Transfiguration Light, I

Today is one of the oddest feasts in the Catholic liturgical calendar, the feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain.  (See Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 9:2-10; Luke 9:28-36)  I say odd in a most humble way.  What happened to Jesus was clearly beyond the comprehension of his three dear friends, Peter, John and James, who by his invitation accompanied Jesus up the mountain.  What happened to Jesus may have also been beyond the comprehension of the gospel writers.  

I found this passage intriguing, on the online "Laudate" prayer website, for this feast:

"The Transfiguration of the Lord can sound embarrassingly magical.  Jesus goes up onto a mountain and his clothes become dazzlingly white.  Prophets appear and talk to him.  And then it is all over and Jesus tells his disciples to say nothing.

"We should hold on to the absurdity of the incident. There is simply no reason for all this to have happened.  In particular, there is no reason to put it into a gospel -- the evangelist makes no capital out of it, it is simply there.

"And this is the strength of the Transfiguration as an historical incident.  There is no reason for anyone to have invented it.  It is not central to the Christian case.  It is not used to win arguments.  There is only one reason to put it into the Gospel, and that is because it happened.  It is one of those cases of the evangelists writing things down without knowing why they were important, and their very puzzlement is what makes the story so convincing."

Some commentators have suggested that this is another post-resurrection story, retrojected into the life and ministry of Jesus.  Others have suggested that it was an illusion, a kind of parable of linking Jesus to his Jewish ancestors and their traditions of law and prophecy.  Who knows?

But I also like this feast, not only for the not-knowing of the story, but for the historical coincidence of two other events in recent memory which fell on August 6:  the U.S. using a nuclear weapon in war for the first time in human history, bombing Hiroshima, Japan; and the death of Pope Paul VI in 1978.

Let me do a post on each of these two events, and try to link them.