2LC22.     Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18.    The Lord God promised Abram that his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky.  “Abram put his faith in the Lord, who credited it to him as an act of righteousness.”  Then God confirmed and sealed that promise by sending a smoking fire pot and flaming torch to offer up Abram’s sacrificial offering.  Sometimes God comes mightily and gloriously; at others, quietly and hardly perceptible yet effectively.

Luke 9:28b-36.  This is the Transfiguration where Jesus, Moses and Elijah appear in glory.  Moses and Elijah represent the Law and the prophets.  Jesus is the fulfillment of what the Lord God had started in the Old Testament.  In the first exodus God led his people from slavery, through liberation and then to the Promised Land.  In Jesus’ paschal exodus he leads his faithful from his death through to his resurrection and then in his ascension to heaven.  A cloud came, and “from the cloud came a voice that said, ‘this is my chosen Son; listen to him.’” In John 1:14, we read, “And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we saw his glory, the glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.”  Since “grace and truth came through Jesus Christ,” (John 1:17b) we are being called to open ourselves to him so that his love of us is our life.

Philippians 3:17-4:1.    To listen to Jesus means to live a life in which Jesus is always communicating with us and we, with him.  “Observe those who thus conduct themselves according to the model” we have in those who are holy.  In the lives of those among us who are holy God communicates with us what he wants us to hear and learn from him.  Something of heaven is already in us who live with him as our life-giving force.  Paul contrasts the destruction that befalls those whose “minds are occupied with earthly things” versus the glory that comes to those, though still on earth, who conduct themselves as citizens of heaven.  The day when he takes us out of this world and up to heaven, “he will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him also to bring all things into subjection to himself.”  Jesus said in John 17:22-23a: “And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me.”  Our loving Jesus shares his glorious self with us so that we, to the degree we are united to him, are transfigured gloriously with him.   As we give ourselves over more and more to him, he shares himself more and more with us.