Peter’s Profession of Faith and the Transfiguration

The gospel reading every Second Sunday of Lent is on the Transfiguration of the Lord.  This gospel account appears in all three Synoptic Gospels; if we put Matthew, Mark and Luke side by side together, one can see their parallelisms.  In these three gospels, the Transfiguration is preceded by Peter’s profession of faith.  One can easily claim that the Transfiguration is a deepening of what took place during Peter’s confession.  In his book Jesus of Nazareth, Pope Benedict XVI has an enlightening reflection on this.  He calls these two events (Peter’s Confession and the Transfiguration) as “Milestones on Jesus’ Way” (read pp. 287-318).  Our present consideration is therefore inspired by Benedict XVI’s reflections.Putting together Luke 9, Mark 9, and Matthew 16, we can see that what comes before the Transfiguration is Peter’s profession of faith.  On behalf of the disciples, Peter confesses that Jesus Christ is the Messiah.  This profession also appears in John: “We now believe and know that you are the Holy One of God” (6:69).  After Peter’s profession, our Lord Jesus Christ has predicted his inevitable passion and death on the Cross.  With this Peter strongly protested saying: “God forbid it, Lord!  This shall never happen to you!” (Mt 16:22).  And so our Lord has to reproach him: “Get behind me, Satan!  You are thinking not as God does, but as people do” (Mk. 8:33).  Peter’s remark sounds very relevant to us even today.  As Benedict XVI puts it, “Yet we know that through all the centuries, right up to the present, Christians – while in possession of the right confession – need the Lord to teach every generation anew that his way is not the way of earthly power and glory, but the way of the Cross” (Jesus of Nazareth, p. 299).  “If you want to follow me, deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.  For whoever chooses to save his life will lose it, but the one who loses his life for my sake will find it.  What will one gain by winning the whole world if he destroys himself?  There is nothing you can give to recover you own self” (Mt. 16:24-26).Life is difficult, as Scott Peck puts it.  Life on earth is a vale of tears.  There is pain, sadness and there is no short cut to a happy life.  If you are a student, you have to work hard to attain you degree.  Cheating has no place for you.  If you are married, you have to stick to your commitment in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in poorer and in richer.  We earn life the hard way.  As the trite goes, “No pain, no glory.”The way to Christ is the way of the Cross.  There is no other way to Glory but through the Cross.  Suffering then is essential.  But maybe like Peter we protest: “God forbids it!”  The world teaches us the other way: power and wealth and just pleasure.  In our school, we are often taught how to earn money, how to become rich and how to get ahead of anybody.  The world teaches us how to live an easy life.  The instant culture is an example.  We can no longer persevere in more arduous tasks.  That is why we hear these words coming from the clouds: “This is my Son, my Chosen one, listen to him” (Lk. 9:35).  We need to listen to Christ and learn from him that there is no other way but the Cross.  And this reality strikes at the heart of our existence.  We need to listen to Christ because the world around us is teaching us the other way.  The Cross is unacceptable, for we often say: God forbids it!  St. Paul has pointed out that the Cross of Christ is a “stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor. 1:23).  But Christ and the Cross are inseparable.  The Cross is Christ’s exaltation; without it there can be no resurrection.  So to follow Christ is to carry our cross.  The world wants to dismiss this saying: “There is no God, enjoy life.”  Maybe one can enjoy life without God, without the cross but in the end it will be an empty life – one of darkness and despair.  A world without Christ and the Cross is a world that leads to self-destruction.Listen to Christ, for he alone brings life and hope.                 

Faith and Reason

Pope John Paul II says that faith and reason are like two wings in our contemplation of truth. Faith and reason are inseparable. If faith alone, we call it fideism and this will result to fundamentalism and fanaticism. One example of this is jihad - killing others in the name of religion.  If reason alone, we call it rationalism and this will bring a world without religion (secularism). One example of this is scientism, a belief that everything is empirical or positive and beyond it there is nothing. Thus the trite goes: to see is to believe.

Faith and reason should go together. If one excludes the other there will be unimaginable consequences.

I love this point from St. John of the Cross.  I learned this from Edith Stein.  Faith is always dark for man. Kaya pala we have this phrase “faith is blind.” And it is true, faith is blind for it will always be dark for us. The realm of faith is beyond us. Now, the question is: if it is dark, what is our light? The answer is human reason. Reason is like a candle that will guide us in the dark - in penetrating the realm of faith that is always dark for us. Even in the Bible, God reveals to us through what the Greek calls “logos”. Logos is Word. Remember the opening verse of the gospel according to John:  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God (Jn 1:1).  And going further we read: And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth (Jn 1:14).

If God never reveals to us through the Word, then we won’t know Him. Now we know him, we see his face in Christ, the Word who became man like us.

God reveals to us according to our manner of reception. There is a principle in philosophy that whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver. What is within man is reason. Faith is beyond him. That is why God reveals himself as Logos, meaning Reason. The Bible is also Reason, since it is Logos.

Without reason we can never penetrate the depths of God. Reason is always consistent with the nature of God. Faith will always be dark but we have our God-given reason to guide us towards understanding our faith. St. Anselm calls this “Faith-seeking-understanding.”

Hence, faith and reason should always go together.