Readings of the day: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 33:4-5, 18-19, 20, 22; 2 Timothy 1:8b-10; Matthew 17:1-9
When we think about our identity—what reveals to the world around us who we are—where do we start? We might start with our names, the identity we were given when we were born. I was born Warren Roger. Roger recalls the French heritage on my mother’s side. It was my great-grandfather’s name, and I also have an uncle (my mom’s brother) whose name is Roger. Warren is Old Germanic, related to caring for animals. I do not think my parents—unless they have a special ability to see into the future that I do not know about—could have predicted how much I love animals when they named me at birth. But I think my name is fitting.
At baptism, we (if we are baptized as adults or older children) or our parents (if we are baptized as infants) give our name to the Church. We take on a new identity, a new name of baptized Christian. How many of us took another name, often a saint’s name, when we were confirmed? At confirmation, once again, our identity changes. We become a new being, sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Today in the Book of Genesis, we hear about Abram. God tells Abram to set out from his homeland, Ur (in what is now Iraq near the Persian Gulf), to an unknown, unnamed place. All God tells Abram is that the place to which he will relocate will be a place of blessing: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.”
At this point, Abram is seventy-five years old. He would have to wait until he was eighty-five to have his first son, Ishmael, with Hagar. Abram was ninety-nine years old when God gave him a new name, Abraham. And, finally, when Abraham was one hundred years old, God followed through on his promise to give Abraham a son, Isaac, with his wife Sarah. The process of Abraham’s change of identity, from Abram to Abraham to the father in faith of many nations, takes time in the Book of Genesis. But already we hear the first movements of God giving Abram that new identity. Not only will the land where Abraham will settle be blessed, or Sarah and Abraham together be blessed with a child in their old age, but Abram will bless the land and its people where he settles. God has already given Abram a new name, a new identity, even before he leaves Ur: “You will be a blessing.”
The process for Jesus and for us, Jesus’ disciples, toward taking on a new identity before God is much shorter than it was for Abram. Jesus’ public ministry through the founding of the Church at Pentecost lasted maybe a few years; Abraham moved to a new home at seventy-five, waited over eighty years for a new name, and one hundred years for a child with Sarah.
Today from the Gospel of Matthew we hear the account of Jesus’ transfiguration. Of all the Gospels, Matthew is the most focused on questions of identity: Who is Jesus? Who were Jesus’ ancestors? Who are we, Jesus’ disciples, the Church? Matthew begins his Gospel with a spectacular genealogy of Jesus, a list of forty-two generations of names, before identifying “Jesus, who is called the Messiah,” as the son “of Joseph, the husband of Mary.”
In the order of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus’ transfiguration happens right between two other important “identity” sections in Matthew. Just before Jesus’ transfiguration, Jesus takes his disciples to the far northern reaches of Israel at Caesarea Philippi. There, Jesus asks his disciples, “Who do you say that I am”? Among all the different identities the people were associating with Jesus—“Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets”—Jesus’ apostle Simon Peter is the only one to identify Jesus correctly: “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” And Simon receives a new identity in the process of correctly identifying Jesus as the Messiah: “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church.”
Just after Jesus is transfigured, it seems that Jesus’ disciples are very confused, not only about Jesus’ identity and mission but their own. When they are barely down the mountain of the transfiguration, Jesus’ disciples question, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”? Jesus places a child among them, saying that the only way to go to heaven, never mind be identified as “the greatest in the kingdom of heaven,” is to be as humble and dependent on God as the child is on those who care for it. And then Peter, who had almost aced the identity of Jesus as the Messiah before the transfiguration (I have a lot of empathy for Peter for his trouble grappling with the need for Jesus to suffer and die), stumbles on the question of forgiveness.
Peter asks Jesus, “Lord, if my brother sins against me, how many times must I forgive him”? By this point, Jesus has already turned this issue about how many times to forgive a sinner into a question about the identity of the whole faith community, the whole Church, all of us. Jesus has told the parable of the shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep to seek the one lost sheep and bring it back to the fold. And then Jesus gives us our new identity and mission. It is the same identity and mission Jesus had given only to Peter at first, when Peter identified Jesus as the Messiah. Now that identity and mission belongs to all of us, sisters and brothers. Jesus repeats his identification and commissioning of Peter to all of his disciples: “Amen, I say to you, whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven… For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
In other words, we now all share in the identity and mission of Jesus himself: An identity and mission of forgiveness and mercy, not only “seven times” (in Peter’s figure of speech), “but seventy-seven times.” We now share without limit, infinitely, in Jesus’ identity and mission of forgiveness and mercy. At this moment we become “other Christs” who are anointed and sent out to “take away the sins of the world” and lead one another to God, to eternal life.
And, in between these two “identity vignettes” in Matthew’s Gospel—exchanges between Jesus and his disciples that are all about who Jesus is as the Messiah, who Peter and Jesus’ other disciples are, and who we are—Jesus goes up the mountain with Peter, James, and John to be transfigured. Jesus’ identity as the Messiah, so correctly identified by Peter, does not change in his transfiguration. Jesus’ identity is only revealed in a way to us that is almost overwhelming. Jesus’ transfiguration reveals him to us more fully than before as the fulfilment of the Law and the prophets (remember how Jesus identifies himself in this way earlier in Matthew’s Gospel, at the beginning of his Sermon on the Mount).
Yet the transfiguration not only reveals Jesus’ identity to us more fully than ever before. And the transfiguration reveals to us our own identity—who we are through, with, and in Christ—more fully than ever before, so fully that we cannot help in the moment but be overwhelmed.
When the voice from the cloud says of Jesus, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased,” this voice, the voice of God, also says this of us. Sisters and brothers, we are transfigured in this very moment. God looks down on us and says, “These are my beloved sons. These are my beloved daughters. This is my beloved Church.”
God reveals to us a new name, a new identity, a new mission. Abram becomes Abraham. Peter reveals Jesus as “the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus reveals us, identifies and commissions us, as the community that will bind and loose, that will seek the lost sheep in infinite forgiveness and mercy. From the cloud God reveals Jesus once again as “my beloved Son.” In the same moment God identifies, commissions, transfigures us as his beloved daughters and sons. In this Eucharistic celebration God sends the Holy Spirit upon us to solidify our identity and commissioning as “one body, one spirit in Christ.”
But from the moment of the transfiguration we still have one more major step so that God might reveal to us fully Jesus’ identity and mission, and ours. That last step we call, we experience as the Paschal Mystery: The events of the passion, death, resurrection, and ascension to heaven of Jesus Christ. This is why, after Jesus’ transfiguration in our Gospel today, Matthew says that the disciples are “overcome with fear.” Now, fear is not a feeling that we like to experience, I do not think. But our experience of suffering, our experience of death, an end to this earthly life, is necessary for us if who we are is anything like who Jesus is. By his passion and death, Jesus has transformed (we could say transfigured) the last event in our human experience that needs to be transformed and transfigured: Death itself.
In the time we have left this Lent, between now and Easter, we will continue to have God reveal our fullest identity to us. God does so one step, one event at a time, sharing with us in Christ our human sufferings but also joys: Between the mount of the transfiguration and the mount of Calvary, between Calvary and heaven, where Jesus has ascended and awaits us. There, in heaven, awaits our fullest vision of Jesus—the Messiah, the Son of the living God—and our fullest vision of who we are: Beloved daughters, beloved sons, beloved Church; beloved, redeemed, and saved disciples of the Son of the living God.
