L2A.  Genesis 12:1-4a.  The Lord said to Abram, “I will make of you a great nation.”   “All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you.”  The Hebrew nation is to stand as the only people of God in the midst of all the peoples of the world that truly has God’s blessing on them.  Through them God makes known what a great God he is.  It is through him, and only through him, that blessings flow on to the earth.  He is only true God through whom any real good can come to people on earth.

Matthew 17:1-9.  “And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.”  These Apostles had always seen Jesus as just another human being.  They were locked in, so to speak, to the ways all humans thought and felt.  This experience of Jesus, as resurrected in the glory of his divinity, was to help shock them out of earthly, human thinking and feeling, so to see far beyond anything they could have imagined to get a glimpse into God’s world.  Just as Jesus real death plunged them into the depths of darkness, Jesus’ resurrection would explode them into the sublime magnificence of his divinity.  They were to be totally astounded and awestruck and so should we be!

In Exodus 34:27-35, God speaks to Moses,   “Write down these words, for in accordance with them I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.”  “Moses did not know that the skin of his face had become radiant while he conversed with the Lord.”  The radiance of Moses‘ face came from his direct meeting with God but Jesus’ radiance came from within because he himself is God.

Moses and Elijah appear speaking to Jesus.  In the first reading from Genesis, what God the Father began through his People and his Prophets, in the New Testament, Jesus was bringing to culmination, since Jesus now is the prime revelation of divinity to humanity.  God the Father attests to this, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well please; listen to him.”  Jesus is the Father’s presence and voice.  God the Father is saying that his words are coming now through God his Son.  In the Old Testament God foretells his intention to raise up the Servant of Lord when he says, “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am well pleased.”(Isaiah 42:1a).

The three Apostles did not understand the significance of what happened on the high mountain; where divinity had come down to communicate with humanity, but later they would get a chance through the work of the Spirit to understand. “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son Man has been raised from the dead.”

2 Timothy1:8b-10.  “He has saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according to his own design and grace bestowed on us.”  By his grace and according to his plan/Will, he has called us to his holy people, a great nation, a great blessing to all the peoples of the world to bring them likewise to be all God’s holy people, all the people of the world to be his kingdom, his great nation.  There is and continues to be great resistance to our calling but he assures us saying, “Bear your share of hardship for the gospel (the good news that I give to you) with the strength that comes from God.”

Our salvation comes to us through “our savior Christ Jesus, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” of the Cross and Resurrection.  We come to salvation by our daily embrace of the holy life, a life of listening to him and obeying him day after day.  H

e is the God of us, of our lives.