MIGUEL ADÁN
Wood relief, polychromed and gilded
1530-1600
Sirach 48:1-11
Psalm 80:1-3, 14-18
Matthew 17:9-13
In the reading from Matthew’s gospel, the disciples and Jesus have just shared an experience of “transfiguration.” This is an event that lies outside of time. It is a mystical experience, one that encompasses past, present, and future as a unified whole.
Elijah (signifying “mind”) has been reborn as John the Baptist. John is the forerunner, the “path-clearer” for the Christ, who is the pure heart of Love. With this union of mind and heart in love, we can experience a clear, compelling, and conscious choice to live each day in hope – hope for ourselves, for others, for all humanity, for our earth.
Such a union of mind and heart in love, functions as a radical wooing, a radical invitation to embark on the life-long journey of transformation-into-transfiguration. We are empowered to choose, invited to choose to be “changed into the likeness of Christ … from one degree of glory to another”, to form a community of light and love and transformation, those whose faces “shine,” and who offer salvation and change and hope and loving service to others.
This is a transformative action of the heart of Christ-in-us — an action that is outside of time, but also radically rooted in every time and every place, a process that is both “already” and “not-yet.”
We wait, then, in hope, in love, grateful to be participants in this life-giving process.
“Restore us, O God. Let your face shine, that we may be saved.”
Yvonne Jensen
