Resurrection and Transfiguration

Resurrection and Transfiguration

It is difficult for us to visualize how our own self may become a Eucharistic, Christified body. Our eyes are not enough here, because they only know how to look, and not to see. 

The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ offered this glorified state as a model for our own glorification, our own hope of becoming part of the body of Christ. This is not easy to put into words or to understand rationally, but what the eyes cannot see, the soul can sense in a different way. And what it can sense is something that has been given to us in Scripture: the close connection between the Transfiguration of Christ and his Resurrected body passes through the Eucharistic chalice. 

If I try to throw myself and my whole existence to the feet of Christ, who showed with his Resurrection that he is the source of any kind of life-force we may imagine, then I can only imagine my final destination as a destination of a body of light. I must submit my own existence to the love of God given to his own creatures, whom he keeps in life with his continuous breath, so that I too may become as much alive as that tiny piece of bread soaked in wine. It is no bigger than a spoonful, but the Eucharist contains and exceeds the life-force of the entire universe. This body, the same as it was given to me, now infused in the divine rays that permeate it and change it. Our own resurrection is not so much, or at least not only, the resurrection of all the dead, righteous and wicked, at the end of time. Our resurrection, our union with the source of our life, is more properly understood according to the image of the Transfiguration of Christ, and our own transfiguration in him. To put it in other words, the person who shares in the Resurrection of Christ becomes a human Eucharist, in a transfiguration that follows the Transfigured, glorified Christ. And in doing so, in becoming the Eucharistic body of the one Christ, we meet everyone else who also has been transfigured in Christ.

—Andreas Andreopoulos 
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