For a Christian the celebration of the Transfiguration is then also an appeal to responsibility and an exhortation to sympathy, to dilate our heart towards the suffering man. It is not a case that, according to the Gospels, the Christ who experiences the transfiguration is the one who has just announced for the first time the fate of passion and death that awaits him, the disfigurement he will suffer because of men (see Matthew 16:21-23): in front of evil, Jesus chooses to be its victim rather than being its minister. Thus, the Transfiguration becomes God’s affirmative answer to the Son who accepts the path of a thorough solidarity with the oppressed and the victims of history. The mystery contained in the heart of the Transfiguration itself is then the mystery of suffering: it finds its logic in the Easter dynamism of death-resurrection, of suffering-vivification.

Moreover, if the 9 of Av evokes the Jews’ sufferings and Hiroshima reminds us of the all men’s sufferings, Christ (who is an Hebrew and will be an Hebrew forever) is the one who gathers in his human body, in his Hebrew flesh, the whole mankind’s sufferings. And his Transfiguration becomes universal hope for each sufferer, indeed for the whole creation that groans waiting for redemption (see Romans 8:22). It is then Christians’ duty to celebrate the Transfiguration hoping for all men; as a matter of fact the memory of this event of Jesus’ life is the promise that also our body of misery and sin will be changed, so that God’s full image can be reestablished inside us. The Transfiguration is the sign worked by God to conform us to his Son, till he makes us like him. It is also the warrant that all our being will be transfigured, with no break in our human situation: also our passions, our senses, our human affections will not be destroyed but they will be transfigured through a purification whose protagonist is God. If it is experienced in this wait, the Transfiguration will be a feast that, already in the present moment, will light gleams of hope in the hearts and will enlighten consciences arousing sympathy, co-responsibility, true fraternity.

Enzo Bianchi

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pp. 131-134