💾 Archived View for vigilia.cc › homilies › Extraordinary%20Form › 2022-2023 › The%20Transfiguration… captured on 2024-03-21 at 15:16:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
The Liturgy is often the best commentator on the mysteries of the faith. “Lex Orandi Lex Credendi est” as the old saying goes – the rule of prayer is the rule of faith, our faith is expressed in our prayers and our prayers shape our faith.
It seems to me that today’s Mass and, if you perhaps had a peek at it, the Daily Office, are particularly wonderful today. The Psalms prescribed for today in the Old Office all draw our gaze onto the radiant, inexpressible glory of Christ Jesus on the Mount of Transfirugration:
How lovely are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! my soul longeth and fainteth for the courts of the Lord. ...  My heart and my flesh have rejoiced in the living God.
And it goes on. Of course the “tabernacles” are exactly what St Peter wishes to create in the Gospel when he is awestruck by the radiant glory of the Lord in the company of Moses and Elias.
The Liturgy is the Rule of Faith, but it is also a revelation of God’s Glory. The steps of the Altar, like the mount of Transfiguration, is where we encounter Christ’s radiant divinity, the Divine Presence. The universal human reaction to it, like for the Psalmist, and also for St Peter, is to wish to stay there. It is what we were created for: in Paradise God and Man dwelt together, and it is what we expect at the consummation of time, when the “tabernacle of God will be with man” as we hear in Revelations. God’s Presence is our natural habitat, as it were. That is why St Peter’s reaction, as perplexed as he may have been in the moment, is not rebuked by the Lord: he asks nothing foolish, he reacts to what is natural in humanity.
And indeed the experience of this is life-changing, it reorients our whole lives. When St John set out to write of his Gospel, the very first thing he recounts – as we also recount in the Liturgy at the end of each Mass – is the vision of the glory of God.
And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us: and we saw His glory, the glory as of the Only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.
He saw this on the Mount of Transfiguration. When he sets out to write the account of the life and works and teachings of Jesus, this moment on the Transfiguration seems to be the most powerful memory he has of the Lord. As soon as he puts pen to paper, the experience of Christ’s glory gushes out. For St Peter, when he writes his Epistle, we see that this is the foundation of an unshakable faith:
We were not following fictitious tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we had been eyewitnesses of His grandeur.
St James, the only person whose account is slightly absent from today’s Mass readings, calls Jesus the Lord of Glory.
Encountering the Glory of God changed their understanding of who Jesus is, and in that Presence they got to experience being restored to what God created us to be. The fact that today’s Mass sets in front of us the mystery of the Incarnation through the Preface is also telling us of this great mystery, that through dwelling together with God, we are made into His sons and daughters, with whom He is well pleased.