1 Corinthians 4:9-16; Matthew 17:14-23

            We are presently in an especially rich period of the life of the Church, as we continue to celebrate our Lord’s Transfiguration on Mount Tabor and prepare for the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos.  The spiritual eyes of Peter, James, and John were opened to behold the brilliant divine glory of the Lord as they saw Him speaking with Moses and Elijah.  Then from a bright cloud the voice of the Father proclaimed, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” (Matt. 17:5). This miraculous vision occurred to enable the disciples, at Christ’s crucifixion, to remember that His “suffering was voluntary” so that they “could declare to all the world that Thou art truly the effulgent Splendor of the Father.”

            In His Transfiguration, it is revealed that the Savior is the God-Man, fully divine even as He is fully human.  He enables us to become transfigured in holiness by sharing personally in His gracious divine energies.  That is possible because of His incarnation, which required the free response of the woman called to become His virgin mother.  During the Dormition Fast, we humble ourselves as we celebrate how Mary was transfigured in holiness as the Theotokos, the Living Temple of the Lord, who at her “falling asleep” became the first to follow Him as a whole, embodied person into the Kingdom of Heaven.  She points us to her Son as the greatest example of receptivity and devotion to the Savior.

            Even as the Transfiguration was to prepare the disciples for the Lord’s crucifixion, the life of the Theotokos has a deep connection to the Cross.   As St. Symeon said to her at the presentation of the 40-day old Christ in the Temple, “a sword will pierce through your own soul also, that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” (Lk. 2:35) We cannot begin to imagine the pain that she experienced as she saw her Son and God rejected and crucified before her own eyes.  Nonetheless, she never abandoned Him and surely no one rejoiced at His resurrection as did His virgin mother. 

            The hard truth is that being transfigured in holiness requires taking up our crosses and enduring the struggle and pain that are necessary for the healing of our souls.  Since we are not isolated individuals but members together of Christ’s Body, the Church, it is not surprising that our spiritual health requires offering ourselves for the wellbeing of our neighbors.   That is especially the case for parents who have both a uniquely deep bond with their children and a unique responsibility to put their interests before their own.    

The father of the epileptic boy in today’s gospel reading stands out as a shining example of what it means to lift up our broken hearts for our loved ones in humility. The poor man sorrowed over the sufferings of his son, whose seizures put his life at risk by causing him to fall into both fire and water.  This encounter is reported by St. Matthew immediately after Peter, James, and John had beheld the divine glory of the Lord at His Transfiguration.  The man had asked the disciples to heal him, but they lacked the strength to do so.  The Lord spoke sternly about the spiritual weakness of those who followed Him most closely: “O faithless and perverse generation, how long am I to be with you? How long am I to bear with you? Bring him here to me.”  Then He healed the young man.  The disciples, being unaware of why they were unable to help in this situation, asked the Lord about it.  His response must have been hard to hear: “Because you have no faith. For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you. This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting.”

            As hard as it is for us to understand, the attachment the disciples—including those who had beheld His Transfiguration– had to Christ at this point was not true faith in Him.  Since the Savior said that “This kind never comes out except by prayer and fasting,” they must have lacked even the most basic spiritual disciplines.  The passage ends with Christ foretelling His Passion: “The Son of man is to be delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill Him, and He will rise on the third day.”  All the gospels indicate that the disciples did not expect the Messiah to die and rise from the grave. They shared the dominant hope for a military champion to defeat the Roman forces of occupation and set up an earthly kingdom, in which they expected to have places of prominence.  Remember that the Lord said, “Get behind me, Satan!” to Peter, the head disciple, when he rejected the prediction of His cross and empty tomb. (Mk. 8:33) The hearts of the disciples would have to be broken through their denial and abandonment of the Savior Who went to the Cross for them finally to become receptive to a Messiah very different from what they had expected.

            St. Paul dealt with similar misunderstandings in the church at Corinth where some had built themselves up in their own minds in stark contrast to the humble obedience characteristic of true apostles.  Paul wrote that true apostles are fools for Christ, weak, held in disrepute, hungry, thirsty, homeless, and persecuted.  They were obviously not out for praise, glory, or self-satisfaction, but manifested in their sufferings the true way of the Lord as they blessed and forgave their tormentors.  That is why Paul could say with integrity, “be imitators of me.”  By enduring the pain and struggle of a heart broken for love of Christ and His Body, the Church, he had been transfigured in holiness.

The heart of the father in today’s gospel lesson had already been broken by his recognition that he could not heal or protect his son from seizures that could cause his death.  Years of caring for the boy had revealed his own weaknesses and limitations.  The common hopes of parents to see their family lines thrive in future generations rang hollow for him now.  He struggled to think that he could keep his son from dying an untimely death and he was disappointed yet again when the disciples could not heal him.  In St. Mark’s account of this encounter, we learn that the “father cried out and said with tears, ‘Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!’ in response to the Savior’s words ‘If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes.’ (Mk. 9:23-24) In the midst of this man’s brokenness and pain, he knew that his faith was far from perfect.  He had acquired the humility to see his weakness clearly. His heart would never be healed by pretending he was something he was not.  He cried honestly to the Lord from the depths of his soul and the Lord heard his plea and healed his son.

            As King David wrote in Psalm 50, “a contrite and humble heart, O God, Thou wilt not despise.” Our hearts will become contrite and humble when we confront how we have marred the beauty of our souls and refused to fulfill our calling to become like God in holiness.  St. Mark the Ascetic wrote that “Remembrance of God is pain of the heart endured in the spirit of devotion.”  We will experience pain in our hearts when we struggle to open our deepest struggles and the darkest crevices of our souls to the healing light of Christ. We will then know the infinite distance between the brilliant holiness to which we are called and the dark corruption that festers within us. Doing so requires mindfully dying daily to the slavery of our passions and reorienting the desires of our hearts for true fulfillment in God.  Especially in this season, we must pray, fast, serve our neighbors sacrificially, and otherwise do all that we have the strength to do in taking up our crosses if we are to become transfigured in holiness like the Theotokos and follow her into the eternal joy of the Kingdom of Heaven. She did not shy away from taking up her uniquely heavy cross.  Let us follow her blessed example in gaining the strength to become totally receptive and obedient to the Lord, despite the cost, for that is how we may all come to shine resplendently with the divine glory.  That is how we may share even now in the eternal life of the God-Man Whose “face shone like the sun” and Whose “clothes became as white as the light” on Mount Tabor as the voice of the Father proclaimed, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!”