Melkite, 18th c.
Translation of the Epistle for the Second Sunday of Lent
Brethren: Even as you have learned from us how you ought to walk to please God – as indeed you are walking – we beseech and exhort you in the Lord Jesus to make even greater progress. For you know what precepts I have given to you by the Lord Jesus. For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that you abstain from immorality; that every one of you learn how to possess his vessel in holiness and honour, not in the passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God; that no one transgress and overreach his brother in the matter, because the Lord is the avenger of all these things, as we have told you before and have testified. For God has not called us unto uncleanness, but unto holiness, in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew
At that time, Jesus took Peter, James and his brother John, and led them up a high mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. And His face shone as the sun, and His garments became white as snow. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elias talking together with Him. Then Peter addressed Jesus, saying, Lord, it is good for us to be here. If You will, let us set up three tents here, one for You, one for Moses, and one for Elias. As he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased; hear Him. And on hearing it the disciples fell on their faces and were exceedingly afraid. And Jesus came near and touched them, and said to them, Arise, and do not be afraid. But lifting up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only. And as they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus cautioned them, saying, Tell the vision to no one, till the Son of Man has risen from the dead.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Transcription of Sermon Coming Soon!
We better arrive at a goal, if we know what it is, and we better live our Lenten commitments of prayer and asceticism, if we have a reason to do so. And that’s why the Holy Church gives us the Mystery of the Transfiguration at the very beginning of our Lenten season so we can have a goal and a reason outside of Lent to persevere in our good commitments.
All heresies reside in the extremes. The Arian heresy denied the divinity of Christ, Apollinaris denied the humanity of Christ; and it’s precisely the transfiguration which overcomes both of those heresies. And today, although not necessarily heretics, some stress God’s transcendence, others his immanence. We see the apophatic theologians who say that there is nothing we can say that is adequate about God, and the kataphatic theologians say that we can describe attributes of God. We’re somewhere in between. On the other hand, St. Thomas Aquinas, after writing all of his body of work, had a profound experience of the Blessed Trinity and he wrote nothing after that. And he said, “Everything I’ve written is straw.” And nonetheless, he is the official theologian of the Catholic Church. He’s the only one. So, we’re somewhere in the middle of this transcendence and this immanence of God.
He’s here with us. He is truly Emmanual, God among us. He’s Yahweh. He’s Yeshua. He is God who saves. And in Lent, we consider the Passion and the Death, but we also do that in the context of victory, in the context of resurrection, and heaven that awaits us. Yes, we follow Christ Crucified, but we also follow Christ Victor. And in the Transfiguration, we see one of the signs of victory, which is precisely this preternatural gift called claritas or clarity. And this is one of the gifts that the resurrected followers of Christ will experience in the resurrected body.
There are four preternatural gifts that the resurrected body will experience. One is called agility, another is called subtlety, another is called impassibility, and then this one is clarity.
Agility is the ability to move with speed, and ease, and grace without being weighed down by physicality. We see this in Christ as He walks on the water.
There’s subtlety. Paul says in the Letter to the Romans, that when we, even though our bodies were sown in corruption, our bodies will rise to be spiritualized. They’ll remain to be… they’ll remain physical beings, but spiritualized through this glorification, this participation in the glory of God. And so, this impassability, this… this better said, this subtlety, this gift of subtlety is how Our Lord passed through the womb of Mary in His Birth. This subtlety of Christ’s body after His Resurrection is how He passed through the door to visit the Apostles without opening the door or even knocking. He just passed through it. He didn’t cease to have a physical body. The body is spiritualized in the resurrection.
There’s also something called impassibility, which is something that Adam and Eve had, the inability to suffer in one’s body. They had that before the Fall. We see a sign of this in Christ when the Jews want to pitch Him off the side of the hillock, off that cliffside, and He walks through them without suffering any harm because it wasn’t His Hour.
And so, clarity is the gift that we see in this mystery of the Transfiguration. Clarity, then, is the emanation of grace through the body. And notice too that this is the only gift that has to do with the person, whereas the others have to do with the abilities of the body. This one regards the body itself, the risen body. So, clarity for the risen will reveal the virtues that each one of us lived in this life, perhaps in a hidden way, and nonetheless, it will be revealed through the body, the risen body, thanks to this claritas. All of the glory of the divinized soul through grace will be revealed through the body. This is what the Church has always taught. And Our Lord is giving a foretaste of this to His followers.
If you think of a soldier who comes back and he wears metals that reveal past heroism, our bodies will reveal past virtue. Notice too that the sources of light in this mystery of the Transfiguration are multiple. There’s the light that comes from the Body of Christ, the glorified Body of Christ. There’s the light that comes from His garments. Imagine too that the clothing that Our Lord was wearing was most likely made by the Blessed Mother. And then there’s the light that comes from the Shekinah, the heavy dense cloud that was bright and shone on Christ. This reminds us of when Moses went up Mount Sinai and spoke with God. And you see the Shekinah, this dense heavy cloud descends upon Him in which he has conversed with God. And when he comes down from the mountain, what happened? He didn’t know it, but the Jews couldn’t look at his face because he was so resplendent. And that was just from conversing with God face to face.
In this mystery of the Transfiguration, Christ is not a mere human mediator. He is the source of that light. You could imagine how bright that must have been then for the Apostles. St. Gregory the Great says, “The garments reveal the glory of the Church, the glorified Church in heaven.” So, notice that this intimate contact of Christ’s clothing does not escape this transforming light, this divinization. In Revelation 19, it says that, “Behold the bride who is dressed in the good deeds of the saints.” Think about what that means, that how beautiful the Church will be, the splendor of the Church in Heaven, what the Bride of Christ is going to look like, is something that you and I are determining, because it’s precisely our theological virtue, faith, hope, and charity, and the degree with which we cooperate with that virtue, that will determine a corresponding beauty in the garments of the Bride of Christ. Notice too that it’s this intimate contact of the clothing with the body of the Church, who is the body of Christ, and Christ is the head that also brings about this splendor.
And God speaks these beautiful words. “This is my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased; Hear Him.” We hear the Father speak twice in the Gospels. And He says the same thing because that’s all He says. There’s nothing more for Him to say. The only utterance that God has is one and it’s Himself. And this utterance is not identified with Him. This utterance is the Logos.
Logos means concept or thought or word and Christ is the Word. He’s the concept of God. He’s the thought of God who is not identified with the Father, and therefore He’s distinct from the Father, and this is the beginning of Trinitarian theology. God’s thought of Himself could not lack anything or it would be imperfect. In fact, it doesn’t even lack personhood, and that’s why the Logos is a person. He’s not a lonely Muslim God who existed before creation and had no one to love. Rather, God is a communion of persons, and that’s why of needs, God is a trinity. So, there’s God who loves, God who is loved, and the love between the two. And so, we get a certain glimpse of this in this mystery.
And when does God say, “Behold my beloved Son in whom I’m well pleased”? It says it twice at the baptism of Christ and here in the Transfiguration; basically, pointing out the bookends of Christian life. At the moment of baptism, when divine life invades our souls and the Blessed Trinity takes up dwelling in our hearts and starts to live in us, making of us temples of God, that’s the beginning of our eternal life. The life of grace says, Thomas Aquinas, is initium vitae aeternae. It is the beginning of eternal life. Heaven has already begun. Heaven began for us in our baptism. But then there’s this other bookend of Christian life, which is the eschaton, the end of all things when our bodies will rise from the dead, some to glory, some to shame. And so, God says, “Behold, my beloved Son, and whom I will pleased,” at these two moments in Christ’s earthly life to show us our dignity and our calling; what we are and what we’re called to be; what we’re called to live in to participate in His Trinitarian love.
And then He says “In whom I’m well pleased,” / ‘whom I delight.’ This is really beautiful. You know we often consider God’s omnipotence, His omniscience, His holiness as Divine attributes, but it does our souls good to consider the divine attribute of His delight, His delight in himself. And His delight in Himself is not selfish because it’s outgoing. It’s a pouring out. Bonum diffusivum sui, says Thomas Aquinas. Goodness is expansive, it has to give of itself. And that’s why also God is a trinity, and that’s why God has a Church that He joins to Himself as His own body because goodness is expansive, goodness gives of itself, and lets us share in His own inner life, and that’s why the light of the Body of Christ, the light of the Shekinah of the Father, is the same similar light to that which emanates from His clothing, the Church.
Of course, this delight of God is logical. How could he have his own glory without rejoicing in it? Peter says, “It is beautiful to be here.” Καλον (kalon). It could be good. That works as a translation, but he says, καλον, which often is beautiful. “It’s beautiful…” What’s beautiful? “…to be here.” Basically, he’s saying that all truth, goodness, beauty is distilled down to this one moment, and he doesn’t want it to end because he’s beholding the Face of the One for whom he was made. And so, this is a glimpse of heaven for the Apostles. “It is beautiful to be here.”
There’s an ancient Latin hymn, Splendida facta est ut sol facies Jesu, dum respiceret in eum Pate. “The face of Jesus was made to shine like the sun, while the Father cast His glance upon Him.” Basically, saying that the look of the Father is reflected in the sacred humanity of Christ and that light then comes from the gaze of the Father. So, it’s no wonder with all of this now that Peter would say in his Second Letter, at the very beginning, “His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who has called us to His own glory and excellence, by which He has granted to us His precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of divine nature.”
So, the Apostles are seeing this mystery after they heard the prophecy of the Passion and Death. One thing is to hear about the Passion, another thing is to see this mystery. Then they see the Passion and the effects of it, and their faith is challenged. This is the whole story. This is the whole story. It’s not just a Passion, it’s not just a Resurrection, it’s one mystery in itself, and in our own contemplation of the sorrow of the grief of Our Lord in His Passion, we don’t lose sight of victory in our contemplation of heaven and of eternity. We don’t lose sight of the need for penance, the need to increase our prayer, and the necessity of Christ’s dolorous passion.
And so, the Church puts this mystery for our consideration at the very beginning of Lent, so we have a goal, something outside of Lent to strive for, and it reveals our own participation in divine life. The source of our salvation, the reason for our delight; being welcomed into trinitarian communion for our own glorification, which is the participation in the glory of God.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, the Holy Spirit. Amen.
~Fr. Ermatinger