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Lectionary Reflections

Transfiguration 2006

In the Early Church Christian Faith produced a clear hope for the fulfillment of all the God has begun and all that we are and can be, a fulfillment they called 'the eschaton,' 'the end of the age,' 'the kingdom which is to come.' It included the transfiguration of this world; my personal eternal destiny was tied up with the renewal of the whole creation.

This fulfillment is a future reality, but one that "visits" us now in this age. It continues to break into this world, this age, already, in the the person of Christ and in the gift of the Spirit to the Church. One of the early ascetical fathers said, "Breathe the air of the age which is to come"—live in a new way already, don't be conformed to the pattern of this age, which is passing away. This world will end. This age, this world, is decaying, passing, but it is also being renewed through a transfiguration, a metamorphosis, that will be finished only at the end of the age.

In the Middle Ages, Christian hope was transferred from the eschaton, that is, from the renewal and transfiguration of all creation, to what happens to me immediately after my death. It was an individualized Christian hope, cut off from the final renewal and transfiguration of creation as a whole. We lost the sense of the eschaton and hope in the renewal and transfiguration of this world—materiality and all—becoming concerned instead about my soul and my salvation. This world, this age, this life came to be viewed increasingly only as a preparation for the next. The world and creation lost much of its value in popular piety and even in certain strands of theology and spirituality.

Such "other-worldly" piety provoked a reaction. The Enlightenment translated hope in the eschaton into the hope of historical progress, which has its most radical expression in Marxist revolution. The Modern Age gradually came to deny anything that transcends this world and this age. There is no personal afterlife, no personal immortality. All there is is this world, this life. It accused the Church of using the promise of immortality to keep people subservient to political and economic structures, as a mechanism of coercion and control. (There was a certain truth to this.)

Against the Church, moderns asserted that this world has value in itself and can establish its own meaning and transfiguration. Christians, too, began to echo this claim. Within the Church, this reaction against otherworldliness can be seen in various forms of liberation theology. Vatican II itself called for a renewed engagement with the world, which is not to be reduced to an irrelevant step to eternity.

These long, historical struggles set up a kind of dilemma for us at a deep spiritual and psychological level. They pose a fundamental question: What do I live towards? I will live towards something. Towards this life and this world? Towards a life after my death? We struggle with this both consciously and unconsciously. But it is a false dilemma, these are false alternatives.

"Transfiguration" gives us a key for overcoming this dilemma. Jesus' transfiguration, his metamorphosis, is an icon, an image, of the relationship between the future age and this age. In the Transfiguration we see this age and this world, the very material stuff of our own existence, permeated with the Divine Glory, the Divine Energies of the Age to Come, and thus changed, transformed, transfigured, filled with light and life.

Over against an other-worldly piety, the Transfiguration proclaims the dignity, the beauty, the value of this world. Christ's flesh, the flesh of God, is the permanent indicator of just how valuable this world of matter, and our lives in this world, really are. It is this world which God loves, this world that has the capacity to be filled with the Divine Energy, this world which is called to be changed and transfigured so that God's Glory can shine in it.

Over against the Enlightenment and the Age of Modernity, which constantly tries to make this world an end in itself—which has perpetrated the huge, ideologized lie that this world can establish its own meaning—the Transfiguration is the sign that this world receives its light, its meaning, its value from God, from the Divine Energies, which can flood it and fill it with purpose and significance and life.

The Transfiguration of Christ tells us both that this world, the material stuff of existence, is good; and yet it is not an end in itself. Its very purpose and vocation is to be a vehicle, a resting place for the Divine Energies, so that the world can be healed, restored, and transfigured into a sacrament of God's presence. We are on a journey to the final transfiguration of this world, where there will be a new heaven and a new earth.

Despite momentary lapses in piety and practice, even theology, the Christian Church has always known this truth at a deep, at times unconscious, level. One of the main ways she has kept alive this understanding is in her tradition of Sacred Art, iconography. The sacred images are not about decoration, not about sprucing up a building. They have to do with a theological-spiritual vision, a way of understanding reality. That's why discussions about sacred art and iconography are really very far off the mark when they are reduced to debates about simplicity versus ornateness.

The Church's iconographical tradition, which belongs to the whole Catholic Church, East and West, and which has been solemnly confirmed by an authentic Ecumenical Council of both East and West—this tradition of sacred art embodies and presents before our physical eyes (not just our minds or our feelings) the image of this world and human beings transfigured. Sacred Art keeps alive before our eyes the vision both of God enfleshed in Jesus Christ and of what human beings can become in God. The images of Mary and the saints constantly present this to us.

When the sacred images are authentic, they are neither sentimental nor brutally realistic like a photograph. They show us what all of us are called to become in the transfiguring light of God's Divine Energies—specks of carbon dust of this universe called to be filled with the Divine Energies and Light of God. That is who you and I are.

All of this remains purely theoretical, though, until we are ready to allow ourselves to be changed and transfigured in Christ. That's the challenge of the Feast of the Transfiguration.

Where do I need to be changed?

Where do I need to allow the Divine Light into my life, into my relationships, into my work, into my family, into my thinking, into my emotions, into my desires?

How do I allow the Divine Energies to enter into my heart, the very center of my being?

How do I allow the Light of Christ to fill every dark and dingy nook and cranny of my being?

That's the challenge of the Gospel, the challenge of the call to Christian discipleship, and that's the challenge of the Feast of the Transfiguration.

—Fr. Chrysostom Frank

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