THE TRANSFIGURATION OF JESUS
By Han Urs von Balthasar1
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The Gospel of the Transfiguration is preceded by the first reading telling
the story of Abraham’s sacrifice. And for good reason, for the Transfiguration
of the Lord was to be the Father’s demonstration of what his “beloved Son” truly
is, the One whom he will permit to be ‘slaughtered’ for and by mankind. For the
Jews, Abraham’s sacrifice is … the climax of their relationship with God, and
they emphasize that it was a double sacrifice: the sacrifice of a father, who draws
his knife, and the sacrifice of a son, who agreed to his own slaughter …. [The
event represents] the extreme form of what God can require … from a man who
is in a covenant relationship with him. The horror of it consists not in the
command to kill the son of one’s own body …; rather, the horror lies in the fact
that this son was miraculously given by God and destined to imitate and
accomplish the divine promises. In his command God contradicts himself. Yet
though the command may be incomprehensibly contradictory to man, he must
obey because God is God.
The second reading resolves the apparent paradox by showing that God
reveals himself as love in essence, a love that does not contradict itself if it sends
the Son of God into real death and thereby fulfills the promise to “give
everything”, namely, to bestow eternal life. Here the extreme is not the one-
sided obedience of man in the face of an incomprehensible command of God;
rather it is the way the Son’s obedient willingness to enter death for the sake of
everyone is united with the Father’s willingness to sacrifice … [everything, even
to the point of not holding back his Son]. In this, God is not only “with us”, as
in the Old Testament’s “Emmanuel”, but is ultimately “for us”, his chosen ones.
In this he has not merely given us something great, but has given us everything
he is and has ….
In this perspective the true meaning of the light… radiating from the Son
on the mountain in the Gospel can be understood. In no way is this light
produced through absorption in oneself; rather it is the radiant … light of
perfect surrender: it shows what the Father has really given up to “slaughter”
for the world, what the new Isaac permits to be done to himself out of obedient
love toward the Father, what the “overshadowing” luminous cloud veils [in the]
divine mystery. Fear and chatter on the part of the men necessarily follow, but
they are commanded to avoid abusing by empty talk what they have witnessed.
It will interpret itself in the death and Resurrection of the Lord.