Today on our journey to Easter Time, the liturgy of the word shows us the transfiguration of Jesus Christ. Although there is a liturgical day in our calendar reserved for this celebration (August 6th), we are now invited to contemplate the very same scene intimately linked to the Passion, Death and Resurrection of our Lord.

The Passion of Jesus was indeed getting close and six days before His ascent to Mount Tabor, He clearly announced it: He had told them that “he must go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised” (Mt 16:21).

But the disciples were not yet ready to see the suffering of their Lord and Master. He, who had always been merciful towards the defenseless, who had healed many a skin marred by leprosy, who had given light to so many blind eyes, who had given back motion to so many paralyzed limbs, it could just not be that his body was to be blemished by the thrashing and flogging. And, in spite of everything, He asserts without any concessions: “I had to suffer.” Incomprehensible! Impossible!

But despite all this incomprehension, Jesus knows what He has come to this world for. He knows He has to assume all the feebleness and pain overwhelming humanity to be able to divinize it and, thus, redeem it from the vicious circle of sin and death, so that the latter defeated —death—, it cannot anymore hold man in bondage; man, who God created in His own image.

This is why the Transfiguration is a splendid icon of our redemption, where the Lord's flesh appears in a glimpse of His resurrection. Thus, if with the announcement of His Passion He kindles the anguish of the Apostles, with the glow of His divinity He strengthens their hope while anticipating them the Paschal joy, even though neither Peter, James nor John could understand very well what means… to be raised from the dead (cf. Mt 17:9). They will eventually find out!