Every year on this Second Sunday of Lent the Gospel is an account of the Transfiguration as told by Matthew, Mark, or (as is the case this year) Luke. In the passage we just heard, Luke highlights the way in which the transfiguration was preparing Jesus himself for his “departure” (exodus), which he will fulfil in Jerusalem. This mountain-top experience is a sign of Jesus being totally caught up with and bathed in the love, power and kingdom of God, so much so that it transfigures his whole being with light, and he is identified as the true prophet, the Messiah.
But what did Peter, James and John make of all this? They were stunned, confused, unable to understand how the glory they had glimpsed on the mountain (the glory of God’s chosen Son, the Servant who was carrying in himself the promise of redemption) would finally be unveiled on a very different hill, an ugly little hill outside Jerusalem. In each evangelist’s account, all that the disciples have to go on is the word that came from the cloud that suddenly overshadowed them: “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.”
“Listen to him”—this one, stark command is the culmination of the Transfiguration event. These words of Luke allude to a passage in Deuteronomy where Moses tells the people: “A prophet like me will the Lord, your God, raise up for you from among your own kinsmen; to him you shall listen.” Here, and again in Acts where Luke explicitly applies this same passage to Jesus, he is identifying Christ as the Messianic Prophet in whom the prophetic office finds its fulfilment and completion. And so it is that God’s voice from the cloud has but one word for the disciples (and us): “Listen to him.”
“Listen to him.” If we were to look for a spiritual Lenten practice, I can think of none better than that. “Listen to him.” In monastic life we hear a lot about “listening”; a long and rich tradition offers many levels of meaning to the practice of “listening.”
But what, in particular, are these disciples to listen for? A message? A teaching? A proclamation about the Kingdom of God? A call to change their lives by repentance, conversion and discipleship? Yes, all this, but so much more—as Jesus makes clear to them (and to us) during the Last Supper, when he said: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father.”
“Everything I have heard from my Father.” – This is why we must listen to him. Jesus has just told Philip: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works.”
In other
words, we are commanded in today’s Gospel to listen to Jesus, because Jesus is
the Father’s ultimate, definitive Word in whom the Father has communicated himself entirely,
communicated everything forever, and definitively acted. Whoever sees Jesus
sees the Father; whoever listens to Jesus, listens to the Father. Because Jesus
is the wholly dynamic image of the Father, he is the Son—and hence the
definitive presence of the Father in the world.
To push this back a step further, what about “listening” and the Son himself? According to what Jesus says to his disciples the night before he died, the Son is nothing other than pure listening, pure receiving, pure handing on what is heard from the Father. The great German theologian, Romano Guardini, once said: “Everything Jesus says, he possesses. The God of whom he speaks is within him. Jesus does not speak from hearsay, nor as having received his message from somewhere. He speaks from essence/identity itself. When listening to him, we find ourselves in the presence of an interior mystery, the mystery of the God-Man.” This, again, is why we must listen to him. As Jesus told Thomas in the Farewell Discourse, “I am the way; I am truth and life. No one can come to the Father except through me.”
Finally, what happens to us when we “listen” to Christ? We heard from Pope St. Paul VI at Vigils on Wednesday:
When we encounter Christ (in listening to him), we are illumined by a new light; we recognize the holiness of God and the malice of sin. Through Christ’s word we receive the call to conversion and offer of forgiveness. We attain the fullness of this gift in baptism, which forms us into the likeness of the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection, so that our whole life bears the imprint of the paschal mystery. excerpt from the Apostolic Constitution Paenitemini
“Listen to him.” This is prayer. I believe “listening to him” is the ultimately defining and transforming core of prayer. I will end with a beautiful example of this as told by St. Katherine Drexel, whom we commemorated on the second day of Lent this year. After a full, active life as philanthropist and promoter of Catholic education for Native Americans, and then foundress of a religious congregation dedicated to serving Native and African Americans for more than 40 years, at age 77 she suffered a severe heart attack that brought that whole way of life in service of the Gospel to an abrupt end. But not her “listening” to her Lord! Now she would “listen” in another way. She moved to the infirmary, not for a few months or years, but for the next 20 years (until she was 97), where she spent her days and nights in prayer, more and more uniting herself with her Lord in the contemplative manner she had so desired as a young woman. Listen to her description:
The shadows of my life grow long. And so He speaks with me . . . He abides in my house, the house of His publican. It is as if all glory were nothing to Him, and I alone were all His care. We speak together, I listen – and thus a lifetime passes. Then comes a moment – who can tell what happens? It is as though a veil were rent and my eyes opened. A radiance not of earth surrounds Him. It is the moment of my passing hence. Blessed death approaches – that death which never corrupts the converse of the soul with God, but which lets fall all earthly sufferings, all mists and veils of faith, and shows us face to face our long desired Guest and Sovereign Master – Jesus.
Like Peter, James and John, we too must descend the mountain of the Transfiguration today and continue on our way to Jerusalem, where the silence of Christ will be most eloquent and salvific as he breathes his last on Golgotha. We may not understand the glory or the journey. But we have only to “listen” to him this Lent—all the way to the Cross and to his Hour of Glory.
