Listen To Him

There is a reason the Church puts the Transfiguration in the middle of August and again on the Second Sunday of Lent. Both times, she is doing the same thing Jesus did on that mountain: showing you the end before you have to walk through the middle. Peter, James, and John saw the face of Christ shining like the sun about a week after they heard him say, out loud, that he was going to be handed over and killed. They needed that vision. So do we.

And here is the part that stings a little. When the Father speaks out of the cloud, the command he attaches to his Son’s identity is “Listen to him.” The whole point of the glory was obedience. We tend to want the mountain without the marching orders. We want a God who impresses us more than a God who commands us, because being impressed costs nothing and being obedient costs everything. Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord, and today the voice from the cloud says the same three words it said on Tabor.

The Readings

First Reading: Daniel 7:9-10, 13-14

As I looked, thrones were placed and one that was ancient of days took his seat; his raiment was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames, its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came forth from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened.

I saw in the night visions, and behold, with the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man, and he came to the Ancient of Days and was presented before him. And to him was given dominion and glory and kingdom, that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom one that shall not be destroyed.

Gospel: Matthew 17:1-9

And after six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” He was still speaking, when lo, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces, and were filled with awe. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and have no fear.” And when they lifted up their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus only.

And as they were coming down the mountain, Jesus commanded them, “Tell no one the vision, until the Son of man is raised from the dead.”

Scriptural Analysis

Daniel is having a nightmare before he has a vision. The chapter opens with four monstrous beasts climbing out of a churning sea, and the sea in Hebrew imagery is chaos, the deep, the place where nothing is ordered. Each beast is an empire. Each empire eats the one before it. That is what human power looks like from the inside of an occupied nation, and the Jews reading Daniel under Antiochus IV knew exactly what beast they were living under.

Then the scene changes. Thrones are set up. The Ancient of Days takes his seat, clothed in white, hair like pure wool, throne of fire on wheels of fire. Daniel is borrowing Ezekiel’s chariot-throne here (Ezekiel 1:15-20), and the fire is the fire of Sinai and the burning bush (Exodus 3:2, Deuteronomy 4:24). Ten thousand times ten thousand attend him. The court sits and the books are opened, and those books are not the book of life but the record of deeds, the ledger of what men have actually done (Malachi 3:16, Jeremiah 17:1).[1]

And then the figure who changes everything. “With the clouds of heaven there came one like a son of man.” Notice where he comes from. The beasts come up out of the churning sea, out of the chaos below. This one comes down with the clouds, from above, and he is human. The Navarre commentary puts the contrast sharply: this son of man is the very antithesis of the beasts, because he has not risen from the turbulent sea, there is nothing ferocious about him, and he has been raised up by God rather than clawing his way to power.[2] Empire after empire devours; this one is given. Dominion, glory, kingdom, all handed to him, and unlike every kingdom before it, his “shall not pass away.”

The Catechism reads this text as the Church has always read it. When we say in the Creed that Christ is seated at the right hand of the Father, we are saying that Daniel 7:14 has been fulfilled: “Being seated at the Father’s right hand signifies the inauguration of the Messiah’s kingdom, the fulfillment of the prophet Daniel’s vision concerning the Son of man.”[3] That title, Son of Man, became the one Jesus used of himself more than any other. And he used it precisely when he was talking about his suffering. He took Daniel’s glory-title and welded it to the cross.

Now go up the mountain with Matthew. “After six days.” Aquinas notes that Luke says eight and Matthew six because Luke is counting the day of the saying and the day of the vision while Matthew counts only the days in between, and he sees in those six days the six ages of the world after which we hope to arrive at glory.[4] Six days is also Sinai. Moses went up the mountain and the cloud covered it six days, and on the seventh God called to him out of the cloud (Exodus 24:16). Matthew is not being subtle. He wants you standing at Sinai.

The parallels stack up. Moses takes three companions up a high mountain (Exodus 24:9); Jesus takes Peter, James, and John. The cloud of glory covers the mountain; a bright cloud overshadows them, and the Greek word Matthew uses for “overshadow” is the same word the Septuagint uses in Exodus 40:35 for the glory cloud filling the tent of meeting.[5] Moses comes down with his face shining (Exodus 34:29-30); Jesus’ face shines here, on the way up.

But Matthew builds the parallel in order to break it. Moses’ face shone because it caught light from somewhere else. He had been standing in a glory that was not his. Jesus’ face shines with a glory that belongs to him, before the cloud arrives, before the voice speaks. The Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture states it plainly: Jesus is no mere human mediator like Moses, he is the Son of God, and he appears with a glory that is his own.[6] Aquinas presses the same point from a different angle. His body was not naturally luminous, he says, but the brilliance came from the interior soul full of charity, and Christ, being God, held the ordinary flow between soul and body under his own command, so that when he willed it the glory of his soul shone out into his flesh.[7] The Transfiguration was not something added to Jesus. It was something he stopped hiding.

And Moses and Elijah are there talking with him. Aquinas gives six reasons from Chrysostom and the Gloss, and three of them are worth your time. First, to distinguish him from them, since the crowds had been guessing that Jesus was Elijah or one of the prophets (Matthew 16:14). Second, to answer the charge that he broke the law and blasphemed, since he stands here in the company of the lawgiver and the greatest of the prophets and they are not correcting him, they are conversing with him. Third, to show that he is judge of the living and the dead, because Elijah was taken up alive and Moses died.[8] Law and Prophets, the whole Old Testament, standing on that mountain giving testimony to the man in the middle.

Then Peter opens his mouth. He always does. “Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths.” Those booths are the tents of Sukkoth, the Feast of Tabernacles, the autumn festival where Israel lived in makeshift shelters and looked forward to the day when the nations would stream to Jerusalem to worship the Lord as king (Zechariah 14:16-20).[9] Peter is not confused about everything. He has correctly guessed that the end has arrived. He is only wrong about the route. He thinks glory can be had without Calvary, and Aquinas catalogs the error with a certain affection: Peter believed the glory of the saints could be had in this world, and he wanted to build houses where God has already prepared one not made with hands.[10] Six days earlier Peter had told Jesus that the cross would never happen to him and been called Satan for it (Matthew 16:22-23). He has not let it go.

The Father answers him. Not Jesus, the Father, out of the cloud: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” The first half is word for word what was said at the Jordan (Matthew 3:17), but there it was spoken to Jesus and here it is spoken to the three men lying in the dirt. And there is a new command attached. Listen to him. Deuteronomy promised a prophet like Moses, and said of him, “him you shall heed” (Deuteronomy 18:15). The Father is identifying his Son and telling the apostles that the argument is over. Aquinas is blunt about what that means for the two men standing beside Jesus: hear him, not Moses, not Elijah, except insofar as they teach Christ.[11]

Then they fall on their faces, “filled with awe,” and Matthew has chosen his words. This is how Daniel reacts to his visions (Daniel 8:17-18, 10:7-9). We have come full circle. The Ancient of Days on his throne of fire and the man on the mountain with a face like the sun are joined in the readings today because the Church wants you to see one thing: the one like a son of man who received an everlasting kingdom in Daniel’s night vision has a name, and his clothes were white as light on a hill in Galilee.

And then Jesus touches them. That is the detail I keep returning to. The glory knocks them flat, and the hand that lifts them is a human hand. “Rise, and have no fear.” When they look up, Moses and Elijah are gone. Jesus alone. Then he walks them back down the hill and tells them to keep quiet about it until the resurrection, because there is no way to understand this vision except from the far side of the tomb.

Daily Application

Peter wanted to stay. I understand him completely, and so do you.

Every one of us has had a moment when God was near in a way we could feel. A retreat, an adoration chapel at two in the morning, the hour after a confession that finally told the truth, the birth of a child, the death of someone holy. And every one of us has tried to build a booth on that spot. We go back to the same chapel, the same retreat house, the same devotion, hoping to reproduce the feeling. And when it does not come back, we quietly conclude that God has withdrawn or, worse, that the whole thing was our imagination.

Here is what the Transfiguration says to that. The vision was never given so the three could live in it. It was given because Jesus knew what was coming in Jerusalem, and he wanted them to have seen his glory before they saw his face beaten past recognition. Consolation is provision for the road ahead. Saint Peter himself understood it that way decades later, when he wrote that they had been eyewitnesses of his majesty on the holy mountain, and then told his readers to treat that prophetic word as “a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:16-19). A lamp is for walking in the dark. He is telling you to spend the consolation, not frame it.

So the question for today is not whether you have had a mountain. It is what you did with it when you came back down. Because that is the actual test of a Christian life, and it is where most of us fail, myself included. The grace that came in that hour of prayer was meant to fund the argument you are dreading, the forgiveness you have been postponing, the confession you have been rehearsing for four years. If it did not, God still spent that grace freely. We are the ones who pocketed it.

Which brings us to the three words. Listen to him. What the Father hands the apostles from inside that cloud is a command, and the Greek carries the sense of a listening that ends in doing. There is a way of being Catholic that runs entirely on impressions, where we read Scripture for how it makes us feel and go to Mass for the same reason and grade our faith by our emotional weather. The Father cuts underneath all of it. Jesus said something to you. Do it.

And be specific, because vague resolutions die by Friday. What has Christ actually said to you that you have not yet obeyed? Most of us know. It is usually one thing and it is usually not mysterious. Go to confession. Forgive your brother. Get the marriage convalidated. Stop the drinking. Tell your kids the truth about why you left the Church for eight years. Take back the sixty hours a week from work you promised your wife you would take back. You do not need a new revelation. You need to act on the one you already have, and you have been waiting for a feeling to make it easier. The feeling is not coming. That is what faith is for.

The consolation on Tabor lasted a matter of minutes. The obedience it purchased carried three men through Gethsemane, through a courtyard where one of them denied he knew the man, through a Friday afternoon and a Sunday morning and, eventually, through martyrdom. God gave them a glimpse so they could give him a life.

He has given you the same glimpse in a way Peter never had it, because you can receive the glorified body of Christ on your tongue this morning, and no cloud on any mountain in Galilee ever came that close. So go up the mountain in prayer today, and then come down and do the thing you have been avoiding. Listen to him.

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Notes

1. Louis F. Hartman and Alexander A. Di Lella, The Book of Daniel, Anchor Bible 23 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 218.
2. The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, texts and commentaries (Dublin: Four Courts Press), commentary on Daniel 7:9-14.
3. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed. (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1997), no. 664.
4. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, trans. Jeremy Holmes and Beth Mortensen (Lander, WY: Aquinas Institute, 2013), no. 1418.
5. Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 217-18.
6. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 215-16.
7. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, nos. 1424-25.
8. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, no. 1428.
9. Mitch and Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, 217.
10. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, no. 1432.
11. Aquinas, Commentary on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, no. 1437.

Books Cited

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• Catholic Church, Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition, Doubleday / Image, 2003
• Curtis Mitch and Edward Sri, The Gospel of Matthew, Catholic Commentary on Sacred Scripture (Baker Academic, 2010)
• University of Navarre, The Navarre Bible: Major Prophets, Four Courts Press, 2005