Vigils Reading – Transfiguration of the Lord

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.