The Gaze of Beauty
Year A – Lent – 2nd Sunday
Matthew 17:1–9: “Lord, it is good for us to be here!”
Each year, on the First Sunday of Lent, the Church presents the passage of the Temptations, and on the Second Sunday, that of the Transfiguration. They are therefore two Gospel texts typical of the Lenten journey. It is as if we are being told that there can be no Christian life without temptation, but neither can there be one without moments of light, of transfiguration.
1. First Reading: setting out again like Abraham
In the first readings of the Sundays of Lent, the liturgy sets before us, in broad outline, the history of salvation. Lent is a catechumenal journey, during which catechumens preparing for Baptism at Easter retrace the principal stages of biblical history. Together with them, we do the same, in order to renew our baptismal promises at Easter.
Last Sunday we encountered our first parents in their disobedience. Today we meet Abraham, the father of all believers, in his act of obedience to God’s call, which opens a new history, a history of grace: “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you…”. So Abram went, as the Lord had told him. Abraham was eighty years old. For most people, it would have been time to rest, to enjoy what had been achieved and to come to terms with the disappointments of dreams shattered by life’s vicissitudes. But God did not think so: “Go!”, and he launches him into a new adventure.
God unsettles the plans of Abraham and of every believer. He always wants us on the move. Perhaps we too, in one way or another, are being called to change direction. “It’s no longer for me. The game is over!”, we might say, with a mixture of disappointment and resignation. And yet God invites us to stake our lives once more. Not by calculating human possibilities, but by investing everything in faith in God.
“Go!”. Yes, this is the time for all of us to change land. Perhaps we have lived in the “land of our projects”. Today, however, God invites us to move into the “land of his promise”. Those who live by projects “project” their lives out in front of themselves as protagonists, making their own calculations. Those who live by promises, on the other hand, welcome the “promise” that God places before them and entrust themselves with confidence.
The protagonists of this Sunday’s readings are all men who invested their lives in God’s “promise”: Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, John, Paul, Timothy… They belong to a long and unbroken line of women and men who believed in God’s promise. Their lives were troubled. They knew joy and enthusiasm, but also trial and discouragement; light and inspiration, but also doubt and confusion; consolation and success, but also defeat and desolation. Yet they never ceased to follow the star of God’s promise.
2. Gospel: towards light and beauty
The ascent: from mountain to mountain
From the “very high mountain” of the supreme temptation, today we are led by Jesus apart to a “high mountain”: “Jesus took with him Peter, James and John his brother and led them up a high mountain by themselves. There he was transfigured before them.” This “high mountain” may be an allusion to Sinai, where Moses and Elijah encountered God (Exodus 24:29–34; 1 Kings 19). These mountains have no name, not only because they are symbolic, but also because it is for us to give them a name.
The Transfiguration is a mystery of light. Three times its brightness is emphasised: the face of Jesus, his garments, and the luminous cloud. According to iconographic tradition, the icon of the Transfiguration is the test of maturity for every apprentice iconographer. All icons must be illuminated by the light of Tabor (the mountain on which the Transfiguration is traditionally said to have taken place). So it is for the Christian: maturity comes when the light of Tabor illuminates and transfigures the whole reality of the believer’s life.
The metamorphosis: from glory to glory
The Transfiguration is not only the mystery of Jesus’ metamorphosis, but also of our own transformation, and of the reality that surrounds us. Whatever is touched by its rays responds by revealing its inner beauty and deep harmony. The verb used here for transfiguration or metamorphosis (metamorphein) is very rare in the New Testament. We find it only here, in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration (Matt 17:2; Mark 9:2), and twice in Saint Paul (Romans 12:1–2; 2 Corinthians 3:18), always in the passive form.
Particularly striking is the apostle Paul’s statement in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “And we all, who with unveiled faces contemplate the Lord’s glory as in a mirror, are being transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.” It is a beautiful text, one to be kept in the memory of the heart. Here it is the face of the Christian that is bathed in the light of Christ’s face and reflects his glory, like a mirror. This light is not a passing event; it works within us a metamorphosis. We become the images we contemplate. If we feed our gaze, our imagination and our soul with images of apparent and fleeting beauty, we find ourselves naked and even disfigured. If, on the contrary, we nourish our hearts with true beauty, we truly become beautiful. This genuine and lasting beauty can also be seen in the luminous gaze of certain elderly faces, despite the wrinkles of age and the furrows left by life’s trials.
The meaning of our life is to be transfigured into the image of the Son. This transfiguration is not instantaneous; it is a long process. It requires constant contemplation of Christ’s face in prayer and faithful familiarity with the Word, in which that face is reflected. Thus the Voice of the Father, enveloped in the luminous Cloud of the Spirit, invites us to listen to the Son: “Listen to him” — listen to him, him alone!, in the literal translation.
The descent: towards wounded beauty
The mountain of the Transfiguration has two slopes: that of the ascent (luminous experiences of prayer) and that of the descent into the valley, into our daily life with its greyness and ugliness. They are the two faces of life, to be reconciled. The face of Christ, “the fairest of the sons of men” (Psalm 45), is that of the Transfiguration and of the Risen One. But it is also that of the Servant of the Lord who “had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2). It is easy, at certain moments, to say like Peter: “Lord, it is good for us to be here!” Harder is it to reach the point of saying, like the British Catholic writer Gilbert K. Chesterton (1874–1936), standing beside a dying friend and contemplating his deathly pale face: “It was good for me to be there!”
3. Conversion of the gaze
Lent is the time to convert our gaze to true beauty, because “Beauty will save the world”, affirms Fyodor Dostoevsky (in The Idiot). In meditating on the Gospel of the Transfiguration, we cannot forget the faces disfigured by suffering, injustice and war. For — as Pope Francis said — “The face of God is reflected in the faces of the poor.” And “the glory of God is that the poor should live”, proclaimed, in both word and life, Oscar Romero. “Every small act of love is a transfiguration”, reminds us Madeleine Delbrêl, French mystic and activist (1904–1964).
Nor can we ignore that the beauty of creation is disfigured by predatory greed: the conversion of our gaze is also an ecological conversion.
Lent invites us to become apostles of what is beautiful and courageous prophets against the ugliness wrought by those who practise injustice.
Fr Manuel João Pereira Correia, mccj
Fr. Manuel João, comboni missionary
Sunday Reflection
from the womb of my whale, ALS
Our cross is the pulpit of the Word
