August 6, 2005
Figures
One might say that Weight Watchers is in the transfiguration business. But so are the shape shifters in Star Trek and tragically, the suicide bombers everywhere. Depending on how you look at it, transfiguration is not all that uncommon.
What is uncommon is how you look at it. Peter, James, and John had got out of the fishing business and gone to transfiguring themselves, themselves. So much so, that they began to wonder about their compulsive career change and were getting distracted from the business at hand.
This was just one more mountain (real and parabolic) they’d had to climb with Jesus, and maybe they were getting tired of it all. No wonder they drifted off only to be awakened by a brilliance greater than left field in nighttime at Yankee Stadium. But what they saw rather made it worth the trip, Jesus passing the time with, of all people, Moses and Elijah. So they thought maybe this was it and that it would be worth their while to stick around permanently, and they suggested precisely that.
Not so. Pay attention and listen, said a James Earl Jones sound-alike. As it turned out, there was a lot more work to do back down the mountain where the world was having another of its fits and spasms and probably not its last if all the current short-memory nuclear swaggering has anything to do with it (Lk 9.28-43). Go figure.