A reading from the Holy Gospel. According to Luke. Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and went up unto a mountain to pray. While he was praying, his face changed in appearance, and his clothes became a dazzling white. Suddenly, two men were talking with Jesus.
Moses and Elijah. They appeared in glory and spoke of his passage which he was about to fulfill in Jerusalem. Peter and those with him had fallen into a deep sleep. On awakening, they saw Christ's glory and likewise, saw the two men who were standing with Jesus. When these were leaving, Peter said to Jesus, master, how good it is for us to be here.
Let us set up three booths. One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. In parenthesis, he did not really know what he was saying, talking in his sleep, you know. While he was speaking, a cloud came and overshadowed, and the disciples proved fierce as the others entered it. And then from the cloud came a voice which said, this is my son, my chosen one.
Listen to him. When the voice fell silent, Jesus was there alone. The disciples kept quiet, telling nothing of what they had seen at that time to anybody, and this is the gospel of the lord. The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen.
Traditionally, Mount Tabor is pointed out as the mountain on which this took place. May may have been there, may not have been there, who knows? But Mount Habor is a very impressive mountain. It's about two and a half hours ride and driving as they do over there from Jerusalem to the north up in near not too far from Nazareth. It rises about 1,500 feet perpendicularly out of the plane.
It's very impressive. To get up there, while you keep going around and around and around and around, somebody counted the hairpin curves, but you lose count of them unless you have a computer with you or a calculator or something, at least I do. Anyway, you finally get to the top of this 1,500 foot I don't see, when you see 1,500 feet above sea level here, you see that the all of the 1,500 feet. Sometimes you can be up three or 4,000 feet above sea level and hardly know you're there. But here you're impressed by the severe perpendicular elevation of this mountain, the way it soars above.
So the top of it has been tipped off way back, there's a huge esplanade up there, magnificent modern basilica, and a guest house, then there's a deserted Benedictine monastery, Saint Benedict noticed going way, way back. And then you have a fortress, 12 or thirteenth century that the mosque was built. Now, when I visited there, what impressed me more than any of this outside of those hairpin curves getting up there and wondering how you're ever going to get down outside of a sliding board, was something that I had the privilege of seeing. The Franciscan who was showing us around, I was in the company of a Franciscan, took us. I said Mass in the crypt, which is the lowest point, and there's the the altar which is the most ancient, the most ancient spot on Taber.
The tradition of Taber going back as the Mount Of Transfiguration is very, very long. But then he took us outside. We went around this basilica of Baluchi's and went in to a door underneath the crypt. And there, you have and there's no reason at all to doubt this because the work of excavation and analysis and criticism and all the rest has been going on there for centuries and with Friedrich intensity in the last fifty years. So there's when they point out something like this, that is when they pointed to that rock and said that is a Canaanite altar, you can accept that.
That's pretty certainly true. So what happens? You have at the top of a basilica of a contemporary building, and underneath it all, down underneath the main altar of the basilica, down beneath the altar of the crypt, which is the oldest spot times, underneath that still, you have an ancient pagan altar of the Canaanites. You're way back. You're way back in Old Testament times.
Now of any mountain that could be picked of Israel or Palestine's 18, I'm told, any one of them that could be picked as I say, we don't know what happened there, really. But it's it's it certainly is a good choice. And especially the day I happened to be there was in March, and we'd had kind of miserable weather, cold and rainy and all that. And but the day we visited that, it was simply superb. It was gorgeous.
There's no other word for it. Everything green and the plain of Israel and all all full of spring and the trees blooming, the flowers out, sun, I'm not exaggerating this, marvelous blue sky and people. It was a whole crowd of schoolchildren had gotten up there. Buses can't get up, get about halfway. And of course, a very modern note was that it's dispersed among all the school children were civilian men in their sixties and seventies, but very well armed with automatic weapons.
Well, anyway, it was a it was a it was indeed. When you were up there and looked out over that valley and thought of all that took place, whether it's amount of transfiguration or not, it can't be too far away with from it. I said I say it's only two and a half hours automobile ride from Jerusalem. So you certainly are in the area or in the neighborhood of where this incident of our lord's life took place. It's all glory.
It's all brilliance. It's all sunshine. It's magnificent just the way Luke says it was, and that's the impression I have. But one point I wanna make first is the continuity here. The altar of the Canaanites, the ancient oral altar of the Christians, then all the history of the Christian era, of the Muslims, of the crusades, of the medieval times, of modern times, and then of the very modern times where you have a a whole school of children being resided over by old men carrying automatic weapons with this gorgeous basilica.
And the basilica itself is, I think, one of the best, is he has the spirit of the glory of the mountain, of the transfiguration. And you see, being a Christian, it's so easy to pick out one kind of element of Christianity from another and exaggerate it. Someone said if you look through a microscope long enough at the tiniest little ant, you will begin to see an elephant. Now we talk a great deal about carrying the cross to Christianity, and you can't escape it. There's no minimizing it.
But we do minimize in our lives and in our thinking and in our reaction to life and all that life brings, we minimize its glory, the transfiguration. We remember the cross and Christ on the cross and Calvary. Sure we remember and we better well remember it and keep it in mind thoroughly. But that's only part of the story. If there's a Calvary, there's also a table or something equivalent to it.
Christ didn't come to bury us in moroseness, in hopelessness, in the dark night of the soul. The dark night of the soul, if there's anything you can say about it, is that it passes. That's for sure. It passes. Most of us know about it, more or less in some degree at some times.
But one thing you can say about the dark night of the soul is that it passes. But there's one thing you can't say about the glory of God, and that is that it passes. That's one thing you can't say about it. It doesn't pass. Now there is an awful lot you can read into this incident of our lord.
Notice, he goes up to pray. The disciples go to sleep. That is so human. I don't know whether you've ever experienced fighting sleep, but folks, that is that is misery. That is torture to fight sleep.
They probably were very tired. And let me tell you, if it was Mount Tabor that they climbed to get up there, they had a right to be sleepy. So let's not look down on those poor old guys. They deserved a little rest when they got up there. But the fact is they slept on such an occasion.
Same thing, you know, when they got a God at Gethsemane. Christ is the one who did the praying, the son of God. His great and loyal disciples slept. This isn't to criticize them. This is just to say they were plain, good, honest to god human beings, and that's where we are, right with them.
But they woke up to the glory that they saw, and that's what we must do. You see, as I've said many times, the great difficulty of being a Catholic is to be a Catholic totally. Not to pick this part or that part, but to put it all together as it is to be virtuous. You can't take one virtue and say, I'm to practice that and forget the others. That is absolutely the way of being most immoral.
If only it were that simple. So our blessed lord doesn't give us a very simple way of life. He gives us so many things that we have to hold on together. And so if we hold on to the cross, let us hold on to to the glory of Taber. In the name of the father, the son, and holy spirit.
Amen.