Saturday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time
The Transfiguration
After six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them. Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, and they were conversing with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, “Rabbi, it is good that we are here! Let us make three tents: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” He hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified. Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them; then from the cloud came a voice, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him.” Suddenly, looking around, they no longer saw anyone but Jesus alone with them. As they were coming down from the mountain, he charged them not to relate what they had seen to anyone, except when the Son of Man had risen from the dead. Mk 9,2-9
There are occasions in the life, during which, in the routine of our days, the truth suddenly lights up and it is given us to grasp the mystery. The poet Giovanni Pascoli would say ”as an eye which wide, terrified, it is open, then it is closed in the black night”. These are the moments of the solution of an ancient problem, such as those in which the scientist comes to the formula which summarizes the functioning of the reality of the things. Or these are moments which come suddenly, as when I met your mother for the first time, or when, pondering a parable of the gospel, we are mysteriously thrown in the middle of the truth. Peter, James and John, who always struggled to understand Jesus and the meaning of his mission, today are surprised by this experience of the mount Tabor: they do not know what to say and they are terrified. They only realize to be suddenly included in the heart of the history of salvation, along with Elijah, Moses and Jesus, who in this scene is the center, the enlightened one. He is the one who is transformed and his garments became shining and white as “no wash-house on the earth could bleach them”. It is Christ whom the Father points out as the fulcrum of the salvation history: “This is my beloved Son, the. Listen to him”. Moses and Elijah represent the past and the three apostles the Church of the future. Peter realizes that they are living a unique and privileged moment and he would like that it would never end, to never return in the shadows of the doubt and of the difficult understanding: “Rabbi, it is good that we are here! Let us make three tents: one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”. He does not propose anything for him, he just would like to stay there. It will be not so. That moment, however, will be the starting point of his mission in the future, because every light, every discovery, every invention, every love and every moment of truth, are always a point of start, not of arrival.