A Good Place to Be

Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord 

Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; 2 Peter 1:16-19; Mark 9:2-10

 

“It is good that we are here!”

 

That is what Peter said when he saw Jesus in his glory with Moses and Elijah.  The Lord stood between them as the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets.

 

Peter was overwhelmed with joy, relief and hope.  He and the other apostles had heard Jesus talk about his persecution, suffering, death and resurrection.  Peter did not want to believe what Jesus said, so he rebuked the Lord.  Jesus responded by calling Peter “Satan,” his adversary.  

 

Then Jesus told him and the others that the cost of following him was nothing less than self-denial and the cross.

 

Who would want to embrace that? 

 

Then Jesus them took Peter, James and John to a mountain, and he was revealed to them as God’s Son. 

 

It was only then that Peter began to understand the paschal mystery:

            The way to Easter was through Good Friday.

            The way to salvation was through the cross.

            The way to life was through death—death to self and death to sin.

 

The Transfiguration of the Lord was an invitation to faith.  It was also an invitation to conversion. 

 

Jesus gives us the same invitation that he gave to Peter, James and John.  He calls us to faith.  He calls us to conversion.  In all the ways that we—as individual disciples and as a church—are disfigured by sin and suffering, we can be transfigured by the grace of God.  When we gather as a people in the house of the Lord, we put our trust in that promise of Jesus; and when we engage in what Sacrosanctum Concilium, Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, called “the full, conscious and active participation” in our prayer and worship, we experience at least a glimpse of the glory that the apostles beheld on Mt. Tabor.  

 

Then we can say with Peter, “It is good that we are here!”—JC