live well is to change often’ as John Henry Newman once said, love changes us, it is dynamic not static, it forms who and what we are.
Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone about this until after he has risen from the dead. The detail is important: Jesus will suffer and die upon the cross, taking our sins upon Himself, restoring our relationship with God and each other – this is real glory – not worldly glory but the glory of God’s saving love poured out on the world to heal it and restore it.
As this is the Sunday before Lent, Quinquagesima, fifty days before Easter we have a chance to spend time time with God, we have the prospect of a penitential season, a chance to focus on what really matters, away from the noise and bustle of normal life, a chance through prayer, reading the Bible and Sacramental encounter to spend time with God, to be close to him, and to let his love and grace transform us more and more into his glorious likeness.
That is why we are here this morning – to see that self same sacrifice here with our own eyes, to touch and to taste what God’s love is really like – to go up the mountain and experience the glory of God, what God is really like, so that God’s love may transform us, given a foretaste of heaven, and prepared to be transformed by God. This is true glory – the glory of the Cross, the glory of suffering love lavished upon the world. The Transfiguration looks to the Cross to help us prepare for Lent, to begin a period of fasting and prayer, of spiritual spring cleaning, of getting back on track with God and each other, so that we may be prepared to celebrate Our Lord’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, to behold true majesty, true love and true glory – the kind that can change the world and last forever, for eternity, not the fading glory of the world, here today and gone tomorrow, but something everlasting, wonderful.
So let us behold God’s glory, here, this morning, and let us prepare to be transformed by his love, so that the world may believe and trust in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed, as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.
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