Transfiguration of the Lord (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 5, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Transfiguration of the Lord, A, Vigil
August 5, 2023

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we, like the apostles Peter, James and John, will accompany Jesus up an exceedingly high mountain and witness him transfigured in glory. As you know, every Second Sunday of Lent we make this journey as we focus on how Jesus, through giving his three closest apostles a foretaste of his divine glory, was preparing them for when they would see him transfigured in blood, pain and suffering on Good Friday. We focus then on how Jesus spoke there with the great Old Testament figures of the law and the prophets, respectively, Moses and Elijah, about the upcoming “exodus” Jesus was to accomplish in Jerusalem, when Jesus, just as Moses led the Israelites from slavery through the Red Sea and the desert to the promised land, would lead us, through the waters of baptism into his death and the desert of the Christian life into the eternal promised land of heaven. Every year, however, since 1456, the Roman Catholic Church has also celebrated the Transfiguration on August 6, as a means by which we can focused on Jesus’ glory in its own right and on the other lessons of this important scene in the life of Jesus, which, since 2002, has constituted the fourth Luminous mystery of the Rosary we ponder each Thursday.
• What are those lessons?
• The first is the exertion Jesus calls us to make as disciples. He never tells us to stay right where we are, but summons us to a journey, to follow him up an exceedingly high mountain, indeed to the heavenly Jerusalem. The Christian life is a dynamic and demanding adventure with Jesus as our alpine guide.
• The second lesson is about the importance of prayer. Jesus took the apostles on that journey precisely so that they might pray. To pray is to contemplate God. It’s far more than an exchange of words or ideas, but an exchange of persons, as God comes to abide in us and have us abide in him. This mutual indwelling is summarized by the experience of contemplation. Just this past Friday, August 4, we celebrated the Memorial of the patron saint of parish priests, St. John Mary Vianney, the Curé of Ars, who loved to talk about the art of prayer with the words one of his parishioners, the farmer Louis Chaffangeon, who, when his pastor asked him what he was doing as he knelt before the tabernacle in Church, replied, “Je l’avise et il m’avise.” “I’m looking at him and he’s looking at me.” Prayer is an exchange of loving glances as we look at God and he looks at us and the whole process transforms us to look at ourselves, the world and others with the loving eyes of God. The presence of Moses and Elijah teaches us about how Sacred Scripture speaks of Jesus, about his life, passion, death and ultimately resurrection. The cloud that descends at the top of the mountain reminds us that prayer is, as the great Latin aphorism attests, both lumen etnumen, both light and cloud, but we’ll be given certain insights but much, because of our finite capacities, will remain shrouded in mystery. And God the Father’s instruction from the cloud, “This is my beloved Son: listen to Him,” reminds us that prayer is ultimately about our allowing Jesus to speak and seeking out of love to align our life to what he asks. Jesus has the words of eternal life and he wants to plant the seed of his word in us as good soil, so that we may bear abundant fruit as branches on the vine and be able to proclaim that saving word to others.
• These lessons about God’s glory, about the exertion the Christian life demands, about the importance of prayer are relevant to all dimensions of Christian existence, but I’d like to apply them to two different contexts.
• The first is to World Youth Day, which is taking place during these days in Lisbon, Portugal, and will conclude this Sunday when 1.5 million people attend Mass with Pope Francis overlooking the majestic Vasco de Gama Bridge spanning the Tejo River in the Portuguese capital. World Youth Days are always great adventures, in which youth and young adults from across the globe, together with their bishops, priests and chaperones, make a long journey to meet the Pope and their Catholic brothers and sisters from. This is the 37^th World Youth Day and follows those that have taken place in Rome, Buenos Aires, Santiago de Compostela, Czestochowa, Denver, Manila, Paris, Toronto, Cologne, Sydney, Madrid, Rio, Krakow, and Panama as well as in home dioceses in intervening years. Beyond the adventure that gets pilgrims to the host city, there’s always a long walking pilgrimage to the location where a moving prayer vigil with the Pope takes places on Saturday night and a concluding Mass on Sunday. Just as Jesus did with Peter, James and John, so the vicar of Christ leads hundreds of thousands of Jesus’ young disciples on pilgrimage, to teach them the dynamic and demanding aspects of the Christian journey we make together with our brothers and sisters. The theme of this World Youth Day, “Mary arose and went with haste,” remembers her lengthy teenage journey from Nazareth to Ein Kerem where St. Elizabeth was pregnant with St. John the Baptist, and points to how we’re all called to this journey with Jesus within us as we seek to bring him to others, so that as he did with John the Baptist, he may make these we meet leap with joy.
• World Youth Days also teach not just those in physical attendance but all those across the globe about the importance of prayer. We come together ultimately to pray for and with each other and for the needs of the whole world. We come to meditate on the power of Sacred Scripture, not just the Old Testament symbolized by Moses and Elijah, but the New signified by Peter, James and John. We come to listen to Jesus’ words as he calls us to follow him and then to go out to the whole world and proclaim his Gospel. The experience at the Vigil of adoring the Eucharistic Lord in the midst of God’s creation together with so many from almost every nation, race and tongue, is an unforgettable memory of the many World Youth Days I’ve been privileged to attend. Likewise is the concluding Mass, celebrated amidst far more than a million people, as the same beloved Son of the eternal Father transfigured on the Mountain, is transfigured anew in humility on the altar.
• World Youth Days are also meant to lead us to behold God’s glory. So many young people receive extraordinary graces on these pilgrimages in which God reveals himself to them and often what he’s asking of them in life. There are also “theophanies,” as I’ve witnessed personally in Toronto and Madrid when massive storms stop on an instant at the word of the Pope. But we see God’s glory in a different way as well. St. Ireneus of Lyons, the great second century French Doctor of the Church, famously taught gloria Dei vivens homo et vita hominis visio Dei, “The glory of God is the human person fully alive and the life of the human person is the vision of God.” When we pray, when we contemplate God, when we glimpse him looking at us and guiding us, we become capable of experiencing the life to the full Jesus came into the world to give us. And that’s what happens to so many at World Youth Days. They make the transition from the faith of their parents, godparents and grandparents, to their own, personal faith as they recognize that Jesus cares for them, individually, too, with an infinite love. They often hear him calling them to serve him as priests, religious, or consecrated or, as we’ve seen in some beautiful news stories, to grasp that their vocation is to marriage and to propose to their fellow pilgrims to share the rest of the journey of life. The whole Church rejoices at this theophany of God’s becoming fully alive in so many of his disciples.
• The second application, which I’ll treat more briefly, is to the Holy Eucharist. As you know, we are in the midst of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival in the Church in the United States and the mystery of the Transfiguration is not just something we mark on August 6 and the Second Sunday of Lent each year but in fact relive every Mass. We leave our homes and make the exertion to climb not the Mount of Transfiguration but the altar of God, where our faith finds its summit and source. It’s at Mass that we listen to his word, the words of eternal life, and strive to become living commentaries of it. We build not a booth for him but a tabernacle and a Church so that we can come into his presence and allow him to transfigure us, as he in return seeks to make us his tabernacle and dwell within us like he did within our Lady. And at the end of Mass, he doesn’t tell us not to tell anyone what we’ve seen and heard until he rises from the dead, but, rather, to go and share what we’ve seen and heard with every creature we meet to the ends of the earth. Every Mass is in fact meant to be a World Youth Day, when we, together, journey to go up to the altar of God who rejuvenates us and fills us with his joy. As we prepare this Sunday to behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, as God the Father gets ready to tell us anew, “This is my beloved Son, listen to him!,” we implore the graces we and all our fellow Catholics in the world need, having encountered Jesus, to go in haste to bring him and his salvation to others. That is the means by which, together with them, we and all God’s children throughout the world, may convene in the eternal eighth day of God’s children in the celestial mountain of Jerusalem where Jesus has gone to build a booth not just for Moses, Elijah, Peter, James and John, but each of us.

The Gospel on which today’s homily was based was: 

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