The Transfiguration (B-2006): Love’s Explosion

Many TV pundits and politicians today speak about the need for “strategy” in the Middle East.

But you cannot have strategy without vision; you cannot have vision without meaning; you cannot have meaning without a purpose; and you cannot have a purpose without an origin.

And there is ultimately no origin except God – unless you prefer the “big bang.”

But then, logically, what begins with a big bang will most likely end in a big bang, and everything in between will also reflect that bang.

Maybe that’s why exploding bombs of increasing proportions characterize human history!

Seriously, though, if the big bang is the ultimate (i.e. the only) origin of the universe, and thus of humanity, then in truth we have no purpose, vision or meaning as a race or as individuals.

We are just random pieces of shrapnel.

The big bang, understood as the only source of the universe, would thus justify the survival of the fittest and the notion that might is right. Notions of justice, solidarity and even of civilization itself would be nothing more than arbitrary strategies, nice arbitrary strategies, adopted by the powerful to preserve their power.

Unless, that is, those same strategies failed the powerful.

Then they would adopt different strategies, such as war, oppression and institutionalized injustice ...

Might we point to embryonic stem-cell research, abortion, discrimination, racism and slavery as examples of that injustice? In all of these, the human being is not destined to God, but to other human beings.

These are the dogmas of a “big bang only” world.

The Catholic faith, more than any other, does in fact present a vision, a global vision of the whole of reality.

Its origin and destiny is the Blessed Trinity, the origin which is itself without origin.

Why did the Blessed Trinity create a reality beyond itself, namely the universe and humanity in it?

If, of ourselves, we knew the answer to that question, we would be greater than the Trinity!

It is the Trinity itself which gives us the answer: out of pure love. If we must speak of a big bang, and scientifically we must indeed do so, it must be considered theologically as the explosion of divine, Trinitarian love which sets the material universe in motion.

Creation is like the seed of Trinitarian love, from which there evolves in the beauteous complexity of billions of years the flower of that creation, which is man and woman, the apex, the zenith of creation, because created, prepared with immense care, in the image and likeness of the Trinity itself.

Through man and woman, and the rich diversity of the human race sprung from them, the Trinity “strategized” that the entire universe would return in loving surrender to the same Trinity.

Thus origin and destiny are the same, except that the seed of the origin now returns as the flower of the destiny, a beautiful, sweet-smelling blossom, our beloved human race, to dwell within the house of the Trinity for ever.

By original sin, that is, by the free rejection of the Trinity’s gift of itself to mankind, mankind injected a strategy of its own, a counter-strategy, into the evolution of the universe.

Sin sought to introduce a new meaning to the life of mankind, a self-invented meaning, a self-determined and self-sufficient purpose which would not be that of the Trinity.

Sin, of course, is absurd and irrational, because, in defiance of all logic and of reality itself, it makes the bizarre claim that man is his own origin (or, worse, matter is his origin)and therefore his own destiny.

Imagine a child saying to its parents, “I was not born of you. I came into existence all by myself!” We would laugh at such childish impudence, yet we do not laugh at the impudence of our own sin.

Neither does the Trinity laugh at it, because, although many don’t or won’t realize it, such impudence can lead only to death.

For, no matter how determined we might be to create our own destiny and to disown our own origin, reality is what it is: the Trinity is our only origin and our only true destiny.

But the Trinitarian love which brought us into existence had no intention of letting us fall into death.

God loves us too much, too all-consumingly, too madly, to let us go without at least trying to win us back.

The Trinity so loved the world that One of the Three, the Son came, not to condemn, but to save the world.

How could he condemn that which he was coming to save?

His love is more powerful than all the energy of the universe itself, than all the stars which burn and are born, than all the atomic bombs that could ever explode.

Only a cynic or a liar could think that he comes to condemn.

He comes to save.

But despite all that power of his love, he will not trespass one inch onto the sovereign freedom of any person.

If he forced us, how would we remain free? And if we were not free, how could we truly love him in return?

Jesus came not to impose salvation, that is, not to force on us the choice to return to the acceptance of our true origin and destiny.

He came to offer us that salvation as a free gift.

And he did that, not with powerful displays of magic, not with blustering speeches, but by the humble and sincere gift of his own love.

His love had two sides: unconditional love of the Father and unconditional love of each of us. Jesus brought to earth the love which the Trinity had shown in that explosion of love at the beginning of creation, and he exploded it again on earth, through his death and resurrection, as the beginning of the new creation. His love was like a blazing fire, yet gentle and humble in its ardor. His death and resurrection were the new “big bang.”

Into the furnace of his own heart, and into the humility of his mortal body, he allowed the Father to place the sin of Adam and of all the children of Adam, and in utter selflessness he offered himself as the perfect holocaust. Is this not the very truth we recall and reenact in the Mass: the very reconstitution of creation through the passage from death to life of the new Adam, namely Christ?

In him our sin, its absurdity and its folly, have been destroyed. If only we would let our sin go to him, be absorbed by him, in sincere and humble repentance and confession!

But Christ’s holocaust is not the end of it.

For his blazing love is greater than all sin and death, a fact proven by his resurrection from the dead.

It was easy for the Apostles, those who first allowed their sins to be consumed in the fire of Jesus, to think that Calvary was the end, that the dream was over, that a glorious destiny was a mirage.

So Jesus lovingly anticipates their sadness and removes the reason for it by also anticipating for them the true and final purpose of his death.

He allows the deep, inner glory of his hidden divinity to blaze forth in his flesh in the Transfiguration.

What he is telling them, and us, is that this is the shape, the texture, the form, the nature of the final destiny of each of us in the body.

The Cross is but the strategy of the Transfiguration!

The glory of the immortal body of every human being is the purpose, the meaning, the vision we must hold before our gaze with the inner eye of our deepest heart and with all the might of our being – especially in the face of war and violence, of depression and addiction, of corruption and deception.

The strategy to reach that destiny can be no different from that of Jesus: an abiding, all-possessing, resolute, stubborn and dogged will to love God above all things, to reject the absurdity and cheap fascination of sin, one temptation at a time, to be restless in loving one another with sincerity, humility and selflessness, one day at a time, one person at a time, one problem at a time.

We need to come so close to the blazing glory of the Transfiguration that we ourselves can catch fire.

Then we will be on fire with our origin, our vision, our meaning, our purpose and our destiny: to dwell forever in the glory of the Risen Christ whose body and blood we consume in this holy place - one Sunday at a time.

Msgr. Peter Magee

Sunday, August 6^th, 2006

Annunciation, DC: 8.30 & 10.00 am