“This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased. Listen to him!”
When the disciples heard this,
they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear.
But Jesus came and touched them, saying,
“Get up and do not be afraid.”
And when they looked up,
they saw no one except Jesus himself alone (Mt. 17:5-8).
There are both heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is one thing, and that of the earthly is another. (1 Cor 15:40)
Of old when Moses saw God he experienced the divine darkness, indicating the symbolic nature of the law; for as Paul has written, the law contained only a shadow of the things to come, not the reality itself. In the past Israel could not look at the transient glory on the face of Moses; but we, beholding the glory of the Lord with unveiled faces, are being transformed from one degree of glory to another by the Lord who is the Spirit. The cloud, therefore, that overshadowed the disciples was not one of threatening darkness but of light; for the mystery hidden from past ages has been revealed to show us perpetual and eternal glory. Moses and Elijah, representing the law and the prophets, stood by the Savior because he whom the law and the prophets proclaimed was present in Jesus, the giver of life.
It was by the Father’s good pleasure that his only begotten Son and Word became incarnate; it was by the Father’s good pleasure that the salvation of the world was achieved through his only begotten Son; it was the Father’s good pleasure which brought about the union of the whole universe in his only begotten Son. For humanity is a microcosm linking in itself all visible and invisible being, sharing as it does in the nature of both, and so it must surely have pleased the Lord, the creator and ruler of the universe, for divinity and humanity and thus all creation to be united in his only begotten and consubstantial Son, so that God might be all in all.
‘This is my Son, the radiance of my glory, who bears the stamp of my own nature, through whom I created the angels, through whom the vault of heaven was made firm and the earth established. He upholds the universe by his powerful word, and by the Spirit which proceeds from his mouth, that is the life-giving and guiding Spirit. Listen to him. Whoever receives him, receives me who sent him by the authority not of a stern master but of a father. As a man he is sent, but as God he abides in me and I in him. Whoever refuses to honor my only begotten Son refuses to honor me, his Father who sent him. Listen to him, for he has the words of eternal life.’(St. John of Damascus)
We cannot confess anything in regard to Mary’s assumption more glorious than what we confess as our hope for ourselves: eternal life, which God himself wants to be for us. For the hope we have for our whole person in the unity of our existence – that single existence which we explain to ourselves as a unity of body and soul – is the resurrection of the body and eternal life. In our liturgical praise of the assumption of the Blessed Virgin we seek only of the one act of God in regard to that one person, but it is something that we likewise expect for ourselves.Ultimately, nothing more is said of her than what God one day, we hope, will say to us…We profess our faith in the permanent validity of history as flesh and blood; we profess our hope and love for the earth, which is not merely the parade ground or theater for our spiritual life, to be abandoned as soon as finality supervenes, and which perhaps itself, even though radically transformed, enters equally with the person’s spirit into the glory of the eternal God.
We acknowledge the dignity of the body, which is not merely a tool to be used and thrown away, but the historical, concrete reality and revelation of the free person who is realized in it and works within it for the finality of its freedom…this feast tells us that those whom God loves are redeemed, are saved, are finally themselves; they are so with their concrete history, with their whole bodily nature in which alone a person is truly himself. He is not a ‘ghost,’ not a ‘soul,’ but a human being completely saved. Everything remains. We can’t imagine it. Of course not. All talk about the soul in bliss, the glorified body, the glory of heaven amounts to the unvarnished, blind statement of faith: this person is not lost. He is what he has become, raised up in the implacable obviousness and absoluteness of the living God, raised up in the transcendent, ineffable mystery we call God.
We can’t say more than this. We don’t try to paint a picture, we don’t imagine anything. Everything has gone through the harsh transformation we call death. What else could we say except that death is not the last word – or rather that it is our last word, but not God’s.(Karl Rahner)
Musical Selection
Prayers
Christ, the Light that shone before the sun,
was on the earth in the flesh.
In a manner fitting His divine majesty,
He fulfilled His fearful dispensation before His crucifixion!
Today, upon Mount Tabor,
He has mystically made known the image of the Trinity.
For taking apart the expressly chosen disciples, Peter, James and John,
He led them up into the mountain alone.
Briefly, He concealed the flesh He had assumed,
and was transfigured before them,
manifesting the original beauty, though short of full perfection.
For He spared them as He assured them, lest seeing, they die.
Yet they saw as far as they could bear it.
He likewise called before Him the chief prophets Moses and Elijah,
who testified to His divinity:
that He is indeed the true brightness of the essence of the Father,
the Ruler of the living and the dead.
Therefore, a cloud covered them as a tent,
and there came the voice of the Father in testimony, saying:
“This is my beloved Son,
Whom I have begotten without change from the womb before the morning star:
I have sent Him to save those who are baptized
in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
and who confess with faith that the one power of the Godhead is indivisible:
Listen to Him!”
O Christ our God, supreme in goodness and the Lover of mankind:
shine upon us with the light of Your unapproachable glory
and make us worthy to inherit Your eternal Kingdom!(Orthodox Vespers of the Transfiguration)
Come, all you ends of the earth,
let us praise the most holy translation of the Mother of God:
for she has delivered her spotless soul into the hands of her Son.
Therefore, the world, restored to life by her holy Dormition,
in radiant joy celebrates this feast with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs
together with the angels and the apostles.
Come, all who love to keep the feasts,
come, let us form a choir!
Come, let us crown the Church with songs,
as the Ark of God goes to her rest.
For today, heaven opens wide
as it receives the mother of Him Who cannot be contained.
The earth, as it yields up the source of Life,
is robed in blessing and majesty.
The hosts of angels, present with the fellowship of the apostles,
gaze in great fear at her who bore the Cause of Life,
now that she is translated from life to Life.
Let us all venerate and implore her:
Forget not, O Lady, your ties of kinship
with those who keep in faith the feast of your all-holy Dormition!(Orthodox Vespers of the Dormition)