They saw no one but Jesus
One way to relate to today’s Gospel passage depicting the transfiguration of Jesus upon a mountain top is first to focus on the closing words of the episode: raising their eyes (or looking around) they saw no one but Jesus.
Isn’t that the way all of Jesus’ contemporaries started out: seeing no one but Jesus, if they saw him at all? Except for his family, he was a face in the crowd. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” said Nathanael when first told of Jesus by his friends. Even the citizens of Nazareth saw nothing special about him. When he gave his first sermon in their synagogue, they shrugged their shoulders and said: Isn’t this the carpenter’s son, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?
And don’t we all start out that way? Leave the circle of our immediate family; exit the family home and what are we? Another face in the crowd, the anonymous driver of one more car in a traffic jam. We learn early to mind our own business on the street, in the super market, to avoid meeting eyes, to adopt the role of those extras in the movies who serve as silent, transient background figures to the lead characters in the story.
Why is it that we live a stranger among strangers? Why do even things like a tree on the Plaza or the stars in the sky behave so impersonally toward me – unless it’s because I behave so impersonally toward them. Nature impersonal, society impersonal, a Church impersonal! Everything, everyone in a state of recoil from each other or ever en garde. Why?
Fed up with such anonymity, our identity reduced to numbers on our Social Security cards, licenses and PINs, I often wonder whether that’s why so many people aspire to a theatrical profession – to become a movie star, a personality of stage and screen – to stand out, become transfigured perpetually as in the case of Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Gregory Peck . . . all of whom, though now deceased, remain alive and idolized in rerun after rerun. A kind of immortality?
And may not that be true of our love of literature, stories, operas, the Bible in that they lift characters (like Abram in today’s first reading) out of anonymity, out of mere mortality, transient nothingness, being otherwise “nobodies”, to make of them unforgettable epiphanies of goodness, models of faith touched by grace, with a touch of the divine, holy. And I’m not just thinking of the Lives of the Saints but of Huckleberry Finn and Jean Valjean and the Marx Brothers and Jane Eyre as well.
And so we read the brief drama of today’s transfiguration of Jesus beginning with its closing verse: looking around they saw no one but Jesus (a phrase so applicable to each of us) while he leads not only his three disciples but you and me upward out of our sense of being “no one but Sally, no one but Claude, no one but Ginger, no one but Phil” into discovering how, from our Creator’s point of view, we are in fact transparent with light, significance, worth, power, grace – of whom that same Creator can say to all the world: This is my daughter, my son, whom I have chosen: listen to her, listen to him.