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AND AFTER six days Jesus took with him Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light. [Mt 17:1-2]

Artist: Victor Luciano Rebuffo

(1903 - 1983)

Buenos Aires, Argentina

KNOWING THAT HE KNOWS ^_[1]

ACT OF CREATION

1. The prayers of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass speak eloquently of the plenitude of God's divine life and the infinitude of his boundless truth. These expressions help us to understand the nature of God. When we say that God possesses the fullness of life and limitless truth, we acknowledge his divine perfection.

2. In other words, God is perfect existence. God is pure being and pure knowing. For God, being and knowing are perfectly one. What does St. Paul mean when he speaks of God's own design? [cf. 2Cor 2:11] What God thinks or knows beyond the perfection of his divine being, we may call the act of creation.

GIFT OF KNOWING

3. Man is the superlative design of God who said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.... male and female he created them." [Gen 1:26-27] To accomplish this Divine Plan, God willed that man's nature be unlike all other temporal creation.

4. God's Will causes me to exist, whereas before my conception, I had no existence. [cf. Jn 1:13] I was absolutely nothing whatsoever. God willed me to exist as an act of his love and relationship. He endowed me with the gift of knowing. More than this, however, God gave me the faculty of knowing that I know.

UNDERSTAND WHY

5. Consider, if you will, an infant child. He sees a smile on your face. He knows your smile as a thing and, not knowing how to explain it, he receives it and returns it with a smile of his own. The thing that you did corresponds with the image and likeness that God placed in his soul at conception. The infant child knows your smile, and his smile in return confirms his delight.

6. He knows that he knows your smile. Understand why God says our image, our likeness. By this he prophesies what we know from the revelation of Jesus Christ: God is a trinity of divine persons whose knowing is love and whose being is relationship. Therefore, you image God best when you love one another for the sake of the their personhood.

BLIND TO ITS OWN LIGHT

7. You exemplify God's likeness best when your relationships are self-sacrificing and generative. Man's being and knowing depend upon God. If man desires perfection, he must turn toward God who "reveals deep and mysterious things". [Dan 2:22] When Sacred Scripture discloses that the "light has come into the world" [Jn 3:19], it refers to Christ whose mission is the perfection and deliverance of man:

...THAT CHRIST may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. [Eph 3:17-19]

8. When man rejects God, his Origin and Destiny, when he rejects the Divine Knowing which perfects his flawed existence, when he lives as if he did not know that God exists, his world and potential close in on him. By rejecting the height and depth of God, the length and breadth of his life contracts. He becomes lost in a universe of sightless, unknowing, dead things. This caused the apostle to observe, "men love darkness rather than light". [Jn 3:19]

9. Though self-enlightening to some degree, man's contingent being and imperfect knowing cannot substitute sufficiently for God from whom all light originates.^[2] Man should be humbled by the knowledge that a star is blind to its own light. Active, but not alive, it does not know of its own existence. Our blind earth receives the blind suns heat and light. Yet not one piece, part or particle of either sphere knows that the other exists. The vocabulary of image and likeness obliges man to remember that he is a reflection of God not the extension or equivalent of God.

LIKE A DYING STAR

10. Man's willful refusal to seek the knowledge of God-- the perfection of love and relationship--propels him away from the divine source of his own humanity. His conscious knowing that he knows diminishes. Without being able to grasp the meaning of his own personhood, he renounces the value and worth of life itself. For a time, his exterior vigor conceals a growing incapacity to sustain the warmth of unselfish love and the radiance of meaningful relationships. He is no longer cognizant of his own priceless attributes, nor does he look for them in others.

11. Like a dying star whose vital energy has dissipated, his activity and potential remain beautiful to behold until the very instant he collapses in upon himself. The Holy Trinity glorifies its divine love and relationship to strengthen man in his contingency. When our lives are threatened by the disorder of the Evil One, the "Lord will arise upon us, and his glory will be seen upon us". [Isa 60:2] Epiphanies of God are, in a manner of speaking, a smile upon humanity.

12. And like the infant child, we see the thing of God. Moreover, we know what we see, not only in its own nature, but because the form of what we see is imprinted in our soul. The real miracle is not that God hastens here or there, but that man is capable of knowing when God manifests himself, and in imaging God, knows that he knows.^[3] Thus, we smile in return. We show our compulsive delight as did Peter on the mountain top: "Lord, it is well that we are here; if you wish, I will make three booths here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah." [Mt 17:4]

WITNESSES TO THE GLORY

13. The Lord smiles upon the elderly Abram, directing him to contemplate the horizons of the earth. In like manner, the Father confers upon this righteous man the length and breadth of his divine blessings. Abram's barren wife Sarai will bear a son. God bestows a new name upon Abram.^[4] Henceforth, he is to be Abraham, the spiritual father of a nation of faith whose descendents will outnumber the stars. Peter, James and John witness the true Light coming into the world [cf. Jn 1:9], not the created light of the sun or their own intellects.

14. Witnesses to the glory of Perfect Existence, they experience the luminous, sovereign majesty of God's pure being and pure knowing. They see and hear that which was from the beginning. [cf. 1Jn1:1] so that we may have fellowship with Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. You can depend on this with absolute assurance: Your love is made for God; your relationship is with God. The fullness of love and relationship is found only through Christ. You receive abundant life and timeless wisdom from Christ.

15. This is to say that human life and its perfection is God's highest act of creation. Jesus Christ, the "way, and the truth and the life" [Jn 14:6], proved decisively that man's rising from the dead is an act of God's glory for our sakes, that we might come to the Father through him. [cf. Jn 14:6] Not for his own sake does God permit his human creation to behold his glory. [cf. Gen 33:18-23] Rather, it is for humanity's sake. Abram, James, John and Peter, are privileged mortals.^[5] They witness and appraise God's amazing display of transcendent power.

YOU, O MAN OF THIS WORLD?

16. Sharing the passover with his disciples, Our Lord extends his epiphany to the elect in every generation: "Righteous Father, the world has not known thee, but I have known thee; and these know that thou hast sent me. I made known to them thy name, and I will make it known, that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them." [Jn 17:25-26] The light of Christ shines in your midst. Through the Holy Spirit, you experience Our Lord's presence every time you kneel in prayer and worship.

17. Do you know that you know Christ through his timeless Word and Sacraments? Have you conformed your love and relationships to the template which God placed in your soul at the moment of your baptism? Have you appraised the incomparable worth of Our Lord's Body and Blood in Holy Eucharist? Yet, for a short while, Lord, we must remain a vessels of clay to "show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us". [2Cor 4:7] May we carry the cross of Christ willingly and without complaint.

18. May the Holy Spirit, who raised Our Lord from the dead, deliver us from the works of death. May we seek sacramental reconciliation with Our Lord to receive worthily the Bread of Heaven. May we share in the fullness of the Father's life and delight in his limitless truth. Amen. If, in all its powerlessness, the infant at your breast knows that he knows your smile, then what are the possibilities of prayer for you, O Man of this world?

^[1] Cycle A /Second Sunday of Lent /Gen 12:1-4 /2Tim 1:8-10 /Mt 17:1-9.

^[2] "And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his garments became white as light." [Mt 17:2-3]

^[3] "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shined." [Isa 9:2]

^[4] "No longer shall your name be Abram, but your name shall be Abraham; for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations." [Gen 17:5] "I will indeed bless you, and I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore." [Gen 22:17]

^[5] "I did not speak in secret, in a land of darkness; I did not say to the offspring of Jacob, 'Seek me in chaos.' I the Lord speak the truth, I declare what is right." [Isa 45:19]