The transfiguration of Jesus

Homily

2nd Sunday of Lent

5th March 2023

Our focus today is on the transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor. No one knows when this festival first took place, but it has been celebrated in Jerusalem since the 7th century. The feast had been celebrated throughout most of the Byzantine Empire over the following two centuries.

Mount Tabor can be found close to the Sea of Galilee being roughly eleven miles away. Surprisingly, Mount Tabor is just six feet taller than Slieve Gullion, around about 18 hundred feet, so the view would be similar for someone standing on top of Slieve Gullion and looking towards Dundalk Bay, as it would be standing on top of Mount Tabor to look towards the Sea of Galilee. Only a bit warmer, and perhaps sunnier. The views from Slieve Gullion on a clear day are awe-inspiring.

I have been up Slieve Gullion many times, often with my camera. My wife often tells me off for not simply enjoying the view without peering down the barrel of a lens with an image framed in a rectangle. One eye is closed and the other one is mostly restricted to a small shape in the centre with everything else black. In the days of the horse-drawn cart, you would have said I was blinkered.

In many ways, today, we no longer look into a viewfinder because our cameras are our mobile phones, but everything else beyond the 5-centimetre by 10-centimetre frame may as well not be there because most of our lives are absorbed by the stills, texts or videos that are displayed there.

A friend of mine recently sent me an article with a photograph of a crowd of people behind a barrier at an event. All but one person held up their phones, capturing images. All but one saw the whole even through a narrow lens. The one without the camera, the caption said, had really experienced the event fully, through sight, sound and feeling because they were fully present in the moment, simply being there. Not worrying about having something for the future to look back on as a simple memory. They just wanted to soak up the experience using their own, in-built senses.

Jesus had taken three of his friends, Peter, James, and John up to the top of Mount Tabor. While they were all alone Jesus’s whole being was completely transformed into something most beautiful and spiritual, his face emitting so much light he shone like the sun and his clothes became as bright as white light. Beside Jesus suddenly stood Moses and Elijah talking with him. Peter was amazed to be there saying ‘it is wonderful for us to be here’. Then his mind, like so many of us got distracted and he started to think about the future. In his head, he was thinking through what he would need to build three tents in honour of each of these holy men.

If it had been us, how many of us would have pulled out of our pockets our mobiles to take a picture? Then finding the light was so bright all we were getting was a white image. No matter how much we fiddled with the menus to change the iris, shutter speed and ISO is would appear as though we had used a powerful flash gun and could only get bleached-out photos. And in that space of time, we would have missed what we should have experienced with our own senses.

When the bright cloud overshadowed us, the voice told us that Jesus is God’s son, his beloved, who enjoys God’s favour and we should listen to him. If we had attempted to record a video with audio the sound would have gone into the red, totally distorted, unplayable afterwards, and video like the photos would have been bleached out. So we would still have had nothing to show afterwards and we would have missed the moment to be experienced by our own senses.

Peter wanted to do something, but Jesus just wanted him to be in his presence and to experience this amazing gift of witnessing Jesus’s transfiguration, through the similarly amazing gifts we have been given in our senses, to see through our eyes, to hear through our ears, to feel through our skin, to smell through our noses and to taste with our tongue.

Our focus these days seems to be dominated by sights and sounds. Yet as I went outside early this morning, I could feel the difference in temperature from warmth to cold. My body shivered. I could smell the freshness of the air and the scent of kiln-dried wood being burnt in a wood fire. I could taste the moisture of the cold air. All my senses were active in that moment. I could see the mist on Slieve Gullion and hear the traffic passing on the road between Forkhill and Newry. Through my senses, I felt alive.

Jesus offers himself for us and wants to be in his presence. In his transfiguration, he reveals his Godness and humanity to Peter, James and John. He does not want us to be afraid. He is here to cleanse us of our faults and to sanctify us both in body and mind. Not through what we have done ourselves but through Christ Jesus’s grace, given to all from the beginning of time but revealed when Christ Jesus appeared, being our saviour.

The best way to record the experiences of our lives which may not be easy, is not always through an artificial device, such as our mobiles, but through the amazing gifts God has given us, our senses. He asks us to be present in the world, and we will be in his presence also.

Amen.