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The Transfiguration of the Lord 
Feast

Using calendar: Australia - Perth. You can change this.

The Lord is the Great King of glory: come, let us adore him.

Year: C(I). Liturgical Colour: White.

The Transfiguration of the Lord

The Transfiguration of the Lord can sound embarrassingly magical. Jesus goes up onto a mountain and his clothes become dazzlingly white. Prophets appear and talk to him. And then it is all over and Jesus tells his disciples to say nothing.
  We should hold on to the absurdity of the incident. There is simply no reason for all this to have happened. In particular, there is no reason to put it into a gospel – the evangelist makes no capital out of it, it is simply there.
  And this is the strength of the Transfiguration as an historical incident. There is no reason for anyone to have invented it. It is not central to the Christian case. It is not used to win arguments. There is only one reason to put it into the Gospel, and that is because it happened. It is one of those cases of the evangelists writing things down without knowing why they were important, and their very puzzlement is what makes the story so convincing.
  Why, then, did it happen? Surely so that we could see and understand that Jesus is at once one of the prophets and the one that was prophesied by them; and that he is God, and lives for all eternity in a blaze of dazzling and unapproachable light.
  The true miracle of the Transfiguration is not the shining face or the white garments, but the fact that for the rest of the time Jesus hid his glory so well.
  See the article in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: Anastasius of Sinai

Anastasius a seventh-century Greek ecclesiastical writer, priest, monk, and the abbot of the great Monastery of Saint Catherine on Mount Sinai. Among his works are Questions and Responses, simple pieces of theological advice which offer a window onto the life of ordinary people of the time and bear witness to Christian life in the first stages of Muslim expansion. His Hexaemeron is a commentary on the Genesis narrative of the six days of creation.

Liturgical colour: white

White is the colour of heaven. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate feasts of the Lord; Christmas and Easter, the great seasons of the Lord; and the saints. Not that you will always see white in church, because if something more splendid, such as gold, is available, that can and should be used instead. We are, after all, celebrating.
  In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)Exodus 19:8-9 ©
When Moses took the people’s reply back to the Lord, the Lord said to Moses, ‘I am coming to you in a dense cloud so that the people may hear when I speak to you and may trust you always.’

Noon reading (Sext)Exodus 33:9,11 ©
When Moses went into the Tent, the pillar of cloud would come down and station itself at the entrance to the Tent and the Lord would speak with Moses. The Lord spoke with Moses face to face, as a man speaks with his friend.

Afternoon reading (None)2 Corinthians 3:18 ©
With our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord, we all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit.

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Scripture readings taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.
 
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