Transfiguration Homily

We live our lives in our bodies. There is a certain ambiguity about our experience of bodiliness. We physically experience joy, sorrow, passion, desire in our bodies. All these things have a bodily aspect to them – joy would not be joy if was just something we experienced in our mind, we feel it.  We laugh, we cry, we tremble.

Yet our bodies go wrong too, illness, disease whether minor or major affect us. Hunger makes us irritable – there is a name for it: hangry. And as we age, our once invincible bodies develop aches and pains; they aren’t so much fun anymore.

We all that we live our lives in our bodies – they immerse us in the world, connect us with the rest of creation, with other people and with God. God is not bodily, we are.

Yet God did become body with all that this implies. His Son became flesh, pitched his tent amongst us. He experienced the limitations and splendour of bodiliness: he lived, touched, smelt grass, flowers, saw sunrises, sunsets, people’s faces, embraced, grew, learnt, cried, was joyful, sorrowful, fearful, was tortured, died.

Today he is transfigured, revealing to us not just his glory, but the glory God has in store for us in and because of his Son. Our bodies, made up mostly of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulphur, but so much more; shaped by our decisions, commitments, by those we have embraced, borne, loved, carrying memories and promise are destined to shine like the light with the Son. Our bodies contain the promise of resurrection not because they are naturally destined for it, but because the Son became body, lived eternal life in the body.

We glimpse the promise of our bodies in Jesus, but we continue our journey with the ambiguity of our bodiliness. The Mass we celebrate, the food we physically and sacramentally receive in the Mass, the readings we hear, our moments of joy, connectedness which fill our bodies are the promise of a connectedness with God, our brothers and sisters and creation which await us.

But it is a future we just wait for. We are called to live the eternal life which is to come in our frail bodies here and now. What could that possibly look like? It is not to be seen in slick, sleek bodies which seek to insulate themselves from the world. Eternal life in our flesh here and now does not come from fleeing the world with all its pain and suffering, fleeing the grime and smelliness of the world. We glimpse eternal life here and now in Jesus’ life in his bodiliness.

It is lived here and now in the body in faith, hope and love. It is lived in touching other people’s lives with compassion, love, forgiveness, washing their feet with our trembling hands, crying and laughing with them as we share joy and sorrow, embracing and being with the other in all our bodily messiness.

The Father asks us to listen to the Son that he may speak to our ears and hearts. We need to continually change our minds and hearts, having them opened to the eternal life we can live in our bodies until the day finally dawns and the morning star rises in our minds as our bodies blaze with light for ever.