Transfiguration Roman Catholic Church at 100 McKrell Road, Russellton, PA 15076 US - June 23, 2013 - 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This scene remained unforgettable in the memory of the Apostles. They must have recounted it often. Three of the four Gospels report it, Matthew in the greatest detail. The place where it happened was off the beaten track, a lonely place near Caesarea Philippi in the north of Galilee, close to the springs of the Jordan. Luke highlights the fact that in this lonely place Jesus was devoting his attention mainly to prayer.

 

At this quiet time, away from everything, Jesus openly expressed a question that had been on his companions' minds ever since they had met him: Who was he really? What was there behind the carpenter from Nazareth? This question obviously preoccupied the people who had met him. Every possible view of this was circulating. The views have one thing in common: Jesus is someone special, a man of God like John the Baptist, a prophet like Elijah or like one of those prophets from earlier centuries.

 

To this day, most people's opinions run in that direction. Islam sees in Jesus a great and important prophet. Many peo­ple regard him as a kind of religious genius, an admirable person - as being, along with Buddha, Moses, Muhammad, and others, one of the great founders of religions.

 

"But who do you say that I am?" This question is no longer being put to public opinion; it has become quite personal. "You have been on the road with me all this time, you have left your work and your families, to share with me a difficult and uncertain itinerant life. You have followed me up to now, you have come to know my way of life; you have heard what I say to people, and you have seen how blind people see again, lame people walk, and even the dead are raised up. What do you think of me, after all that?"

 

"We think you are the Messiah!" replies Peter, without hesi­tation. "In fact, we have thought that all along, since we first got to know you." At first it was a question, and now it has become a certainty: "You are the One for whom our people have been waiting for generations, the One who was prom­ised, who comes to save us and set us free; you are God's anointed one (that is what the word "Messiah" means), the Christ (the Greek word for the" Anointed One", the Messiah).

 

At last it has been said out in the open. Everything is clear now. Jesus reaffirms it - in the future they will know where they are. And yet hardly has it been said when there comes an unexpected twist. Instead of talking about what they all expected from the coming Messiah in those days - about peace and liberation, about the end of all suffering and weeping - Jesus talks about sufferings that lie ahead of him, about persecution and death, and - most mysteriously­ - about a Resurrection.

 

And besides that, if his companions wish to follow him any further, they have to be similarly ready to take trouble and suffering upon themselves. They had not imagined the Mes­siah like that: they really had expected something quite dif­ferent from him, something quite different for themselves.

 

Nonetheless, they were willing to commit themselves. They soon discovered that the path that Jesus had pointed out for them was the only right way. It proved its value in ordi­nary life. They found by experience that Jesus was right: whoever denies himself every day, anyone who struggles, day by day, to overcome his weaknesses, to take his labors upon himself, to carry his cross (and who goes through life without any cross at all?) - that person will find that in doing so, he is not left alone: the Messiah, the Christ, the Savior, will be with him. He truly is, to this day, the One who saves.