Jesus “took with him Peter and John and
James, and went up on the mountain to pray.” Luke tells us that the face of
Jesus changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white and that
Moses and Elijah appeared in glory and spoke of the exodus or departure Jesus was going to accomplish in
Jerusalem. Christ's Exodus, his
departure from Jerusalem is not going to be on a luxury jet but by way of a
wooden cross and a cold stone tomb. He
will be raised up in glory by the Father but only after suffering his saving Passion
and Death for our salvation, his Exodus. Here as so often elsewhere in those
places in the Gospels where we are allowed to read what Jesus is praying about,
the subject is the chalice of suffering and death that he must drink for our
salvation in union with the Father's will.
Thus, Luke's account of the prayer which
occurs during the Transfiguration connects it to the description of the agony
in the garden and the farewell discourses and prayer of Jesus at the end of the
Last Supper in St. John's gospel. So we
see how for Jesus it is by prayer that he leads us to follow him and to take up
our cross each day. George Martin points
out that for early Christians “to take up a cross” meant one was on the way to
crucifixion and so to the final hours of one's life. He writes, “To take up a cross daily can mean
to live each day as if it is one's last, focusing on the most important thing
to do in one's life in one's remaining hours: unite oneself with Jesus as his
follower.” Luke shows us that just as Jesus sought to unite himself with his
Father's will for him through prayer, so must we in prayer unite ourselves with
Jesus who shares the mystery of the redeeming cross with each one of his
followers as well as the mystery of his transfigured and resurrected glory.
This plays out in this Eucharist, the
prayer that is the source and summit of the Christian life, the prayer in which
we offer the divine victim to God and ourselves along with it. In it, through
the mystery of remembrance, of anamnesis,
the saving cross and passion of Jesus Christ is made present to us even as the
souls of all of us are filled with transfiguring, transforming grace through
our celebration and reception of the sacrament which is not only our spiritual
food for the day, but is also a pledge of future glory given to us--like the
glory of the chosen Son and the Voice of the Father witnessed by Peter, John
and James on Mount Tabor.
Photograph by Brother Daniel of colored glass at the Abbey. Excerpts from Father Luke's homily for the Second Sunday of Lent.
