Angelus Message on Feast of Transfiguration

JMJ+D

The Pope renews call for peace as he reflects on the feast of the Transfiguration.

Dear brothers and sisters,

Today the evangelist Mark narrates how Jesus took Peter, James and John with him to a high mountain and was transfigured before them, becoming so luminous that "no cleaner in the world could have made his vestments so white" (cfr Mk 9,2-10).

The liturgy today invites us to focus on this mystery of light. On the transfigured face of Christ shone a ray of the divine light that He kept within Him. This same light would blaze from the face of Christ on the day of the Resurrection. In this sense, the Transfiguration was an anticipation of the Paschal mystery.

The Transfiguration invites us to open the eyes of the heart to the mystery of the light of God present in the whole story of salvation. Already at the start of Creation, the Almighty says, "Fiat lux", let there be light! (Jn 1,2) and light separates from darkness. Like His other creatures, light is a sign that reveals something of God: it is the reflection of His glory which accompanies His manifestations. When God appears, "His splendor is like the light, flashes of lightning come from His hands" (Ab 3,3f).

Light, it is said in the Psalms, is the mantle in which the Lord wraps Himself (cfr Ps 104,2). In the Book of Wisdom, the symbolism of light is used to describe the essence of God itself: wisdom, an effusion of God's glory, is "a reflection of eternal light", superior to any created light (cfr Wos 7,27-29f).

Read its entirety here.