Feast of the Transfiguration (Year A) - 6 August

Readings: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14; Psalm 97; 2 Peter 1:16-19; Matthew 17:1-9

We hear about the temptations of Jesus on the first Sunday of Lent each year, and we hear about the transfiguration of Jesus on the second Sunday of Lent each year. We also hear about the Transfiguration on the special feast dedicated to that moment and which is celebrated on 6 August. The gospel reading follows the three year Sunday cycle and so this year is the turn of Matthew’s gospel.

It is instructive to think about what each of the evangelists decides to omit and what he decides to include compared with the other two accounts of the same experience. Matthew, for example, does not show Peter and the other two disciples to be quite as dim as they can seem in Luke and Mark. The comment that Peter, always the first to open his mouth, ‘did not know what he was talking about’ is omitted by Matthew. He is generally kinder in his account of the disciples anyway, certainly kinder than Mark who presents them as forever getting the wrong end of the stick.

In this, Matthew’s approach fits with one aspect of what the transfiguration means, that it is a moment of re-assurance for the disciples. It happens, he tells us, ‘six days later’. Six days later than what? Six days after Jesus had told them for the first time that he was to go to Jerusalem, to be rejected and condemned, to suffer and to be put to death. The transfiguration is a moment of re-assurance and encouragement for them to continue following Jesus even in view of what Jesus had begun to teach them about his destiny. It is a divine endorsement of the way Jesus is going and what he is saying about his mission.

The scene is richly loaded with traditional and familiar figures, scenery and texts. Of course the disciples knew who Moses and Elijah were. The scenery – on a mountain, with an overshadowing cloud and a voice – immediately evokes an experience of the divine presence. They surely understood something also of the significance of the words spoken from the cloud. The beloved son with whom God is well pleased, is referred to by Isaiah and others of the prophets. They might well have been familiar also with Moses’ prophecy in the Book of Deuteronomy about a great prophet, whose authority would be comparable to that of Moses himself. ‘Listen to him’, Moses had said, providing words for the divine voice at the transfiguration.

But if the characters and scenery and words of this dramatic moment are all familiar, the meaning of their being brought together in this way, and the one around whom they are brought together, makes of this an experience of something radically new. Although each of its elements is anticipated in the Old Testament, there is nothing quite like it in the Old Testament. What Jesus is helping the disciples to do is to make the transition from the ways in which they understood life and God and themselves up to then to a completely new way of understanding life and God and themselves in the future. The journey they are being asked to take is solidly rooted in all that they had been taught about the God of Israel and yet it is a journey that will transform them completely as regards what they thought and how they lived. It is at once familiar and completely mysterious and for both reasons their fear is understandable.

Related to this is another detail of Matthew’s account, which is not mentioned in either Luke or Mark. Jesus, he tells us, touched them and told them to stand up. They have done what human beings ought to do in the presence of God: bowed down, fallen on their knees, and put their faces to the ground. But the great outcome of the adoration of God, as distinct from the adoration of anything that is less than God, is that we stand up greater for having worshipped.

Whenever we worship something less than God we must hand over some of our identity to that thing. We are then less than we might be for having worshipped an idol. It may be money or power or a group of people or a political ideology or a religious organisation or some vague abstraction– to worship an idol, a false god, always makes us less than what we are. We must pay tribute to whatever it is we worship in that way. We must invest something of ourselves and such false gods have big appetites.

But to adore God does not mean losing anything of our identity. In fact it means the opposite, for we are not rivals to God and God is not a rival to us. To worship God is to live in the truth. This is the reality of our situation, that we are the creatures and servants of God, called to follow the way of His Son. In the presence of God, the Son says to us ‘stand up’. Already we get a glimpse of the greatness that is being revealed, not only the greatness revealed in Jesus but the greatness revealed in Him for us.

Romano Guardini, a theologian working in Berlin at the height of Nazi power there, decided with colleagues and friends to try to disseminate statements to counter-act what was happening. He decided to write first about adoration, for adoration, he says, is ‘the safeguard of our mental health, of our inmost intellectual soundness’. ‘Whenever we adore God’, he writes, ‘something happens within and about us. Things fall into true perspective. Vision sharpens. Much that troubles us rights itself. We distinguish more clearly between good and evil. … We gather strength to meet the demands which life imposes upon us, fortified at the very core of our being, and taking a firmer hold upon truth’.

To fall on our knees before God expresses the truth of our situation. To be enabled to stand up in the presence of the same God, at the invitation of His beloved Son and through His saving work, is the wonderful grace that has been manifested through the appearing of Jesus our Saviour.

Week 18 Wednesday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 31.1-7; Jeremiah 31.10-13; Matthew 15:21-28

How are we to understand this story in which Jesus is rude to a Canaanite woman whose daughter is possessed by a demon?

There is a feminist interpretation that says that Jesus, as a man, needs to be helped, in particular by the women who come into his life, and that here we see him being helped by the Canaanite woman to realize the full extent of his mission. She calls him, as it were, beyond the boundaries of his own understanding and imagination. We do, often, have difficulty accepting the full humanity of Jesus and what it entailed. We are probably much happier, for example, accepting that Jesus needed to be taught how to pray by Mary and Joseph than we are with the suggestion that he needed to learn something about his mission from the Canaanite woman.

If we work with the belief that Jesus always knew exactly what he was about and always understood what his mission was and how he was to pursue it, how are we to explain the strange conversation that takes place between him and this woman? At first he remains silent (as he did also when confronted with the woman taken in adultery in John 8.) The disciples encourage him to do something for her, though whether this is to help her or just to get rid of her is not clear.

Jesus then makes the statement about being sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Whether he says this to the woman or to the disciples is, once again, not clear. The woman repeats her request: ‘Lord, help me’. Notice that she makes exactly the same prayer as Peter in yesterday’s gospel: ‘Lord, save me’. In situations of great need we don’t need to be told how to pray. Then Jesus makes this strange statement in which he seems to imply that she is a dog, but is immediately taken by her answer about the dogs at least getting the scraps that fall from the master’s table. And so he acknowledges her faith and heals her daughter.

Here’s a suggestion as to what might be going on here. I spent a short time in Trinidad, in the West Indies, but long enough to learn that the people there liked what they call piquant. It is a French word that has hung around in that part of the world and refers to an exchange between people that is witty and clever, moving towards being daring and even (to one who does not understand what is going on) insulting. I can remember one or two conversations of this kind where each party is expected to give as good as he gets – there is excitement and fun in the conversation but an onlooker might not understand what is happening and might even feel uncertain about it.

Might it be that the Canaanite woman and Jesus are immediately attuned to each other – they were able to see each other’s eyes, for example – and that their exchange is of this kind, a kind of verbal sparring that both sides enjoy? They are then enacting a parable for the sake of the disciples in order to teach them something about the universal mission of Jesus.

There is plenty in the prophets about the universal reach of God’s promises to Israel and we cannot imagine that Jesus is unaware of this. The pagans, represented by the woman, will come to the temple – which is now Jesus - and their prayers and sacrifices will be acceptable to the Lord. He quotes this kind of text later in Matthew’s gospel, when he drives the moneychangers out of the Temple and says it is to be a house of prayer for all the peoples.

Jesus in his encounter with the woman takes the opportunity to teach the disciples something about the call of human need, that there is no limit and no boundary to where the light of the gospel and the healing love of Christ are to be brought. Wherever there is human need, charity is to be exercised and the healing power of the gospel made present.

The missionary learns from the missioned if we can put it like that. We might be tempted to think that we know what people need and that we are the ones to provide it. Jesus, remember, does not presume to know that: ‘what do you want me to do for you’ he asks a blind man. The young priests who go out from this community learn what is expected of them from the people who come to them, teaching them the ways in which they expect them to be of service. There must always be this dialogue, between the teacher and the taught, the missionary and the missioned, the helper and the helped. Those we serve help us to realize the gifts with which we have been entrusted. Their need will call us beyond the limits we may have set to what we think we have to offer.

Fergus Kerr OP composed a homily for Torch, the English Dominican website, about this encounter between Jesus and the Canaanite woman. He concludes with this question:

Isn’t this wonderful little story an invitation to reflect on the possibilities of liberation that pagans may hope to find in Christianity, and the necessity, if they are not to be disappointed, that we Christians discover possibilities in ourselves that call us beyond our inherited boundaries?

Week 18 Tuesday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 30.1-2, 12-15, 18-22; Psalm 102; Matthew 15.1-2, 10-14

Out of the crisis of the Exile comes relief. The Lord acknowledges the pain his providence has inflicted on his people, but now it is time for reconciliation, restoration and renewal. When all is said and done the 'bottom line' is the one that is, literally, the bottom line of today's first reading: 'you shall be my people, and I will be your God'.

The gospel reading reminds us that our relationship with God is always in danger of slipping. Jesus is just as severe in his criticism of the Pharisees - blind guides leading the blind - as the Lord is in his description of the wound he has inflicted on his people.

Job struggled with the mystery of God's purpose in a philosophical way. He submitted his thoughts and feelings to the consideration of his friends but always remaining committed to the truth that he knew. He was not going to let God off the hook but instead called on God to share his own truth with him. Which he did - 'I am God, the one who is, and you are Job, the one who is not'. The words are not exactly those we find in the book of Job, they come rather from God speaking to Catherine of Siena, but they apply just as much to Job's situation as to hers.

It is the mystery at the heart of all dark nights - we know our sins and we know God's goodness, we know suffering and we know consolation, we know our weakness and we know what we desire, we know our longing to love and we know God's love for us. And still, trying to put together all those things we know, the elements of that equation which unites us with God, remains a quandary for us. It cannot be resolved philosophically, it seems. It leads inevitably to the cross of Jesus and his mystery.

That is where this quandary is at its most intense. That is where we see human sin and divine love exposed to our gaze as never before and as nowhere else. It is what comes from inside that matters, he says in today's gospel. From the heart exposed by human sin on Calvary comes the assurance of divine love, even in our darkest night, even in spite of our most serious sins, even when all seems lost. The Lord hears the groaning of the imprisoned and releases those doomed to die. But he does that not by helping them to avoid death but by bringing them beyond it to new life, to the kingdom of his beloved Son.

Week 18 Monday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 28.1-17; Psalm 119.29,43,79,80,95,102; Matthew 14.22-36

Sometimes the only thing people see in this event is Jesus walking on the sea as if it is some kind of trick, a piece of magic to impress people. (Sometimes it is the same with the sign given at Cana, as if that too were just a magical trick.) But that means missing so much of what this very rich text contains. Because what Matthew gives us is a theophany or more precisely a ‘Christophany’. Those terms mean a revelation of the power and presence of God, a revelation of the power and presence of God in Christ. In fact this moment belongs with the baptism, the transfiguration and the resurrection appearances as one of the key moments in which the glory of Christ is revealed to his disciples.

Looking back, there are so many echoes in this text of the great theophanies of the Old Testament. There is a mountain and roaring waters and wind. There is fear as nature is churned up by the presence of God. Those called to be close to God (Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, for example) experience perplexity and terror in the presence of the glory of the Lord. Psalm 77 speaks of the power and presence of God in a way that is strikingly echoed in Matthew 14:

Your ways, O God, are holy. / What God is great as our God?

You are the God who works wonders. / You showed your power among the peoples.

Your strong arm redeemed your people, / The sons of Jacob and Joseph.

The waters saw you, O God, / The waters saw you and trembled;

The depths were moved with terror. / The clouds poured down rain,

The skies sent forth their voice; / Your arrows flashed to and fro.

Your thunder rolled round the sky, / Your flashes lighted up the world.

The earth was moved and trembled / When your way led through the sea,

Your path through the mighty waters / And no one saw your footprints.

Your guided your people like a flock / By the hand of Moses and Aaron.

If there are echoes from the Old Testament in this event there are also premonitions of what is yet to be revealed about Jesus – the transfiguration, on another mountain, also provoking fear, and especially the appearances of the risen Lord. In those appearances we also find the disciples, the boat, the lake, difficulty on the lake, the appearance of Jesus and their wondering whether it is a ghost, his words of reassurance: take heart, do not be afraid, it is I, ego eimi in Greek, the divine name of Exodus 3, ‘do not be afraid for I AM’.

There is something satisfying, for us, in this way of God showing his presence and his power. To shake the building, to unsettle creation, to come with noise and fire and wind and smoke … this seems like how a proper god will reveal himself. But we believe that the Christophany, the revelation of the power of God in Christ, comes to its fulfillment on another mountain, the mountain of Calvary, where our God reveals his power in powerlessness, weakness and failure. We are happier with a God who would throw his weight around, who would fill us with fear. We find it much more difficult to understand a God who is love because we know less about love than we do about fear. But this is our faith, that the power and wisdom of God are revealed in the weakness and foolishness of the cross, that it is there that God’s power is most clearly seen and it is seen to be the power of love alone.

In this moment, Peter is like Thomas later, he wants some kind of proof or evidence that it really is Jesus. When Jesus asks him why he doubted is he referring to Peter’s loss of confidence on the water (his inability to do ‘the trick’) or, more likely, is he asking him why he doubted that Jesus would be present to the Church in its hour of difficulty. This event, this story, is an encouragement to the Church, to Christians at all times, to trust that Christ is nearby and his hand is always ready to reach out to save us. Peter then does not need to consult a book about prayer to know what he should say. He does not need to track down a wise man or woman to teach him how to pray. In situations of real need we know exactly what to pray for and we simply ask for it.

The gospel reading thus re-assures us that Christ is with us, always, in personal or shared difficulty, and we are not to be afraid. The hand of Christ is held out to us at all times. It is there in the Word of God nourishing us from day to day. It is there in the sacraments of the Church when we are fed and strengthened by the life of Christ. And it is there in each other, each of us a ‘Christ’ to the other, our neighbour, not far away, someone we ought to be able to turn to and say ‘help me, I’m sinking’. Each of us has been conformed to Christ in his dying and his rising and so we bear the Word and the Spirit for one another, as compassionate companions in the calms and in the storms of life.

Week 18 Sunday (Year A)

Readings: Isaiah 55:1-3; Psalm 144; Romans 8:35,37-39; Matthew 14:13-21

Some years ago the Christian community of Mosul in Iraq was obliged to make a stark choice: either pay a tax in order to live in an Islamic state, go away with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing, or stay and be killed with the sword. This is not a story from ancient times or from the middle ages, it happened just a few years ago. The vast majority decided to go away with nothing more than the clothes they were wearing. The people they were dealing with had already shown that they meant business, having slaughtered their way through Syria and across northern Iraq. For the Christians of Mosul it meant walking up to forty kilometres across the desert, carrying their children, until they found a place of safety, arriving tired, thirsty, hungry and, one can imagine, deeply sad. A whole civilization and culture which had survived so many things across the centuries may now have been destroyed forever.

Suddenly the world seems to be very insecure and full of great political and physical dangers. Not just in Iraq. The normal decencies of civilized living seem to be suspended as people act and react out of fear, humiliation and hatred. Every situation is being exploited by people gripped by fear, hatred and violence. Politicians in different parts of the world are building their power by playing to people's fears, hatreds and humiliations. The normal decencies that used to guide debate and discussion seem to have fallen away as people take to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the other social media to attack, mock, decry, complain and protest. Some of this is very good and necessary but much of it is done in language that is itself violent, humiliating, dismissive, disrespectful. Fear, hatred, violence seem to be the things dominating world affairs at the moment. And put with all of that the massive question of migration in the world, the normal problems, so to speak, of famine, thirst and disease, and the many other tragedies cutting across people's lives and leaving them permanently wounded ...

A great feeling of impotence and irrelevance might well overtake us as we try to reflect on scripture texts and wonder what the Christian faith can offer in such circumstances. Is God not just Santa Claus for grown ups, the wishful thinking that there is, as today's psalm says, a God of great kindness who is good to all and near to everyone who calls on Him? Against a strengthening chorus of agnosticism and atheism the Church's voice seems feeble, unrealistic, even at times hypocritical. Many good and intelligent young people have decided they do not want to stay with what the Christian faith teaches: it seems to them, at least in the way the Church lives it, unintelligent and morally bankrupt.

Jesus can sometimes be presented as a kind of Santa Claus for grown ups but we must always remember that his engagement with the world ended in failure. He was not able to answer the world's problems. He was not the solution to the world's problems. They are as bad, if not worse, than they were before He came. In the face of fear, hatred and violence, he too was powerless and he died as just one more innocent victim of those forces. Today's gospel reading reminds us of this: 'when Jesus heard of the death of John the Baptist', it begins. This is a turning point in his ministry, a defining moment as we say nowadays. He saw clearly what his destiny too was likely to be. John had died protesting at injustice. Jesus will die preaching the kingdom he had come to establish, the project of his life, it seems, unsuccessful.

The first thing the readings ask of us today is that we listen and look, heedfully and hopefully, to the generosity of God. And that we continue to do this no matter how bleak and dark the circumstances become. 'I will renew with you the everlasting covenant' - so the voice of God, barely heard perhaps, but distinct and certain, whispered in the desert, sounding in the night, patient and persistent in spite of the agitation of fear, the restlessness of hatred, and the screaming fury of violence. Under the shadow of the looming cross, Jesus is moved with pity for the people and goes on doing for them what he has done in more promising times: healing them, feeding them, teaching them.

The outcome is in the hands of God, times and hours known only to the Father. John the Baptist remains faithful in his campaign for justice and accepts death without knowing whether that death will be remembered or how that death might contribute, if at all, to the good of the world. Jesus remains faithful in his mission of preaching the kingdom, engaging with the forces of evil that are attacking the lives of the people. But his engagement with them is not on their ground but on his. His are not the weapons of fear, hatred and violence, for to fight those things with those things is to descend ever further into the abyss.

Paul's extraordinary litany at the end of Romans 8, today's second reading, makes what might seem like an absurd claim, that we are more than conquerors, that we conquer overwhelmingly. Faced with the powerful forces of the world - anguish, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword, death, life, angels, principalities, present things, future things, powers, height, depth, anything at all in creation - any of this, all of this, loses its power, because none of it can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. That whispering voice - 'I will renew with you the everlasting covenant', 'I have loved you with an everlasting love' - penetrates through all these things.

That love, poured into our hearts, will of course move people to work for solutions, for political and economic solutions to the problems that are destroying people's lives. Man does not live on bread alone but he does live on bread. The gift of God is an enabling gift, not a soothing cream to take the sting out of human life, but an empowering gift. 'Give them some food yourselves', Jesus says to the disciples when they come whinging to him. The miracle happens in such a way that it might seem as if the disciples themselves have worked it, it allows the bounty to appear to come from them: there was one basket of scraps for each of the apostles. The gift is within our efforts for this is how grace works, a power which enables our efforts from beginning to end.

Listen heedfully and look hopefully to the generosity of God. He is the creator who wants things to be and who sees them as very good. He is the redeemer who wants our salvation and who renews with us the everlasting covenant. The kingdom does not consist in food and drink, nor does it consist in political and military strategies. The kingdom means righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. That Spirit is given when Jesus is glorified and Jesus is glorifed through his failure, his death at the hands of fear, hatred and violence. He is the Victor, our Champion, and Conqueror, not in the terms and categories of the world, but in a new way, in a new world, in a kingdom that is as yet still coming.

Week 17 Saturday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 26.11-16, 24; Psalm 69; Matthew 14.1-12

We are in high summer in Europe but the readings pull us back towards Holy Week and Good Friday. Jeremiah anticipates the experience of Jesus in the way he is treated. Prophets and priests are against him: it seems they are more threatened by his preaching. They appeal to the princes and the people for support in condemning him to death. Jeremiah speaks to the princes and the people and says 'do with me what you think is right, but it was the Lord who sent me to call you to repentance and renewal'. Unlike Jesus, however, Jeremiah wins the support of the princes and the people who then tell the prophets and priests not to kill him.

The psalm provides much of the imagery we associate with the passion of Jesus and the gospel reading tells of the beheading of John the Baptist. He was another prophet who anticipated the experience of Jesus, this time even to death.

The disciples of John went and told Jesus about his execution and that marks a turning point in his own ministry. It is as if the final outcome for him also rolls into clear view for the first time. Jesus was also faced with the opposition of priests and prophets, of princes and people, with none of these prepared in the end to intercede for him. Even his own disciples abandoned him as he was handed over to death. He had anticipated it, he knew it was coming.

The role of the people is interesting in these events. With the princes they save Jeremiah. We can take it that the princes are politically savvy and did not wish to alienate the people. The same with the Baptist: at first the weight of public opinion is enough to keep Herod from killing John. Eventually, though, he corners himself with his rash promises to Salome and Herodias, and human pride obliges him to kill John.

These are dramatic events for the middle of summer, the persecution of Jeremiah and the execution of the Baptist. We would have wanted lighter fare, something easier, for our midsummer dreaming. And they are both 'echoes beforehand', premonitions and forebodings, pointing forward to the great drama of Calvary.

We find our place among the people in these dramas and so should not underestimate either our responsibility for how prophets are treated or our capacity to influence the minds of princes, prophets and priests. Often we feel too small and insignificant to have any real impact on what happens but it is not so. The man or woman of integrity saves the world. Even if it means losing their lives in order to remain faithful, their sacrifice will not be without fruit. It shines in the darkness of this world's history and will be influential long after the power of evil and its perpetrators has faded.

Week 17 Friday (Year 2)

Readings: Jeremiah 26:1-9; Psalm 69; Matthew 13:54-58

Matthew, Mark and Luke agree: Jesus did not go down well with the people of his native place, his own country or ‘fatherland’. If he had come preaching doom and destruction as Jeremiah did their reaction would be more understandable. But he comes speaking words of grace, a time of healing, reconciliation and restoration.

Part of the reason for their reaction might have been small town thinking. ‘Sure he’s from around the corner’, we might hear someone saying about a person who is gaining a reputation elsewhere. It seems that we do not expect greatness to be local, familiar or ordinary. ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’, is Nathanael’s first reaction when he hears about Jesus. But great people have to come from somewhere. And the New Testament teaches us over and over again that God’s preference is usually for the ordinary, that God works through the ‘poor of the Lord’, the ordinary people from ordinary places: Mary of Nazareth, Peter of Capernaum, Saul of Tarsus.

‘Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works?’ He is acting from something we did not put into him and operating from somewhere other than the culture we gave him. He is outside the education he received from us and outside the values and limits within which we shaped his formation. ‘We know where he’s coming from’ is another way of putting this, we know what we’ve put into him, and yet he does not say ‘Nazareth made me’. He speaks as if he comes from somewhere else and acts from a source of power with which we are not familiar. He returns to us with a wisdom that is beyond us.

There is always the danger, especially for people who think they have come to know Christ, of domesticating Him, thinking we know where He is coming from and what He is about. We can think we have identified the limits of what is to be known about Christ, the channels within which He will act, and the ways in which He can be present. But His wisdom and action remain available only for those who have faith, that is, for those who remain open to receive fresh truth, unexpected signs, and new freedom.

On the other side there is always also this hope: that there is a greatness in us that is yet to be seen. No matter how ordinary and banal we believe our origins to be, no matter how ordinary our culture or experience up to now, the same gift of faith teaches us that we have not yet reached the limit of what can be asked of us. Jesus comes to visit all our Nazareths, we might say. He brings His wisdom and power to bear there, calling and enabling everyone who listens to Him to love more. This means also to know more, and to do more, for it is in love that Christian greatness consists.

He is the hound of heaven: we must not turn him into a poodle. He remains always strange, free, other, different, receiving us with great gentleness but calling us to new things. The Love we believe Him to be – the divine wisdom and power – is always creating, always renewing, always ready to unveil the extraordinary gift waiting in the most ordinary of places.