This is the edited text from the Homily for the Mass of the Feast of the Transfiguration Retreat for Bishops, Kenthurst Retreat Centre, 6 August 2024.
Jesus mostly eschewed the limelight, preferring to preach and heal through small gestures that encouraged and persuaded, rather than big ones that wowed and overwhelmed. But sometimes he “let rip”, as it were, and today was such a day. He goes up a mountain as if He were the new Moses. But where the first Moses went to converse with God, this one is revealed to be the very conversation of God, the Logos, communication, argument, love song of God. Where the first Moses averted his eyes from looking directly upon the face of God, Jesus uncovers His glory and invites us to look upon the face of God and live! At last we glimpse His glorious divinity and graced humanity shining out brilliantly. At last we see His place in salvation history, as the culmination of the Law and Prophets, Moses and Elijah. At last we understand He is both the beloved of God the Father and of His Mother Mary, the very Son of God and no less so for being the Son of Man. It is His true hour of glory—at least until His resurrection—and the highpoint of His public ministry.
Like Jesus, the church conformed to Him is often modest, and we prefer to teach, sanctify and serve through small gestures rather than triumphal display. Yet sometimes we “let rip” with World Youth Days, Eucharistic Congresses and other very public displays. Today the nascent church and all of us witnessing this theophany, make our profession of faith by proposing to erect the first tabernacle in Christ’s honour; there would in due course be hundreds of thousands of such tabernacles. We, the successors of Peter, James and John, are overjoyed at what we see, we too want to celebrate it magnificently and wish it would last forever.
Yet no spiritual or emotional life is all highs: eventually we must “come back to earth” where things are not quite so glorious. Amidst the glory of the Transfiguration there are hints that not even the Son of Man is immune from the lows of life: in a premonition of the Crucifixion, Moses and Elijah stand either side of Jesus discussing His “exodus” or “Passover” through death to the Father. The three disciples, at first delighted, are soon falling on their faces in terror. As they leave the scene, Jesus speaks ominously of the death that must come before Resurrection. And we know that the next time He will take these three aside to pray with Him will be on the night of His agony, when people will again fall on their faces.
If there were highs and lows for Jesus and the apostles, so too for their successors. Our age has so many advantages and the Church so much to be grateful for, so many achievements of grace and so many opportunities for more. Yet it’s also an age of unremitting secularisation, of disillusionment over the sex abuse crisis, of disaffiliation and declining practice, of polarisation and struggles within society and church.
So much of life is like that: feasting and fasting, highs and lows, glory and despair, either in turns or all at once. God gives His beloved some good times, to be sure, and will eventually give us that best and most extended of good times we call heaven. But in the meantime our Transfiguration experiences are often fleeting ones against a more mundane everyday and the shadow of the Cross…
How do we bishops respond to the highs and lows of life, which bring with them opportunities and challenges, blessing and curse? As we’ve heard in this retreat, when divine joys come we must savour them, give thanks for them, share them. But not everyone is yet experiencing such joy. The former Yellow Wiggle, Greg Page, opened up this week about the crippling loneliness and depression he had suffered at the height of his wiggling, and he pointed to reports that one in four Australians faces persistent loneliness. Many cannot see the glory of God on the face of man; they know no human ecstasy or divine intimacy. Our Church is charged with reaching out to them in compassion…
For the Transfiguration is a premonition of the Risen Lord, no longer limited by time and space, no longer subject to suffering or need, but totally fulfilled, the face of joy. He reveals this to us today, not to show off or to torment us who are far less enlightened, but as a prophecy of what we will be. His history is our trajectory, His glorification our promise. Jesus foreshadows that day of hopes and dreams, when every human person, everyone who has suffered, everyone we have lost, every beautiful newborn body or decaying centennial, every atom of creation however used or abused… all will be revealed to be suffused with the light and energy of God!