August 6, 2023

What is Christianity finally about? These days if you ask almost anyone who doesn’t know the Bible you’ll probably hear an answer like this: “Being a good person” or “following the golden rule.” No offense to the golden rule, but our faith is simply much stranger than that. This week’s feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord is a luminous example of this. Jesus becomes radiantly and overwhelmingly beautiful. The glory of God literally shines forth from his body and even his clothes. Here we see that Christianity is not mainly a moral system, but a relationship with God in Christ, one that finally makes human beings gloriously beautiful.
Now we can see our good and bad deeds in a new and de-centered way. Our morality isn’t about a heaven or hell scorecard. It’s about lives open (or closed) to transfiguration, lives capable of revealing the glory of God in Christ to the world. Spouses, children, friends, co-workers, priests, consecrated women and men, and so on — we are all called to let the beauty of Jesus make our lives beautiful, little by little. His beauty in us is the center of our faith. — Father John Muir ©LPi