The Meaning of the Transfiguration
God reveals himself as love in essence, a love that does not contradict itself if it sends the Son of God into real death and thereby fulfils the promise to "give everything," namely, to bestow eternal life. Here the extreme is not the one-sided obedience of man in the face of an incomprehensible command of God, rather, it is the way the Son's obedient willingness to enter death for the sake of everyone is united with the Father's willingness to sacrifice to the point of not holding back his Son in order to give us everything.
In this, God is not only with us, as in the Old Testament's "Emmanuel," but is ultimately "for us," his chosen ones. In this he has not merely given us something great, but has given us everything he is and has. Now God is so completely on our side that any (juridical) indictment against us loses all its force.
No one can accuse us before God's judgement seat, because the Son God sacrificed is such an irrefutable advocate that he silences any human charge against us. In this perspective the true meaning of the Trinitarian light of love radiating from the Son on the mountain in the Gospel can be understood. In no way is this a light produced through absorption in oneself. .. , rather it is the radiant truth of the three-in-one light of perfect surrender: it shows what the Father has really given up to "slaughter" for the world, what the new Isaac permits to be done to himself out of obedient love toward the Father, what the "overshadowing" luminous cloud veils into divine mystery.
Father Hans Urs von Balthasar (+ 1988) was an eminent Swiss Catholic theologian who wrote prodigiously.
(MAGNIFICAT March 2012)
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| Cedar of Lebanon, Nunraw Abbey |
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