Robert Barron - When the Eternal Breaks Through
Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent this year is Luke’s account of the Transfiguration. And whenever we come to this text, I don’t know, it just opens up something that’s this marvelous, this confounding… There’s a sort of aching and a longing associated with this text, I always find. I might’ve told you before in Chartres Cathedral, one of my favorite places in the world, and you look on the windows on the facade, and they have a depiction of the Transfiguration, and a certain time of year, the sun hits in such a way that the white cloak of Jesus just becomes almost incandescent. It’s beautifully crafted and beautifully arranged. And that speaks to me of the Transfiguration, these moments when life, when reality becomes incandescent or transparent to something more.
Now, if you know what I mean, it’s hard to talk about these things. They’re hard to describe. When, in the course of your normal experience, you’re going through your day and talking to people and seeing the things around you, but it might be that particularly gorgeous sunset. It might be that experience on the beach, the beauty of the waves. It might be something in a conversation that suddenly light breaks through, as it were from another world. The more. That there’s something beyond this world, listen now, that can be glimpsed through this world. That’s the dynamic. See, there are some people that would say, think of Puritans or dualists, that «Well, this world’s all bad, it’s all fallen. Let’s try to get away from it. I’m longing to die, so I can escape from this world».
Others on the other side, like pure materialists, say, «No, no, that’s all there is, this world that I can see and measure». These people are thick on the ground today, the sort of scientistic attitude, that «All there is, is the world that I can measure». What I’m talking about is neither one of those. I’m talking about in our ordinary experience of people, of nature, of our own lives, suddenly, often unexpectedly, the more becomes apparent. The deeper dimension, this brighter light that isn’t normally seen but on occasion flashes forth. Sometimes the philosophers talk about limit experiences. Means you’ve come to some height or depth, maybe, it could be a height of joy, it could be a depth of suffering, but you’ve come to a limit of human life.
And at those limits, you begin to glimpse something that lies beyond them. Here’s an image. This helped me a little bit, is imagine there’s a fish, and of course, spends entire life in the lake underwater. And the fisherman catches it is imagine there’s a fish, up out of the water, and for the first time sees this world beyond the water, sees a brightness it had never imagined before. This space that was at the same time amazing and deeply frightening and unnerving. And then the fish wriggles free, let’s say, from the hook and goes back into the water. You know what I’m driving at? There are moments in life that are like that, that I’m lifted up out of the ordinary, and I sense there’s something more that lies beyond it. I think this has a lot to do with religion, with spirituality.
Think of Meister Eckhart, the medieval Dominican mystic. He coined a term which has become an ordinary word in German and now in English, but he coined it. The word was «durchbruch». It means «through break,» literally. Durchbruch, breakthrough, breakthrough. That the other world, the higher world, breaks through sometimes into this world. Well, I think this is what the Bible is talking about when it says that God speaks to people. Yes, I do think some of the mystics really heard a literal voice, but more often than not, I think the divine voice is a symbol of this experience, when the more, the greater, breaks through.
You know what I love on this point, is C.S. Lewis, his book «Surprised by Joy». And by joy, he means something very specific. Not ordinary, good feeling. Joy is this weird longing that we experience sometimes at the limit of life for something we can’t really see, but we intuit it in this absolutely beguiling way. That’s joy. And I think some of you, anyway, you know what I’m talking about, you know those experiences. Well, all of this is a kind of introduction to the Transfiguration. I think it’s the supreme story in some ways about this kind of experience. It’s the paradigm of this kind of experience.
So, listen now as Luke, in his beautiful telling, walks us through this. So, Jesus leads Peter, James, and John up on a mountain to pray. Well, look, mountains, we know that from the Bible, and it’s across the cultures too, are symbolic of a meeting place of heaven and earth. Where earth goes up, heaven, as it were, comes down, and the mountain peak is where they meet. And so it’s a great image for what I’m talking about. Those moments when heaven, as it were, breaks into our ordinary experience. They go up the mountain to pray. See, it’s so important, everyone. That’s why the Church is always calling upon us to pray. Not that our prayer is going to compel God to break through, but prayer is a kind of alertness.
Once you’re aware of this higher world, well then, you want to go to these sacred places, and you want to be alive and alert and awake, see, to see the breakthrough. So, that’s the mountain. Then it says, «While Jesus was praying his face changed in appearance. His clothing became dazzling white». The Greek here is literally «metamorphosis,» that he, «meta» means beyond, «morphe» means form, is he went beyond the form that he had. Now, it doesn’t mean that he lost his humanity. So, this is not a dualist game. Like, «Oh, Jesus left all that behind, and now I see him as a pure spirit». No, no, he keeps his human form. But something more, see, meta, beyond, something more appeared.
So, to this point, they would’ve known him as a friend, as a beloved rabbi, as a deeply esteemed teacher. But gosh, what happens now is they see that the more, they see who he truly is; this is the durchbruch, the breakthrough of his divinity in his humanity. See, that’s what makes this now, this is a Christian view. Not escape from matter, not just a reversion to matter, but matter becoming translucent, matter being metamorphosed, something breaking through, see. They understand his divinity. And then this lovely detail. They also saw two men conversing with him, Moses and Elijah. So, Moses the Law, Elijah the prophets, this is Jesus in dialogue with the great scriptural tradition that precedes him. It’s extremely important that we understand Jesus correctly only in light of the Old Testament. All that’s true. But I want to point to something else here.
So, in our ordinary experience, figures from the distant past, and for Jesus in the first century, Elijah and Moses were both figures from the far distant past, hundreds, a thousand years, far distant figures. And yet, on this mountaintop, during the Transfiguration, he’s talking to Moses and Elijah as though they’re friends and they’re right there with him. See, there’s a very powerful truth here, everybody, is when the more breaks through, we get access to the eternal realm. So, the world that we move in ordinarily is a world of space and time, and time passes moment to moment, and then the past goes back and the future is still out there. But eternity? Eternity is not endless time, that’s like a vampire’s life or something, endless time. Eternity, as Aquinas says, is beyond time. The eternal is outside of time, and therefore inclusive of all time, if that makes sense.
So, I’m stuck in time now, meaning that I can’t get to the past except through books and maybe videos of the past. I can’t get to the future, except by means of imagination, anticipation. But when the eternal breaks through, I’m lifted up into a realm that includes all of space and time. So I can be a contemporary of someone from the distant past. Think here in the Catholic spiritual life of our conversation with the saints. So, in an ordinary framework, «Oh, the saints? Oh yeah, they lived a long time ago, and weren’t they interesting and inspiring people»? But if you experience the more, the breakthrough, no, no, they’re not just from the distant past; you can be, right now, in dialogue with the saints. You can ask for their help; you can ask for their intercession.
So, Jesus speaking to Moses and Elijah… Isn’t it wonderful too, at Mass, we purposely surround ourselves in our church buildings with images of the saints and the angels? Of course, of course, because that’s the place of breakthrough, where the more appears. I love this detail. Luke mentioned that «Peter and his companions had been overcome by sleep» at one point, but now they were «fully awake». This is typical biblical symbolism. Sleep in the Bible is not good. Now, I get it, I like to sleep; it’s a good thing. But sleep in the Bible is a sign of spiritual inattention.
Think of the disciples sleeping in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus is trying to pray, and he says, «You couldn’t even watch with me for an hour»? Paul says, «Awake, O sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will give you light». They were asleep. See, that’s the condition of most of us, most of the time. Meaning, we’re living so thoroughly in this world of ordinary experience that we’re asleep. We’re not aware of the higher, of the more, of the greater. We’re oblivious to it. It’s like we’re unconscious; we don’t know anything about it. But when the great more breaks through into our lives, now we are awake. We are aware of it. And again, that’s what prayer is, everybody. That’s what prayer is. It’s being awake, wide awake, eyes wide open.
Chesterton’s comment that the statues outside of Chartres are not closed eyed; they’re open eyed, they’re looking, they’re awake, they’re alive. This is why too, think of the great mystics who’ve had experiences of the other world in a very vivid way, think of Bernadette of Lourdes. She wanted to go back to that spot. Nothing would stop her. She was awake, alive to a higher world, and that’s where she wanted to go. And this is of course why Peter says, «Master, it’s good that we’re here». Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it.
When you sense that higher world, that’s it, you want it. But now here’s the thing, and I’ll close with this, and I know, I get it, I get it, Peter wants to stay on that mountain all the time. Bernadette wanted to stay at the Grotto of Lourdes, of course she did. Of course she did. And someday, everybody, someday on high in heaven, we will be with the angels and saints and able to stay there all the time, wide awake. But in God’s mysterious providence, in this life, we glimpse this higher realm, we rejoice in it. But then, then we’re sent back down the mountain. Now, why? Why? So that we too can be radiant with this experience and share it with everybody we know.
See, that’s why Peter, James, and John, they don’t stay on top of the mountain. They go down, but boy, they caught some of the light. They got some of this light, and they’re now going to carry it to everyone they know. And see, here’s the beautiful thing. I stand here today in the year 2025 as a Catholic bishop. Well, it’s Peter. Peter, the first pope, Peter the Rock upon whom the Church is built. I’ve got any sense of this reality because Peter came down the mountain. So, when you experience this, love it, savor it, enjoy it, but then come down the mountain of transfiguration for the benefit of the world. And God bless you.