Transfiguration Means We Need To Believe God’s Truth Of His Love For Us!

If you haven’t figured it out yet, God is very patient with those who practice their faith.  The Chosen Race of Jews of the Hebrew Scriptures who either witnessed or were taught about what God did to release them from slavery took 40 years of wandering in the desert before fully accepting His love for them.  It has been 2000 years plus since Jesus walked the earth and Catholics are still questioning the teachings of Jesus and His plan for our salvation based upon a recent survey indicating only 31 percent of believers accepts that the bread and wine is transubstantiated into His body and blood and not just a symbol.

That same patience was shown with Jesus in regards to the confusion His Apostles illustrated when they accepted His teachings and miracles but then fought back when His plan did not fit their ideas and because they had to see before believing.  Peter disagreed with the trip to Jerusalem where Jesus would be tried, tortured and killed and Thomas would not accept Jesus’ Resurrection until he could touch His wounds from the crucifixion.

Jesus’ Transfiguration calls His Apostles and us to transform our lives by going beyond the visions we accept to share the truth about God’s love for us for everyone’s salvation.  We should not and cannot stand on a mountain or off to the side in hopes that people who practice Catholicism or those not practicing will be saved without our help if they don’t fully believe. 

God created us for the purpose of using our gifts to ensure that all His creation hear the Good News of Jesus Christ and His plan of salvation.  If we don’t, we face the same condemnation as those who reject God because we know better and didn’t do anything to make it known.

In St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians he writes: “We have our citizenship in heaven; it is from there that we eagerly await the coming of our Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”  Although we are not yet in heaven, we should be exercising the duties of citizenship in the coming reign of God even now.  There is no other goal available to us.

Chapter 15 of Genesis also confirms the importance of having faith and trusting that God will deliver upon His promise.  The covenant God made with Abram because he believed was credited to him as an act of righteousness which expresses the “right” attitude of man toward God.  St. Paul in his letter to the Romans and Galatian makes Abraham’s faith a model for that of all Christians.

Of course, the Transfiguration scene is a theophany, a manifestation of God that evokes the sense of a heavenly realm by a process of taking an idea, a dream, a goal or a vision and taking the necessary action steps to make it a reality.  For us, it is our daily Transfiguration: Communion of the Body and Blood of Christ.         

The entire episode of the Transfiguration is intended to clarify the divine identity of Jesus.  In Bob Hurd’s rendition of Transfigure us, O Lord written by him and published by OCP in 2002, we are given insights of what we can do as true believers of God’s love for us.  Let us take this week to look up the words of this hymnal or listen to it on You Tube.  Hopefully, it will enlighten us to take those extra steps to answer God’s call to us as true disciples of faith to love Him and all as Jesus loves us in hopes that God’s patience has been rewarded!

Reading 1: Genesis 15: 5-12, 17-18
Reading 2: Philippians 3: 17 – 4: 1
Gospel: Luke 9: 28b-36