How open are you
to the grace of God?
The Transfiguration is a story that stretches the imagination: Jesus and his disciples go to a high mountain to pray, and suddenly he is transfigured before them; his face
shines like the sun and his clothes become white as light. And then Moses
and Elijah appear… The disciples must have been shaken -- Peter tries to
deal with the situation by proposing the banal gesture of making three tents.
But in reality, the Lord is revealing something to us at every moment of the day;
his grace is available to us at all times, can work in us at all times, if only
we are open to it. This is my beloved Son, God tells the disciples, Listen to him. Imagine if, rather than getting caught up
in what we think should happen in our lives, we simply wait and see, and listen.
Our openness to the revelation, and our willingness to allow it to teach
us something at every moment, is the only way to see the Lord’s blessing at
work.
Blessing is also an
important focus in the Book of Genesis. Remember
that the Lord tells Abram, I will make of
you a great nation, and I will bless you and I will bless those who bless
you. Not only that: you
will be a blessing, he adds. Abram
is not caught up in his own idea of what should happen; he is willing simply to
participate in God’s plan and let God do the work. It is through this kind of relationship that blessing
comes. God is interested in our entering
in and opening to the blessings he has for us because he loves us; God wants to
bless us, wants us to find blessing in him.
That Abram’s name might be a blessing is also significant: imagine your own name being a blessing, that blessing
might flow through it. And Psalm 33
reminds us that, even if we are immobilized with grief or hardship, we must
stand in the face of tragedy and know that blessing will come: Our
soul waits for the Lord, who is our help and shield. The proper human stance is to wait for God’s blessing
to flow, no matter what is happening in the current moment. That blessing – God’s grace – is made perfect
in the very fact of Jesus’ death and resurrection, as Paul tells Timothy: the
grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began is now made manifest, because Jesus destroyed death.
God’s design, God’s
plan, is often quite hard for humans to conceive of; it is not grounded in
human standards but rather in perfect love, in something that cannot be controlled
by human effort. Divine love, now made
manifest in Jesus Christ, is undeniable – we have only to open to that grace, open
to that blessing for it to be ours in all its dazzling splendor.
This post is based
on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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