This morning’s Gospel reading is Matthew 17:1–9:

Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light. And behold, Moses and Elijah appeared to them, conversing with him. Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” While he was still speaking, behold, a bright cloud cast a shadow over them, then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” When the disciples heard this, they fell prostrate and were very much afraid. But Jesus came and touched them, saying, “Rise, and do not be afraid.” And when the disciples raised their eyes, they saw no one else but Jesus alone.

As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

Life is all about change. Nothing stays the same. We grow up, we get older, and eventually we die. The world changes around us in small and large ways alike. Empires rise and fall, your neighbors move away, someone installs a traffic light where a stop sign used to be. We live in a constant state of change in this world, as much a part of our innate industry used to shape our world to our present desires as it is part of our material bodies and their relatively short life spans.

And even our innate industry gets redirected on a regular basis. We make mistakes and correct them; we forget principles and “correct” things that shouldn’t have changed in the first place; we lose interest and move onto other things.

What is the connecting thread through all of this? Time. Whether you see time as a predator haunting our every move or as a companion who walks with us through our adventures in this world, time changes — and it changes us as well. We become oriented to time, perhaps even obsessed by time. How much time do I have left? Do I have time to get my goals accomplished? In some ways, time can be an ally by reminding us that we don’t have an infinite supply of it. It creates urgency for action, and pushes us into new adventures.

What would happen, though, if we suddenly ended up without time — and without change? What if this very moment was frozen, Twilight Zone style, and we could simply live in this status quo forever? Everything would be alive in its present state; no one would grow older; nothing would change while we lived in this present moment of time eternally.

Frankly, it would stink.

Not that we don’t have lovely amenities and resources, although we don’t appreciate them as much as we should. No, what would stink would be us. This present moment is filled with hatred, war, crime, exploitation, and more sins than can be calculated. Without change and time, we’d lose even our limited abilities to impact the world around us to make it better, to heal, and to pass it along to our children and their children. We’d be stuck in a limbo that offered no redemption and no hope at all. It would shortly turn into monotony.

That brings us to today’s Gospel and the Transfiguration, and a curious fear among some about the kingdom of Heaven. What is Heaven all about, anyway? Jesus uses parables to talk about it, and John offered an extraordinary vision of it in Revelation, but the idea of eternal life is so outside our experience that it’s impossible to grasp. More than once, I have heard people discussing it as an attempt to explain to a child in the womb what this world is like. Being creatures of the material world and strapped to time, it’s almost impossible to grasp — which is why Christ chose to teach about it in parables.

Our lack of understanding leads some to dismiss it out of hand or to believe that it’s a lesser experience than our current world. Billy Joel once sang that he’d “rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints — the sinners are much more fun.” Those who see it as an endless sitting on clouds and plucking of harps probably don’t feel enthusiastic about the prospect either.

Jesus understands that fear of the unknown, and today’s Transfiguration speaks to us more directly to alleviate it. Rather than offer another parable to explain eternal life, Jesus allows three of His disciples the briefest glimpse of it. His bodily form is transfigured first, demonstrating that we have glorified and eternal bodies through salvation, and then enters into a communion with two of the greatest prophets, Elijah and Moses. At the end, the Father becomes part of the vision, expressing His love for the Son and inviting the disciples to enter into a closer relationship to Him.

What does this show us? Heaven is not a stasis or a frozen moment that lasts eternally, but a community of the saved living in Trinitarian life. It is a gathering of all God’s children who choose to unite with Him, living in an existence founded on eternity rather than a fallen world, where His children allow the Lord to guide them and provide for everything they want — just as God wished all along.

And in order to get to that status, we must be transfigured ourselves, body and soul. The Word of God has that transformative power, and Jesus Christ leads our way to and through it, sacrificing Himself for our sins to allow us the grace to follow His way.

We cannot imagine Heaven on earth because very few of us are saints in this world. We cannot imagine eternity because we are so integrated into time and decay. We wear blinders and wonder why we cannot grasp what may be over the horizon. For just a brief moment, Jesus strips us of our blinders to catch the smallest glimpse of what awaits us through salvation, and our own transfiguration to come.

The front-page image is a detail from “The Transfiguration of Jesus” by Giovanni Bellini, c.1487. On display at the National Museum of Capodimonte. Via Wikimedia Commons. 

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.