For today's feast of the Transfiguration, here is an excerpt of a commentary by the Pontifical Household preacher, Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa. To view the full commentary, please click here.
...Let us now go back to the episode of the Transfiguration to draw from it some practical teaching. Even the Transfiguration is a mystery "for us," it hits close to home.
In the second reading St. Paul says: "The Lord Jesus transfigured our miserable body, conforming it to his glorious body." Tabor is an open window on our future; it assures us that the opacity of our body will one day be transformed into light. But Tabor also tells us something about the present. It highlights what our body already is, beneath its miserable appearance: the temple of the Holy Spirit.
For the Bible the body is not an inessential element of human beings; it is an integral part. Man does not have a body, he is a body. The body was created directly by God, assumed by the Word in the incarnation and sanctified by the Spirit in baptism.
The man of the Bible is enchanted by the splendor of the human body: "You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother's womb. I praise you, so wonderfully you made me" (Psalm 139). The body is destined to share the same glory in eternity as the soul. "Body and soul: either they will be two hands joined in eternal adoration or two wrists bound together in eternal captivity" (Charles Péguy).
Christianity preaches the salvation of the body, not salvation from the body, as the Manichean and Gnostic religions did in antiquity and as some Eastern religions do today.
And what can we say to those who suffer? What can we say to those who witness the deformation of their own bodies or those of loved ones? The most consoling message of the Transfiguration is perhaps for them. "He will transfigure our miserable body, conforming it to his glorious body."
Bodies humiliated by sickness and death will be ransomed. Even Jesus will be disfigured in the passion, but will rise with a glorious body with which he will live for eternity and, faith tells us, with which he will meet us after death.
In the second reading St. Paul says: "The Lord Jesus transfigured our miserable body, conforming it to his glorious body." Tabor is an open window on our future; it assures us that the opacity of our body will one day be transformed into light. But Tabor also tells us something about the present. It highlights what our body already is, beneath its miserable appearance: the temple of the Holy Spirit.
For the Bible the body is not an inessential element of human beings; it is an integral part. Man does not have a body, he is a body. The body was created directly by God, assumed by the Word in the incarnation and sanctified by the Spirit in baptism.
The man of the Bible is enchanted by the splendor of the human body: "You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother's womb. I praise you, so wonderfully you made me" (Psalm 139). The body is destined to share the same glory in eternity as the soul. "Body and soul: either they will be two hands joined in eternal adoration or two wrists bound together in eternal captivity" (Charles Péguy).
Christianity preaches the salvation of the body, not salvation from the body, as the Manichean and Gnostic religions did in antiquity and as some Eastern religions do today.
And what can we say to those who suffer? What can we say to those who witness the deformation of their own bodies or those of loved ones? The most consoling message of the Transfiguration is perhaps for them. "He will transfigure our miserable body, conforming it to his glorious body."
Bodies humiliated by sickness and death will be ransomed. Even Jesus will be disfigured in the passion, but will rise with a glorious body with which he will live for eternity and, faith tells us, with which he will meet us after death.
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