Listen to Him: The Mystery of the Transfiguration

You know that feeling when you read the Transfiguration and think, “I wish I could have been there”? We challenge that assumption and make a bold claim: you are not deprived of Mount Tabor. When we understand the Catholic liturgy as more than remembrance, Eucharistic adoration becomes a real encounter with Jesus Christ, present and acting, even when His glory is hidden under humble signs.

We start with Mark 9 and then follow a surprising path: a seminary homiletics assignment that opened a lifelong connection between the Transfiguration and solemn exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Along the way, we unpack what “memorial” means in the Bible. Passover is not a history lesson; it places God’s people in contact with the saving event. That sets up the deeper Christian reality of the Mass, where Christ’s once for all sacrifice is made present and we are drawn into the mystery of the Cross and the Resurrection.

Then we slow down and look at what’s right in front of us during exposition and benediction: the high place of the altar, the radiant design of the monstrance, the candles that echo dazzling light, and the incense that recalls the overshadowing cloud and the Father’s command to listen. We even explore Peter’s “three tents” line and why tabernacles in Catholic churches can be seen as Christ’s answer to that request. Finally, we explain a detail many people notice but few understand: why the priest covers his hands with a humeral veil at benediction, and how that sign points to Jesus blessing you directly in the Eucharist.

If you’ve ever struggled with silence in adoration, wondered why the Church uses so many signs, or wanted a clearer, more biblical Eucharistic theology, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves adoration, and leave a review with your biggest question about the Eucharist.

Transcript

Adoration As Mount Tabor Today

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Think about that. Like you weren't deprived of not being able to be there when Jesus was transfigured. You just have to go to adoration, right? We're gonna have it this Sunday after Mass on Corpus Christi in between the masses. You can go anytime here and gallop at the uh the Sisters of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Joseph at the Blessed Sacrament Chapel there on Porco. Um you can go almost 24 hours a day. And you are not deprived of that experience that the apostles had of seeing uh the transfiguration, right? It's just we do it through the liturgy. We show the signs that are there, but it's it's the same event.

Welcome, Prayer, And The Text

SPEAKER_02 0:42

Welcome to Christero Cast. I'm your host, Patrick Mason, and again today I'm joined by Father Matthew Kelly of the Cathedral. Thank you, Father, for being with us. Good to see you, Pat. And just as a reminder at the outset, if you find this uh uh video edifying, please like and subscribe, ring that bell, share it with your friends. It really does help us get the word out. Uh Father, could we begin with a prayer today? Certainly.

SPEAKER_03 1:03

So in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, most holy Trinity, I adore you. My God, my God, I love you, and the most blessed sacrament. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Amen.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

So, Father, uh, we're going through a couple of what I like to call as Father Keller's greatest hits. Um, it's some of the different homilies I've heard you uh preach over the years that have really stuck with me. Um, and one of those that you always are really great at uh talking about is the transfiguration. So I thought I'd start us off with the reading of the transfiguration, and then you could give us your thoughts on it. Okay, sure. Okay. So this comes from Mark chapter nine, um, verse two. So after six days Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain apart by themselves, and he was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fooler on earth could bleach them. Then Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, and they were conversing with Jesus. Then Peter said to Jesus in reply, Rabbi, it is good that we are here. Let us make three tents, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. He hardly knew what to say, they were so terrified. Then a cloud came, casting a shadow over them, and from the cloud came a voice. This is my beloved son, listen to him. Suddenly looking around, they no longer saw anyone but Jesus alone with them.

A Seminary Homily That Clicked

SPEAKER_03 2:30

So, yeah, um my favorite uh passages of you know the mystery of our Lord, and and Saint John Paul II made that one of the luminous mysteries. He says the luminous mystery par excellence, uh, because our Lord you know just demonstrates like light pouring from him. But my uh my sort of encounter with this passage started when I was in seminaries in a homiletics class, and we had to preach, and that was what uh I you know drew the thing. It was the transfiguration. And so I spent a lot of time because uh you know, different than like a Sunday, we do some work, you know, we do a few hours of you know prayer and and preparation, but for something like that, you've never preached before, and and you have all your classmates who are skeptics and and real crazy. Kind of like you're almost like your first homily. Yeah, exactly that. So I spent a lot of time on it, and the professor uh said, like, I didn't want to like that, but I liked it. And that stuck with me uh because uh the way I uh the insight that God gave me was this um a connection between the transfiguration of our Lord and solemn exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, right? Something I was serving that every day at the time, and I saw a connection there that um the liturgy was unfolding for us the mystery of the transfiguration,

Memorial Means Real Participation

SPEAKER_03 3:50

the liturgy of solemn exposition and benediction. And so um if as you know, in in uh in scripture, we have these theophanies, these times when God reveals himself. And so in the Old Testament, whenever that happened, there was a memorial for that. And so there was one for in the Old Testament of, for example, when God revealed himself to Moses, the memorial for that was uh later on the showbread being laid out in front of uh in this in the sanctuary that uh we hear about in in David and his men were given some of that by the priest. That show bread uh with 12 loaves of it were to remind them of God appearing to the people of uh uh of Israel. So it was a memorial of God revealing himself, right? And so the mass is something like that, but deeper because what the mass does, well, I'll give you the the Passover, right? Uh another Old Testament thing where um every year, right, the memorial of the Passover is solemn. And the the Israelites didn't just think of that as let's remember something that happened a long time ago, like Lincoln's birthday or whatever, right? It's not that. They were experiencing being freed, right? Every time they they celebrated the Passover, if you lived hundreds of years or thousands of years afterwards, you still had the experience of being liberated, right? So the the memorial puts you in touch with the original event. Okay, well, think about Mass, in which, right, we say it's a memorial. No, right, do this in memory of me. No, be there at the foot of the cross uh and the Last Supper. It's not just us remembering what happened there. We are there. There's only one Mass. Jesus made a once for all sacrificed on the cross. And that's why it's a true sacrifice. That sacrifice is made present at every mass. And so the curtain between heaven and earth is is like split apart. So Jesus doesn't get recrucified, we get transported there, right? Right. And so um so the mass is the great example of us being we're present at the Last Supper, we are present at the foot of Calvary, right? And surprisingly enough, right, at the empty tomb where Jesus is risen because we have the resurrected, glorified Christ in the Eucharist. So the whole the mystery of Christ is present there, all right. And the liturgy unfolds that for us, right? It it takes what's hidden. We can't see Jesus in the Eucharist, but we but that's why, right, we um we meditate and we prepare and we uh we're catechized and we have you know time of worship, but because we know that Jesus is truly present there, right? And the liturgy uh let's say unfolds the hidden mystery, right? Um so this is true. Uh there's a uh a theophany, another one in the New Testament, which is Jesus showing his himself in glory, right, to the apostles. He shows them for a moment that dazzles them. And that uh so that theophany, the showing forth of himself as God, right, um uh is something that we see happening there on Mount Tabor.

Exposition Symbols That Reveal Glory

SPEAKER_03 7:03

And so in solemn exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, uh, if you think about the uh the steps of it, right? So, first of all, we go up to a high place, right? So the our cathedral is the greatest for this, right? Because we have that you know tabernacle with the crown on top, you take the crown off, and there's a tabor on the top. That's where that's where that tabernacle comes from, right? No, well, Mount Tabor Tabernacle means tent. Oh, okay, right? That's the place where our Lord is reserved. We'll get to that in a moment. But the Tabor is the mountain on which Jesus was transfigured. That was Mount Tabor. So that place, maybe you've seen on EWTN where they have the uh the two angels adoring, and there's a platform. Yeah, like raised platform for the monster. It's called the Tabor. Oh, interesting. So Mount Tabor, because we take, right, our Lord is taken up to a high place. So in the cathedral, right, we go up the steps to the high altar, and even wait, I can't even reach it. I have to use a step. Father Father Brown can reach it, and the bishop can, but I can't. So high. So um we place uh right, we take the blessed sacrament, our Lord Himself, um, who's hidden, right? Because he's humble. And so the church, you know, says, okay, Jesus, we know you're humble. We're gonna exp, we're gonna show forth your glory. Right. And so we take right the blessed sacrament, a large host usually, and place it inside of a monstrance, right? That word means to demonstrate, right? Monstrare to show or to demonstrate. And so the monstrance, what's it show? It shows the hidden glory of Christ. And that's why a monstrance has rays coming from it, like sun, because think about what happens in the in the transfiguration. Dazzling light, rays, right? Uh like uh nobody can look at it. Uh, so it's showing forth, and Jesus, right, who is uh right, the son of God, who is uh right, uh so you see uh if you if you think about uh this looking at the sun, right, and the center of it is our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. So the monstrance is demonstrating the glory that's hidden uh that our Lord has hidden uh himself in in the sacrament. So that is placed on uh on the tabernacle. Okay, so what happened with the apostles, right? They um they see this dazzling light. So the church has us light a bunch of candles, right? So on is four or six is the minimum, but you know, you've seen on uh you know some solemn uh exposition, you know, 40 hours or something, where is it all the candles? Candles all over the place. So that's right, it reminds us also of that dazzling light that was uh surrounding our Lord, right? And then uh says that uh they were encompassed by a cloud, right, from which God the Father spoke. And so we offer incense to Jesus because he's God, right? Uh, but also to remind us of the cloud from which God the Father spoke, right? This is my beloved son, listen to him. So one of the our tasks at adoration is to listen, right? Yeah to just be there in silence. We can pray, you know, the rosary or something, of course, but we should be very attentive to our Lord uh there, not running this as much as these. Yeah uh you know, our ears to the ears of our heart to listen to our Lord. All right. So um we go up to the high place, right, with Jesus. He's uh uh we use the liturgy to you know to show the the magnificence that was present there uh

Tabernacles And The Three Tents

SPEAKER_03 10:23

at the uh at the transfiguration. So some of the things that happen though there, um Peter says, Lord, it's good that we're here. Let us make a tent. This is where the word tabernacle, that's the same word tabernacle for you, because there was the the feast of tabernacles and they made the booths and all that stuff in the Old Testament. So not something unknown, uh you know, a place to stay and worship God. So Jesus answered that prayer of St. Peter. There's a tabernacle in every active Catholic church in the world, right? Yeah. Where our Lord remains with us, right? Think about how uh Peter asked that question. It says he didn't even know what he was talking about, right? He was so all the apostles were so dazzled by all this. Um, but Jesus answered that for thousands of years, right? All of us have benefited from that little request that St. Peter made, right? Lord, let's make a place here, right? Tabernacle.

SPEAKER_02 11:13

God's like, well, here's the here's the tent you want. That's right. That's what it's everywhere you own.

SPEAKER_03 11:16

And so I've been um amazed by this uh thing that that happens in a lot of older churches. Our cathedral was one of them. There were two side altars that had tabernacles on them for no apparent reason, right? Because you don't usually keep it. No, you wouldn't keep the sacred the blessed sacrament in more than one place in the sanctuary, right? But there were two side uh tabernacles. We had the they put the the um statues down on top of the altars now, but there used to be tables. If you look, there's uh there's sort of faux tabernacles.

SPEAKER_02 11:45

Well, then when you go to St.

SPEAKER_03 11:46

Peter's in Rome, a lot of those side altars, I think they had to there some of them might actually have the blessed sacrament, but a lot of parishes when I was in France, yeah, there were like faux tabernacles. And one day I was like, those are the two for Moses and Elijah. That's good. Because our Lord is staying with us and one. So I'm not sure if that's always true, but in some parishes, it's clearly the case that they made faux tabernacles, too. There's three tents. There's three, one for Jesus, one for Moses, one for Elijah.

Why The Priest Covers His Hands

SPEAKER_03 12:17

At the end of um of the period of adoration, uh, though something happens where the priest you know takes uh the humoral veil to place over his shoulders and uh and covers his hands. And you might think, okay, well, of course, um that's God. But the priest has his hands have been consecrated, right? They were anointed on the day of his ordination for the very purpose of touching the blessed sacrament and consecrating the body.

SPEAKER_02 12:44

Yeah, you could touch the host, but you can't touch the vessel to hold the body.

SPEAKER_03 12:47

That doesn't make any sense, right? So why does the priest cover his hands?

SPEAKER_02 12:50

Well, I had a priest, I had a priest tell me once it was to keep the the monstrance clean as well. That's right.

SPEAKER_03 12:55

Yeah, keep your grubby hands off his monster.

SPEAKER_02 12:56

Keep your grubby hands off.

SPEAKER_03 12:57

No. The purpose of that is to demonstrate that the blessing at the end of benediction doesn't come from the priest, it comes from Jesus directly, right? So when he's moving the the uh the monstrance, right, in the sign of the cross, there's no intermediary. The priest is no priestly, or usually a priest gives a imparts a blessing, right? With his own hand. With his own hand. It's like Jesus is reaching through the priest and right and giving you a blessing. He's acting in persona Christie, right, at Mass. Uh, and so Jesus is blessing him through the you know, the instrumentality of the priests, uh, you know, uh holy orders and the priest. So he's being used in a real way, right, to act in the person of Christ. But at that moment, he doesn't give you a blessing, right? He covers his hands to show that the that Jesus is giving the blessing. We use the same symbol uh when a bishop is celebrating mass, uh, the kids that are or servers that are carrying the the miter and crozier, right? They have vimps, we call them, but they're just like humor veils, and they serve exactly the same purpose. It shows you that when your son is serving and he covers his hands and he's holding the bishop's uh crozier, that that's not his sign of authority, it belongs to somebody else. The bishops, right? Same sign exactly. So the priest covers his hands and gives the benediction uh to show that that blessing is coming directly from Jesus Christ in the Eucharist with no uh right, no intermediary at all, no, not even the ministry of the priest uh in between you and Christ. So it's really powerful blessing, right? That uh solemn, uh solemn blessing at

Where To Go For Adoration

SPEAKER_03 14:35

the end of it. So, anyhow, this is something then you know, when we go to our time of adoration, right? Think about that. Like you weren't deprived of not being able to be there when Jesus was transfigured. You just have to go to adoration, right? We're gonna have it this Sunday after Mass on Corpus Christi uh in between the masses. You can go anytime here and Gallop at the uh the Sisters of Our Lady Guadalupe St. Joseph at the Blessed Sacrament Chapel there on Porco. Um you can go almost 24 hours a day. And you are not deprived of that experience that the apostles had of seeing uh the transfiguration, right? It's just we do it through the liturgy, we show the signs that are there, but it's it's the same event. So you kind of get transported, right, to the transfiguration uh whenever you go to solemn exposition and benedictions. Awesome thing.

SPEAKER_02 15:26

That's an awes that's awesome, Father. That's definitely one of your uh greatest hits that stuff with me over the years. Um well, thank you, Father, for being here today for for that story, and we'll come back with a couple more of your greatest hits on further episodes.

SPEAKER_00 15:40

Okay, thank you for watching this episode of Christerocast. For more information on the Christeros or to join the movement, check out our website at theCristeros.org. That's theChristeros with an S.org. There you could find our daily reflection series as well as many of our publications and articles. Thank you for watching, and viva Christore.