Poor Peter! He and the other apostles had left everything behind to follow this itinerant rabbi from Nazareth. Their native land has been under Roman occupation and they wanted to change the situation. They envisioned Jesus as the long-awaited Messiah who would liberate Judea from the yoke of the imperial Romans and now he has just been told, “The Son of Man must suffer many things, be rejected by the elders and the high priests, be killed and be raised on the third day. If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”
Jesus said that when he first predicted that he would suffer at the hands of the chief priests and scribes. Eight days later he took Peter, James, and John and went up the mountain to pray. There, his glory is revealed to strengthen them for the scandal of the cross that they would soon witness. The transfiguration allowed the apostles to see Jesus in a new light, not as the earthly liberator they had envisioned him to be but as one truly sent by God. You could say that they too were transformed that day.
Years later when Paul wrote to the Christian community at Philippi, he called them more deeply into the Christian way of seeing things. He cautioned that many in their community were living as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their god was their stomach; their minds were occupied with earthly things. “But our citizenship,” he tells them, “is in heaven.” By embracing the risen Christ and all that Christ stands for, they could look forward to being transformed as well.
Two thousand years later, we hear the same message, but are we listening? Many Catholics put on outward facades of being religious but inwardly they tend to focus only on their wants and “earthly things.” They are too preoccupied with worldly issues to notice how God is trying to transform them into future citizens of heaven.
In his book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Steve Covey tells of an experience he had on a New York subway one Sunday. The passengers were sitting quietly; some were reading the paper, others were dozing, some were simply contemplating. It was a rather peaceful scene. At one stop a man and his children entered the car. Soon the children were yelling back and forth, throwing things and even grabbing things. The scene was very disturbing and yet the father just sat there alongside Steve and did nothing. Feeling irritated, Steve wondered how this man could let his children run around so wildly.
With patience and restraint, he said to the man, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little bit more?” The man lifted his gaze as though he was just beginning to notice what was happening. “Oh, you’re right,” he said. “I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what to think and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”
Steve sat there speechless. “Can you imagine how I felt at the moment? Suddenly I saw things differently. Because I saw differently, I felt differently. I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior. My heart was filled with this man’s pain. Feelings of compassion and sympathy flowed freely.”
He then asked the man, “Oh, I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Notice that nothing changed in the scene. The same people, the same irritation, the same kids. What changed was Covey’s way of seeing it all and with that new outlook came a change of attitude.
Likewise, we too will see the world differently when we truly recognize who Jesus is and can be in our daily lives.
Perhaps you have seen the movie, The Passion of the Christ, which realistically depicts the cruel violence done to Jesus in the last hours of his life. More disturbing to me than the horrendous brutality was the portrayal of Satan, lurking in the background, confident that he could break anyone, including Jesus. Despite the torture inflicted upon him, one could see the passion in Jesus to fight evil to the very end.
Many walked away from that movie in silence, subdued by what they had seen, as though they too were transformed.
The one line in today’s gospel that catches my attention is “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” Whether we are rich or poor, well or ill, young or old, we are told, as were Peter, James and John, to listen to Jesus, to really listen and for good reason. The transfigured Christ calls us to the Lenten work of transforming ourselves, to transform the sadness, coldness and despair within us into the love, compassion, and hope for others to then experience Christ.
We are not perfect nor can anyone expect us to be perfect. But hopefully we can see that God is at work in us, slowly but surely transforming us into the image of Christ that we are called to be. Like Paul’s disciples in ancient Philippi, may we commit ourselves to Jesus as future citizens of heaven through prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Listening to Jesus, through meditation and scripture enables us to see the world differently and respond accordingly, transformed by his passion into becoming his true disciples.