Homily for Feast of The Transfiguration - Revelation is an Experience to be had.
I think our seminarians are not going to want to drive with me much.
I have a tendency to ask them questions: such as “Explain the Trinity”, or “Succinctly explain Salvation?” and “How did Jesus’ death and resurrection save us?”
However, what I like is that if they get into it, they start asking their own questions and that lets me know what they are thinking.
One seminarian asked me during one such discussion, “Why did God reveals God’s self the way God did? Why did God reveal God through Jesus Christ? Why not just say directly who God is?”
Here we are celebrating the Feast of the Transfiguration, almost midway through summer.
This feast celebrates God’s revelation and God’s way of revelation, and it invites us to go into the revelation.
This is the Good News: God wants us to know God.
God, Father Son and Holy Spirit wants us to enter into that mystery of who God is, and in doing so, we discover not only God, but ourselves as well.
We discover the deep Truths that penetrate all of reality.
We discover true Wisdom.
See the search for ourselves in not necessarily in some exotic place, nor in some monastery far away, but close.
It’s in our minds, hearts; in our Scripture and Tradition. It is where God reveals Gods' self to us.
Jesus appears in this scene with Moses and Elijah, two persons who represent the Law and the prophets.
These two men also represent previous revelations of God to the Jewish people.
Matthew tells us that Jesus is the fulfillment of those revelations; he does not replace them nor does he negates them.
See, note it says they converse together.
Peter, the representative for all humanity, doesn’t get the situation.
He wants to stay and meditate, to stay and think upon this scene.
And I love it when the Father basically stops Peter and shuts him down.
Jesus then sums it up, “don’t be afraid”, there is more to this: the Cross and Resurrection.
See here is the thing; Revelation is not necessarily all about the words.
Jesus completely reveals the nature of the Father, but the way Jesus does this is indirectly, yes through the words of parables, but also through his forgiveness and his compassion, healing and presence; and again most especially through the Cross and Resurrection.
It is not the words per se, but the Experience of Jesus that reveals the reality of God. Again, the supreme moment is Paschal Mystery.
Imagine trying to explain the concept of snow to a Bedouin who has always lived in the midst of the Sahara desert and never ever has been in snow?
We could use words to describe whiteness, coldness, how water once it loses so much energy reorganizes itself to crystallize into a different shape, blah blah blah.
I imagine the Bedouin would just look at us vacantly.
Take him to the Sierra during winter...then snow becomes reality!
Jesus invites us into the experience of God, so as to know God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Jesus wants us to personally experience the reality of God.
God is not an object that is learned and studied through doctrine, dogma, rules, protocol and theology, but a subject to be lived with and experienced.
The doctrine and theology are great!
The help us provide words to our experience. They give to us a framework for communicating our experience of the Father, but the experience must ground it all.
The poets and mystics understood this the best. They use words that evoke our imaginations, so as to enter into the mystery. The best theologians are poets at heart!
We have our Sacred Scripture through which God communicates to us; the Law, the Prophets, the story of God and humanity. Scripture is Words of the poets and mystics; story tellers and prose.
We read these stories to open ourselves so as to experience the person of God in our lives today. (Which is why we are not literalists!)
We have our Tradition, especially our liturgy but also private prayer, which also opens our minds and hearts to experience God in our lives as well.
This is the beauty of our Faith.
People tell me that they don’t hear God speaking to them; I ask what is their prayer life like? Are they reading Scripture? Are they coming to mass? ‘No’ to most, some or all is the common answer.
They want an easy answer. We too often also want an easy answer to our prayers and questions. This leads to a superficial life.
Conversely, I know some very intelligent people who can quote Aquinas, Rahner, et al… and yet their lives seem to not be reflecting a relationship with God, only those books and authors. This leads to a rather cold and sterile life.
God is here inviting us into a deep, personal, fulfilling and loving relationship; always has been.
It is relationship that involves our total being, one that transforms our total being…
Will we stay put, or enter more and more into it?
Comments
Post a Comment