‘This is my Son, the chosen one. Listen to Him’

Fr David Howell• March 16, 2025

“When the sun had gone down and it was dark, behold, a smoking firepot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.” (Genesis 15:17)

In Sunday’s first reading, God commits himself to Abraham through a blaze of glory. As we know from Jeremiah (34:18-19), it was customary to walk between cut-in-half animals as a sign of a commitment, the implication being that one who breaks it will be cut in half too.

So when God passed between the split carcasses, He promised to make Abraham’s offspring as many as the stars (Genesis 15:5), while He shone forth with flames, like a star Himself. Abraham in his slumber would never have dreamed that God would break His word and suffer the curse symbolised.

In the Gospel, we have God’s beloved sleeping again, like Abraham: Peter, James and John, the closest of Jesus’ friends. They too witness the bright glory of God in Jesus’s body, which promises not offspring as numerous as the stars but something as glorious as them: St Paul explains that “star differs from star in glory” and “so is it with the resurrection of the dead” (1 Corinthians 15:41-42).

Yet Jesus shows the coming curse as well as the future glory we will share with Him: He speaks to Moses and Elijah of His “departure”, His suffering and death (Luke 9:31). Abraham never dreamed of seeing God split in half, but God incarnate will be split open on the cross, His heart pierced for our sins, for our infidelity to His unbroken promises.

Jesus’s Transfiguration prepared His closest three for His cross and for their own future sufferings. They saw that Jesus’s death was providentially foreseen by the Law and the Prophets, represented by Moses and Elijah, and would lead to the resurrection.

But knowing the past and future more deeply would not help in the present unless they obeyed the Father’s command: “Listen to him.” Knowing that our pain is part of God’s plan and that it will be transformed into glory is ineffective unless we pray in the present.

Of those three, only one made true use of the Transfiguration: John, the only one to stand by the cross. He was not perfect: he was ambitious, seeking a throne from Jesus (Mark 10:37); he zealously tried to stop a rogue exorcist and to burn down a Samaritan town and was rebuked by Jesus for both (Luke 9:49-55).

But he did “listen to Him”, he reclined on Jesus’s heart at the Last Supper. We are called to listen to Jesus, especially in the Holy Mass, and tell Him our honest desires as John did, even if, like his, they need some purifying.

Prayer in the present is what helps us accept the coming cross, and embrace the chaos around us: Jesus’s prayer in the Transfiguration helped Him descend the mountain and exorcise a boy whom His disciples had failed to help because of their poor prayer (Mark 9:29).

Let’s imitate John by listening to Jesus, and so we will stand by the cross, with Mary our mother.

Fr David Howell is an assistant priest at St Bede’s in Clapham Park. His previous studies include canon law in Rome, Classics at Oxford and a licence in Patristics at the Augustinianum Institute in Rome. He is a regular contributor to the Catholic Herald; his other articles can be accessed here.