Mar 1 Sun
Why the Transfiguration?
With the Transfiguration, Christ wanted to strengthen the apostles’ faith in the face of his coming Passion.
By extension, Christ’s glory, briefly revealed on the mountain, shows the hidden glory of his Body the Church that radiates in the sacraments.
When we receive the sacraments of the Church, we participate in the Transfiguration. Peter, James, and John saw the radiance of the Son of God. In the sacraments, we receive that radiance, God’s grace. With the apostles, we have “the hope of glory.”
The voice of the Father bids the apostles to “listen” to his beloved Son. To listen to Christ means both to grasp what He says and to carry it out. We can do so with the help of grace, bestowed on us in Jesus Christ.
Grace is the help God gives us to respond to our vocation of becoming his adopted sons, as children of God. It introduces us into the intimacy of the Trinitarian life.
The first effect of grace is a ‘new identity’: it makes us children of God. The holy life God calls us to is not any life we may wish. His design or plan is that we should become “his adopted sons” sharing in “the intimacy of the Trinitarian life.” That is our divine vocation. This is impossible to attain without God’s help. And that help is grace.
Grace precedes, and prepares the free response of man. Grace responds to the deepest yearnings of human freedom, calls freedom to cooperate with it, and perfects freedom.
What does my freedom yearn for? Does it want to choose perfect happiness forever?
Yet we know from experience from our fallen human nature that our freedom is not that free. It needs to be healed and helped.
This is why God’s grace does not replace our freedom or overpower our freedom. Instead, grace guides our freedom, if we say yes to it. Grace is there before we make a choice, gets us ready to make that choice, and draws that choice out of us.
What is my response to grace?
Recall St. Paul’s advice: “Bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God.”
In our ordinary life, we will experience some hardship without looking for it. And we will bear some additional hardship if we are faithful to our Lenten resolutions.
Let us be very aware that we have the strength that comes from God to bear these difficulties through the sacraments we have received: Baptism, Confirmation (if we have received it), Matrimony (if we are married), Holy Orders (in the case of a priest or deacon), the Holy Eucharist, and Confession, if we need it.
Our lives will be conformed to the will of God,
- if we bear the small hardships that come our way
- if we cooperate with God’s grace.
For a little while, we are under a kind of dark cloud, but God’s “own design” is for us to be gloriously transformed, like Christ on the mountain, forever.