Earthly and Heavenly Harvests

It was a privilege to be asked to preach at the Harvest Thanksgiving in St Burchin's, Bourney by the Rector, Rev Canon Jane Galbraith. The readings were for Harvest Year C: Deuteronomy 26:1-11 and John 6:25-35. 

It is a great pleasure for me to join you today for your Harvest Festival in this beautiful church.

It is also a privilege to be asked to speak to you, so I must begin by thanking Rev Jane for her invitation.  

Like all of us I’m sure, I’ve loved Harvest Festivals ever since I was a child! Let us just look around us at this beautifully decorated church, filled with harvest bounty. The decorators have every right to be proud of their skillful arrangements, and those who have grown the produce have every right to be proud that the best of it should be displayed here in God’s house! We all enjoy the colours and the smells of the fruit and the vegetables and the flowers, the familiar harvest hymns, and the cheerful people.

Today I’m going to talk about two things: the earthly harvest, for which we are giving thanks today - and also a different, heavenly harvest. The two are deeply interconnected.

So first, the earthly harvest.

Are you feeling cheerful? I do hope so, because we have so much to give thanks for. And cheerfulness is a Christian virtue!

However, we must acknowledge that many people feel they have little to be cheerful about. Arable farmers have been struggling to harvest crops due to bad weather. Yields are down, and many, particularly in the West, face making a loss on the year’s work. Other farmers too are struggling: milk prices may be recovering, but only a little. And cattle prices have been hit by recent currency movements. Many in the wider community do not feel the benefit of economic recovery after years of austerity. Homelessness continues to rise in our cities. Our public services are in crisis after years of under-investment. And people fear the consequences of our neighbours’ vote for Brexit.

But it is surely right to look at the glass as half full, not half empty! Just reflect for a moment on the breadth and variety of our harvest:

We have the staples: we have wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, hay for horses and silage for cattle.

And there’s so much more than staples for us to enjoy, isn’t there? There’s milk and honey, butter and cheese, beef and pork, lamb and chicken. There are fruit and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and apples, potatoes and turnips. There are pumpkins and marrows, peas and beans, cabbage and lettuce, and gardens full of flowers!

Many of us work with animals, and there are this year’s foals, and calves and lambs and chicks – thank God for them!  And there’s also the fruit of our own bodies - our children and grandchildren born this year, and older ones growing apace as mine are - thank God for them too!

Above all perhaps we should thank God for our health and our strength - and also for our intellects, our God-given cleverness. As every farmer knows, this bountiful harvest does not appear from heaven as if by magic: it takes intelligent planning and hard graft!

In this rich corner of the world today, no one will starve because of a poor harvest or recession, as our forefathers so often did. With our God-given cleverness we have invented ways to store food and to transport it, and economic and social systems to distribute it to where it is needed. And if we consume a little less, it will probably be good for our health; and perhaps the whole planet will benefit.

So let us be cheerful, and follow the good advice of Deuteronomy: ‘You shall set the first of the fruit of the ground down before the Lord your God … Then you shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you.’

Yet for all our cleverness, the earthly harvest is perishable and uncertain. Why has God not given us perpetually good harvests - and recession free economies? Perhaps to remind us that we are not masters of the universe: God is. God’s laws don’t change: Nature is as God has made it; and what we sow, we shall reap. We remain as we have always been, totally dependent on God’s continuing fatherly goodness.

In the passage from John’s Gospel that we’ve just heard, Jesus asks us to look beyond the earthly harvest, to a different heavenly harvest.

He tells the crowd: ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.’ ‘The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world’, he says. And finally he makes this great claim: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whosoever believes in me shall never be thirsty’. What is Jesus talking about?

This teaching is difficult. I find it so - but then so did many of those who heard his words, as John tells us in the next few verses. One way to look at it, which I find helpful, is this:

Just as God has made us clever, able to till and keep the world of which we are part, so he has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does. If we use our conscience to make the right choices, we reap a heavenly harvest of good, which nourishes us for eternal life. As the old saw says, the good we do lives after us.

But we are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe: our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation. So it’s hard to be good. We have to work at it, just as we do for the earthly harvest. It is hard work resisting temptation, putting what is right above our own desires. All too often we fail. We name that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul, and that evil too is eternal. A bad deed done can never be undone!

What a mess it is! How can we possibly be as good as God wants us to be? As good as God has made us want to be in our best moments.

This is where Jesus’s teaching speaks to me: he promises us all the help we need to reap the heavenly harvest. All we require is the faith to come to him. As the bread of life, he strengthens our souls. He helps us to resist temptation and to do good. And when we fail, he sucks out the evil that poisons the soul – in other words he redeems us. The only cure for a bad deed is to repent and be forgiven!

It is in this sense that Jesus is the bread of life that nourishes us for eternal life.

What are the practical implications of this? Consider greed for example:

Greed is the cause of so many of the problems we face, I think, from global warming to the global crash; old-fashioned, sinful human greed. Greed to consume more than we need at the expense of our planet. Greed for profit at the expense of other men and women.

To overcome the problems we must be generous to others, not greedy for ourselves. We must be unselfish and learn to know when we have enough. This wonderful planet – our God-given Garden of Eden – would be enough and more than enough for all of us if only we could do so.

But we cannot do this by ourselves, because our innate tendency is to be selfish and greedy. We can only do it through the grace of Jesus Christ, the bread of life, who will help us transform our sinful greedy natures into generous ones. He will help us to be as generous as God wants us to be.

And think on this: human greed threatens our future.

Selfish over-consumption in the rich world not only pushes the poor into deeper poverty and violent responses, but it drives the climate change that is damaging our planet’s ecosystems on which all life depends. Without Jesus’s help to transform our greed into generosity, we stand to lose the earthly harvest too. The earthly harvest depends in a very real way on the heavenly harvest.

So to sum up:

Let us thank God our loving Father for this bountiful earthly harvest. God makes it possible, and we work hard for it, so it is right for us to celebrate it and enjoy it together.

But let us work just as hard for the heavenly harvest of goodness, to nourish our souls.

Let us also thank God for the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. We need his help to reap this heavenly harvest. If we believe in him, if we come to him, we will never be hungry or thirsty for good things.

And let us pray that Jesus will transform our selfish natures into the generous natures on which both our earthly and heavenly harvest bounty depends, praying together a Christian Aid Harvest prayer:

The earth is fruitful - may we be generous.

The earth is fragile - may we be gentle.

The earth is fractured - may we be just.

Creating God, harvest in us joy and generosity

as we together share in thanks and giving.

Amen

Saints and saints

An address given at Templederry and Nenagh on Sunday 3rd November 2013, celebrated as All Saints.

We are celebrating All Saints today.

But just who are these Saints we are celebrating? Let’s try to tease it out a bit.

The common answer, I suppose, is that Saints are dead Christians who were most particularly holy and close to God, either because they lived such exemplary Christian lives, or because they died as martyrs for their faith in Jesus Christ.

But how can we be sure that any particular individual is a Saint?

No one would doubt, I suppose, that Jesus’s earthly family and close friends, and the Apostles and Evangelists we meet in the NT, were very close to God and worthy to be called Saints.

Later on, in the first Christian centuries, local churches and dioceses quite informally came to recognise other people as Saints, such as outstanding bishops, teachers, martyrs and missionaries within their own area. This includes our many early Celtic Saints, among them St Brendan the Navigator, who a number of us in the Pilgrim Fellowship was remembering in Clonfert Cathedral yesterday.

The process of recognising Saints was gradually formalised over the years, until eventually in the pre-Reformation Western Church it was accepted that only the Pope in Rome could declare someone a Saint, after exhaustive enquiries and checks, as is still the case in the Roman Catholic Church. By now there are thousands and thousands of them. I have a Roman Catholic ‘Book of Saints’ at home which has alphabetical entries for almost 5,000 named Saints and groups of Saints, starting with St Aaron – a C6^th  Breton Abbot, and ending with St Zoticus – a C4^th  priest in Constantinople.

It is particularly important for Roman Catholics to have certainty about who is a Saint, because they believe in the intercession of Saints – that dead Saints can effectively intercede on our behalf with God, if we ask them to in prayer. Only God truly knows who is a Saint, the theory goes, so no one is declared a Saint until God has demonstrated this by performing miracles in answer to prayers addressed to that candidate for sainthood.

Most reformed Christians reject the practice of asking Saints to intercede – Article 22 of the 39 Articles describes the invocation of Saints as ‘a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God’. Nevertheless, reformed Christians like us continue to honour Saints, at least those recognised before the Reformation, as examples of holiness and faith that we do well to imitate, in order to strengthen and encourage our own holiness and faith.

The Church of England has not declared any new Saints since the Reformation – with the peculiar exception of Charles I, who was honoured for political reasons as St Charles King & Martyr from the Restoration until 1859. But the Church of England Calendar does list many post-reformation Christians as worthy of commemoration, without explicitly calling them Saints. Not all of them are Anglican – they include for instance: George Fox the Quaker, Oscar Romero the martyred Catholic Bishop of San Salvador, and German Lutheran Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

We in the Church of Ireland are more parsimonious, but our BCP Calendar includes commemorations for two post-Reformation Bishops - Bishop Jeremy Taylor of Down, Connor and Dromore, and Bishop Charles Inglis, a bishop in North America from Raphoe.

All of these are examples for us of holiness and faith whom we should honour at All Saints – I suppose we might call them ‘heroes of the Church’ – and we are at liberty, I think, to consider them Saints too if we wish.

So far so good – but St Paul in today's reading from Ephesians 1:11-23 gives us a completely different view on who the saints are.

‘I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints’, says Paul. ‘I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ … may give you a spirit of wisdom … so that you may know what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints … for us who believe’.

It is clear from the context of this and other similar passages, that for St Paul the saints are all those who are ‘in Christ’, both those alive who believe and follow Jesus as his disciples, and those who have died. For the first Christians, the saints included ordinary Christians like you and me, as well as a few exceptionally holy people.

We are all saints (with a small ‘s’)!

We are all saints in this sense: we are sanctified, that is made holy, by being made part of the body of Christ in his Church at our baptism - the English word ‘saint’ comes from the Latin ‘sanctus’, meaning holy. Even though we know we are all sinners if we are honest with ourselves. We are not particularly holy, we often feel far from God – and, please God, we won’t be asked to die as martyrs. But we do try to live good Christian lives, and when we fail we seek forgiveness and try again - and again, and again. That is what makes us saints.

Those that we recognise as Saints (with a big ‘S’) and heroes of the Church are different from us in degree but not in kind – they too knew they were sinners. Even as marvellous examples of holiness and faith worth celebrating, they were human and fallible just like us. Remember, even the great St Peter was rebuked by Jesus with the words, ‘Get thee behind me, Satan’.

I wouldn’t for a moment suggest that we should celebrate ourselves at All Saints - how horribly narcisistic that would be – but surely at All Saints tide we should remember the saints (with a small ‘s’) from whom we have received our own faith, whether they are parents, teachers, friends, or others we have met on the way.

Since we are all saints, surely there are implications for how we should live our lives.

And I think Jesus spells them out for us very clearly in today’s 3^rd reading from Luke’s Gospel (6:20-31).

First, as saints we must never forget that we are blessed by God, whatever bad things may befall us. Let's hear Jesus's words again:

‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man … for surely your reward is great in heaven.’

Second, as saints Jesus tells us that we must obey what philosophers call the Golden Rule, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do to you’. He tells us:

‘Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes your coat do not withhold even your shirt. Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.’

Wow! That is a big 'ask'! How difficult these things are for ordinary, self-centred human beings. But they are commands from the very lips of Jesus, the Son of God. Unless we do our best, however poor, to follow them, we cannot claim to be part of the body of Christ, and we are not worthy to be called saints, even with a small ‘s’. No wonder we need the example of the Saints with a capital ‘S’ to show us that it is possible!

So as we celebrate the lives of all the Saints, let us pray that God the Father, through his Holy Spirit, will strengthen and encourage us to live up to the example of the Saints, and to behave as Jesus has commanded us to.

The Earthly & Heavenly Harvests are deeply interconnected

A Harvest Festival address given at Kinnitty on Friday 18th October, year C

What a privilege it is for me to join you for your Harvest Festival, to give thanks to God for all the good things he has given to us all.

And I must thank your Rector, Michael, for his invitation to address you this evening.  

Like all of us I’m sure, I’ve loved Harvest Festivals ever since I was a child! Let us just look around us at this beautifully decorated church, filled with harvest bounty. The decorators have every right to be proud of their skillful arrangements, and those who have grown the produce have every right to be proud that the best of it should be displayed here in God’s house! We all enjoy the colours and the smells of the fruit and the vegetables and the flowers - when I came in I smelt the apples and was transported back to my childhood. And we love the familiar harvest hymns, and all the cheerful people.

I’m going to talk about two things today: the earthly harvest, for which we are giving thanks today - and then a different, heavenly harvest. The two are deeply interconnected.

So first, the earthly harvest.

Are you feeling cheerful? I do hope so, because we have so much to give thanks for. And cheerfulness is a Christian virtue!

After the fodder crisis of the winter and late spring, my farming neighbours tell me the good summer has cheered them up. The crowds at the Ploughing were happy ones. The harvest has been easier than for several years. And a friend who grows cereals told me, with a twinkle in his eye, that although prices have dropped back, yields aren’t too bad, and he can’t complain – now for him that’s almost a shout of joy!

Yet even so, many of us remain anxious in this great recession we are living through. After the turmoil in global financial markets, policies of austerity have destroyed jobs and many are driven to emigrate. Worries bubble up: Is my job safe? What about my savings and my pension? How can I stretch my income to pay the rising bills for energy and other things?

But we should try to look at the glass as half full, not half empty! Just reflect for a moment on the breadth and variety of our harvest:

·         We have the staples: we have wheat for bread, barley for beer, oats for porridge, hay for horses and silage for cattle.

·         And there’s much more than staples for us to enjoy, isn’t there? There’s milk and honey, butter and cheese, fruit and nuts, blackberries and mushrooms, plums and apples, potatoes and turnips, pumpkins and marrows, peas and beans, cabbage and lettuce, and gardens full of flowers!

·         Many of us work with animals, and there are this year’s foals, and calves and lambs and chicks. But there’s also the fruit of our own bodies - our children and grandchildren born this year, and older ones growing apace as mine are - thank God for them too!

·         Above all perhaps we should thank God for our health and strength, and also for our intellects, our god-given cleverness. As every farmer knows, this bountiful harvest does not appear from heaven as if by magic: it takes intelligent planning and hard graft!

In this rich corner of the world today, no one will starve in times of recession, as our forefathers so often did. With our cleverness we have invented ways to store food and to transport it, and economic and social systems to distribute it to where it is needed. If we consume a little less, it will probably be good for our health; and perhaps the whole planet will benefit. So let us be cheerful and follow the good advice of Deuteronomy (26:1-11): ‘You shall set the first of the fruit of the ground down before the Lord your God … Then you shall celebrate with all the bounty that the Lord your God has given to you.’

Yet for all our cleverness, the earthly harvest is perishable and uncertain. Why has God not given us perpetually good harvests - and recession free economies? Perhaps to remind us that we are not masters of the universe: God is. God’s laws don’t change: Nature is as God has made it; and what we sow, we shall reap. We remain as we have always been, totally dependent on God’s continuing fatherly goodness.

In the passage from John’s Gospel that we’ve just heard (John 6:25-35), Jesus asks us to look beyond the earthly harvest, to a different heavenly harvest.

He tells the crowd: ‘Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.’  He tells them ‘the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.’ And finally he makes this great claim: ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whosoever believes in me shall never be thirsty’.

What is Jesus talking about? His teaching is difficult; at least I find it so. But then so did many of Jesus’s disciples, according to John. One way to look at it, which I find helpful, is this. I offer it to you:

·           Just as God has made us clever, able to till and keep the world of which we are part, so he has made us in his image to be moral beings, to be souls. Souls with the capacity we call conscience to distinguish right from wrong, truth from lies, love from hate - and to prefer good to evil, as he does, at least in the abstract. If we use our conscience to make the right choices, we reap a heavenly harvest of good, which nourishes us for eternal life. As the old saw says, the good we do lives after us.

·           But we are not masters of our own souls, any more than we are masters of the universe: our souls are as God made them, with free will, vulnerable to temptation. So it’s hard to be good. We have to work at it, just as we do for the earthly harvest. It is hard work resisting temptation, putting what is right above our own desires. All too often we fail. We call that sin. And when we fail and sin, the evil we do poisons our soul, and that evil too is eternal. A bad deed done can never be undone!

·           What a mess it is! How can we possibly be as good as God wants us to be? As good as God has made us want to be in our best moments.

·           This is where Jesus’s teaching speaks to me: he promises us all the help we need to reap the heavenly harvest. All we require, all that is asked of us, is the faith to come to him. Then, as the bread of life, he strengthens our souls. He helps us to resist temptation and to do good. And when we fail, he sucks out the evil that poisons the soul – in other words he redeems us. The only cure for a bad deed is forgiveness!

·           It is in this sense, I suggest, that Jesus is the bread of life that endures for eternal life.

What are the practical implications of this? Consider greed for example:

Greed is the cause of so many of the problems we face, I think, from global warming to the global crash; old-fashioned, sinful human greed. Greed to consume more than we need at the expense of our planet. Greed for profit at the expense of other men and women.

To overcome the problems we must be generous to others, not greedy for ourselves. We must learn how to be unselfish. This wonderful planet – our God-given Garden of Eden – would be enough and more than enough for all of us if only we could do so.

But we cannot do this by ourselves, because of our innate tendency to be selfish and greedy. We can only do it through the grace of Jesus Christ, the bread of life, who will help us transform our sinful greedy natures into generous ones. He will help us to be as generous as God wants us to be.

And think on this: human greed threatens our future. I'll say it again: human greed threatens our future.

Selfish over-consumption in the rich world not only pushes the poor into deeper poverty to which they may respond violently, but it drives the climate change that is damaging our planet’s ecosystems on which all life depends. Without Jesus’s help to transform our greed into generosity, we stand to lose the earthly harvest too. The earthly harvest depends in a very real way on the heavenly harvest.

So to sum up:

·         Let us thank God our loving Father for this bountiful earthly harvest. God makes it possible, and we work hard for it, so it is right for us to celebrate it and enjoy it together.

·         But let us work just as hard for the heavenly harvest of goodness, to nourish our souls.

·         Let us also thank God for the gift of his Son Jesus Christ. We need his help to reap this heavenly harvest.

·         And let us pray that Jesus will transform our selfish natures into the generous natures on which both our earthly and heavenly harvest bounty depends.

If we believe in him, if we come to him, we will never be hungry or thirsty for good things.

Shining Faces

The common thread between today’s readings is shining faces.

In the OT reading (Exodus 34:29-35) we heard how the Israelites saw the skin of Moses’ face shine when he came down from Mount Sinai with the stone tablets of the covenant – what we know as the Ten Commandments.

In the NT reading (Luke 9:28-36) Luke tells us how Peter and John and James saw Jesus’s face change – shining, as Matthew tells us - and his clothes become dazzling white, in the event we call the Transfiguration.

So today I want to reflect a little about shining faces and what they mean for us.

First, let’s think about Moses’ shining face.

The background to the story is that this is the second time that Moses came down from Mount Sinai with stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. The first time, he discovered that the Israelites had broken their covenant with the Lord, the God they called YHWH – Moses found them worshipping a Golden Calf made by Aaron. In a fury Moses smashed the stone tablets on the ground and ordered a massacre of those responsible. After Moses pleaded with the Lord not to desert the Israelite people, the Lord had relented. So for a second time Moses climbed Mount Sinai and returned forty days and nights later with another pair of tablets, to a very different reception.

The Israelites were afraid to come near Moses because his face was shining, we are told. I wonder if what happened the first time might also have put them off. He put on a veil to cover his face, which he only took off when he went into the tent pitched a little away from the Israelite encampment where he went to meet the Lord alone, to pray.

What are we to make of Moses shining face? Is this a miraculous light, or had he perhaps got sunburned in the 40 days on the mountain? I prefer to look at it in another way.

Even today we talk about lovers or brides, pregnant women and new mothers looking ‘radiant’ – it is the light of joy in their faces which we recognise by tiny almost imperceptible clues – they don’t glow in the dark, but they do look somehow different to how they looked before their joy.

I think this is the meaning of the haloes that are used in many religious traditions – not just by Christians, but by Muslims and Buddhists for instance – to mark out holy people or saints. Haloes depict the light of joy that comes from a close encounter with the divine, a symbolic reflection of God’s love for his saints.

And I think we should see in Moses’ shining face a mark of his joy at encountering the Lord, a reflection of God’s love for him and for his people Israel.

So what of Jesus’s Transfiguration?

The story is told by Matthew and Mark as well as Luke, in almost identical words – indeed scholars suggest that both Matthew and Luke made use of Mark’s earlier account.

The bones of the common story they tell are these. Jesus took Peter and John and James with him up a mountain. There Jesus was transfigured before them, with his face shining and his clothes dazzling white. And beside him the three disciples saw two other figures, which they identified with Elijah and Moses.  Peter said to Jesus, ‘It is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah’. Then a cloud overshadowed them and they heard a voice saying, ‘This is my Son … listen to him’. And when the cloud cleared they saw only Jesus by himself.

Now a high mountain and clouds are just the circumstances where we can see an unusual optical effect called a ‘glory’. In a ‘glory’ sunlight is scattered back from water droplets in a mist, forming a glowing halo – the technical term is Mie scattering. An example is the ‘Brocken Spectre’, named for the highest peak in the Harz Mountains in Germany. This appears when a low sun is behind a climber looking downwards into mist from a ridge – the spectre is the shadow of the observer projected onto the mist and surrounded by the glowing halo of a glory. You might be lucky enough to see one yourself, as I did, looking down from a plane at the shadow it cast on a cloud, surrounded by a halo of light.

I imagine Peter and John and James close together on the mountain, with Jesus a little bit away, praying by himself as was his custom, as the clouds swirl around them. Suddenly, where Jesus has been standing, they each see a glowing figure – it’s their own shadow cast on a cloud, wrapped in a glory – and two other shadows beside it, which are those of their companions. Peter, always the impulsive one, identifies the three figures with Jesus, Moses and Elijah. When the cloud envelopes them they are terrified, and in a sudden flash of inspiration they understand, as if they had heard God say it, that they must listen to Jesus as God’s Son.

This is speculation, of course, and not just mine. But if it is true that we can understand the effects surrounding Transfiguration as physics and not as a miracle, it should not weaken our faith one jot,  in any sense. Rather it makes it easier to believe the event actually happened, and therefore it strengthens the case that the Gospels are reliable accounts. The Evangelists might not have understood the physics, as we can, but they did not just invent the story to serve their artistic and theological needs.

The real miracle, I suggest, is how the Transfiguration affected the disciples.

They did not tell anyone about their experience, Luke tells us – indeed Matthew and Mark both say Jesus forbade them to. But they remembered it, how important it seemed to them, for they passed their story on through Mark to Matthew and Luke, and so to us.

The voice that Peter, John and James heard told them to listen to Jesus. And that is just what they did. Jesus taught them as they travelled with him the road that lead to Jerusalem, to the Cross, to the Resurrection, to the Ascension, and on to Pentecost, when they began to blossom as Christ’s body, the Church.

I think the Transfiguration was the moment on their long road when their complete commitment to Jesus was confirmed.

And we are surely meant to understand that his shining face and the dazzling light are, in fact, a reflection of Jesus’s joy in his Father’s love, for himself, for all creation - and for us.