Beyond Opinion: Homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration

Feast of the Transfiguration, A                                                                       August 6, 2023
Fr. Alexander Albert                                                               St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette

“The Lord is king, the Most High over all the earth.” I hope you know that we really do mean it. The Psalm doesn’t say “the Lord is our king” or “the Lord is king if you accept him.” It says the Lord is king… over all the earth. I think we might have an American “freedom filter” in our brains that doesn’t let us register what that really means.

We’re taught from birth not to impose our beliefs on other people. Not bad, but we go too far, allowing this to filter our own convictions out of our own lives. We even extend it to all of morality. If you ask a room full of Americans whether or not the statement “lying is wrong” is a fact or an opinion, you’ll usually get the answer “opinion” even if they’re all Christians. Some alarm bell goes off in our heads that says “that’s a moral thing… it must be just an opinion!”

But saying “Murder is wrong” is not an opinion. It is a moral fact, one most people believe. We’ve been trained to only see certain things as facts. Yet there are many different kinds of facts: Scientific, historical, mathematical, and yes, moral. There’s a still deeper category. You could call it philosophical or metaphysical or even religious fact.

Catholics don’t just believe there is one God for us. There is one God, period. Historical, metaphysical, religious fact. Just because a lot of people don’t believe that fact doesn’t change it. People don’t believe we landed on the moon or that the earth is round. Yet what people believe doesn’t change a fact. And what other people believe should not stop you from treating the fact as true, certainly not in your own mind.

Which brings us to this: the Lord is king of all the earth. Whether you voted for Biden, Trump, or someone else, the Lord is the king. Whether you’re an anarchist Buddhist, a communist wiccan, or a democratic atheist, God is the king. If you do know that, you shouldn’t pretend you don’t, even as you try to respect the freedom of others.

So, no, I’m not saying we go around forcing non-believers to bow down to the God we know is king. But it’s one thing to respect the freedom of another person. It’s quite another to confuse that with rejecting facts altogether. It is totally possible – actually it’s necessary – to be able to say and believe both of these things: It is a fact that Jesus rose from the dead and I won’t force people to believe that.

In practice, we do this all the time. There are some things that, even though you know they are true, you don’t force people to accept. It’s not usually worth it to hassle people about the moon landing. You know the facts, but for most people, it’s not a big deal to let it go. There are facts, however, that require you to act on them whether people around you like it or not. Mixing certain cleaners can create poisonous gas. If someone in the house doesn’t believe your explanation, you still knock the bottles from their hands to prevent you both from dying.

What does that have to do with today’s feast of the Transfiguration? It’s about what we do with the truth. The entire second reading is an eye-witness report, St. Peter laying out the historical facts. “We did not follow cleverly devised myths.” It’s like he’s saying, “this whole Christian religion thing? It’s not a myth, it’s not a set of options on a menu. It’s fact. Jesus lived and died and rose from the dead. We saw it happen, Jesus showed us that he is the king.” The gospel gives us the full report and the details are interesting.

First, we are told that only Peter, James, and John are brought up the mountain “by themselves.” Despite it being a fact that he is the Son of God, he only reveals his glory to three other people… for now. This tells us something important: there’s a time and a place for revealing certain things. We don’t teach calculus to a 4 year old and we don’t berate atheists about the hypostatic union. People need to be prepared, disposed before we can present certain truths to them. If you want others to believe what you know to be true, you’ll need enough patience to help them up the mountain and enough conviction to not wait til it’s too late.

Secondly, Jesus won’t let them stay there. After experiencing this truth in all it’s glory, Peter, James, and John are forced to return to the world. Now they are in the position of living with this truth despite being surrounded by people who don’t know it. We must not deny to ourselves what we know to be true, but we must also avoid resenting people who don’t know, even fellow Catholics. Just as he sets the timeline for Peter, James, and John to reveal his glory, so we too must cooperate in Jesus’ plan for saving souls, not our own.

Which brings us to the third and final point: The Father’s voice uses the present tense: listen to him. It’s an ongoing thing. If we want to know the truth, if we want to know when and how to share it, we need to be constantly listening to Jesus Christ. How? By following what St. Peter says: being “attentive” to the “prophetic message” that’s like a “lamp shining in a dark place.” That prophetic message is the Gospel found in Scripture and Tradition. Read your Bible and Catechism, frequent the sacraments, spend real time in private prayer. Not just an Our Father and be done with it, real prayer. These are the lamp in the darkness of the world around us and the lies of our culture.

That darkness is very dark indeed. The world rejects not only Jesus Christ, but even the very idea of God. It rejects not just God’s plan for humanity, but what it means to be human. In the name of tolerance, we are told not to impose our opinions. But they aren’t just opinions, they are the facts and some of these facts, some of these truths are matters of life and death and more. We cannot force people to be Christians, but sometimes we can force them to be human, to stop them mutilating children, robbing the poor, or killing the innocent.

No, we cannot and should not force people to believe in Jesus. But if you can’t stand for the truth when it affects the life you can see, what makes you think you’ll stand for the life you can’t see? Faith without freedom isn’t real faith. But if you treat your own faith like it’s just another opinion, then it is not a faith worth sharing. Christian faith isn’t an opinion, it’s a supernatural conviction of the truth, genuine trust in the God who is truth. Others might think it’s just an opinion, but you have to know in your own mind and heart that your faith is either true or it’s nothing. And how you live will prove it.