A Homily for the Feast
of the
Transfiguration
We were eyewitnesses of
his majesty: for he received from God the
Father honour and glory,
. . . when we
were with him on the holy mount.
—II Saint Peter 1:16–18
“Jesus . . . went up into a mountain
to pray.” Jesus did not go up the
mountain for the purpose of impressing his friends.
He did not go up the mountain to do magic
tricks or to put on a sound-and-light show.
Jesus went up the mountain to pray.
We should also note, up front, that
what happened on the mountain did not happen to prove to the disciples
who
Jesus really is. To be sure, Saint
Peter, in a letter written some twenty years later, referred to what he
had
seen and heard on the mountain as evidence that “we did not follow
cleverly
devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our
Lord Jesus
Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.” But
who Jesus is he already knew, and had
already declared aloud.
Just a few weeks ago, in out Gospel
lesson, we heard the story of how Jesus called three of his friends,
three
fishermen from the
And one day Jesus asked them, “Whom
say ye that I am?”
Peter, on behalf of the twelve, responded: “You
are the Messiah, the Son of the living
God.” And the events recounted in today’s
Gospel lesson occurred just about a week after that.
It was only after the disciples had given
voice to that profession of faith, that
Jesus took the
three “fishers of men” with him when he went up into a mountain to pray. Their ability to share in the experience of
what was the Transfiguration was a consequence of their knowledge of
Jesus as
the Messiah and Son of God; that knowledge was not the result of their
experiencing the Transfiguration.
Jesus, the Messiah, the Son of God,
went up the mountain to pray, as he had often done before.
But it had been his practice to go alone up a
mountainside or into the desert. For
example, just before he preached that sermon from Simon Peter’s fishing
boat,
he had gone off alone, out of
There is so much symbolism in the Transfiguration,
that one might become lost in the symbolism
and lose sight of the reality of the event itself.
The Gospel writers—and Matthew, Mark, and
Luke all include an account of the Transfiguration in their
Gospels—include a
number of details that help us to see
the reality, including details that must have been embarrassing
to the
disciples themselves. We are told that
while Jesus prayed the disciples fell asleep, and we are told the Peter
blurted
out the suggestion that he build three shelters on the mountain top,
“because
he did not know what he was saying.”
We also perceive the reality of the
event in the difficulty that the Gospel-writers had in finding words to
describe
the Transfiguration itself. We are told
that Jesus’s face shone like the sun (and
we have all
had the experience from time to time of looking toward the brightness
of the
sun, and so we have an idea what the Gospel-writers are trying to say). We are told that his raiment, his clothing,
became very white: whiter than white,
whiter than bleached wool. And we are
told that his raiment was glistering.
(Now it may seem that this is just a
misprint in our English Bible, and that it ought to say “glittering”
or, maybe,
“glistening.” But “glistering” is—or at
least it was 400 years ago—a real English word denoting sparkling
brilliance. And it is used here to
translate a Greek word that means “flashing like lightening.”)
That is why Saint Peter, twenty or
so years later, wrote that on that mountain he saw Jesus in majesty and
honour and glory.
He, and the other two disciples, saw something unlike anything
they had
ever seen before or would ever expect to see again, at least until they
gazed
with their own eyes upon the beatific vision of God in heaven.
Keeping in mind, therefore, the
reality of the event, we cannot ignore the symbolism, either. The Transfiguration is inseparably linked to Jesus’s passion, death, and resurrection, and
therefore,
also, with the whole of the Old Testament, which was the preparation
for and
the foreshadowing of Jesus’s passion,
death, and
resurrection.
Just a week after the disciples had
confessed him as their Messiah and as the Son of God, and just before
he began
his final ascent to
As Jesus prayed, the disciples saw
and heard him conversing with Moses and Elijah, two righteous men of
the Old
Testament. Indeed, Moses and Elijah were
the embodiment (if that is the right word in this context) of the Law
and the
Prophets. And what was the subject of
that conversation? Our 1611 English
translation says that they “spake of his
decease,
which he should accomplish at
The exodus of the Jewish people, in
the Old Testament, immediately followed the first Passover. We do well to remember that the Passover was
a foreshadowing of the crucifixion, in which Jesus, the true Passover
lamb, was
to be sacrificed. And the exodus, the
escape, of the Jews from slavery in
And, remembering that, we should not
be altogether surprised to hear that this is when Peter blurted out his
suggestion of building three shelters there on the mountaintop, because
for
forty years after the exodus from
And just as Peter was speaking, a
cloud enveloped the mountaintop. This is
not any cloud, but the cloud that is called in Hebrew the Shekinah,
the Glory of God, the visible manifestation of God’s presence. This is the cloud that covered the top of
And they heard that voice, the voice
from heaven, saying: “This is my beloved
Son, listen to him,” or as Saint Peter recalled it, “This is my beloved
Son, in
whom I am well pleased.” The voice
confirmed what Peter himself had confessed aloud a few days earlier: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living
God.”
Jesus told the three disciples that
they must keep secret what they had seen and heard, at least until
after his
resurrection; and we know that the disciples then did not yet
understand the
reference to resurrection. But they
apparently
did keep the secret.
Shortly before the Transfiguration,
the Pharisees and the Saducess had tempted
Jesus,
asking him for a sign that they should believe him, and he had refused
them,
saying: “A wicked and unfaithful
generation seeks a sign, but no sign will be given it except the sign
of
Jonah.” But the disciples had believed
without that sign, and they (or, at least, three of them) were
permitted to
know just what kind of sign might have been given.
The story of the Transfiguration does
not end when Jesus and the disciples come down from the mountain. The Transfiguration of Jesus, witnessed by
the disciples on the mountain, is also a foretaste of what we all, as
Christians, should expect to witness.
Saint Paul, writing to the Corinthians,
reminded them that the face of Moses, who had been in the presence of
God,
glowed so brightly from the mere reflection of God’s glory that he had
to cover
his face with a veil so that the people could bear to look at him. But we, who are baptized into Christ himself,
do not merely reflect glory, but we can and should be lit by it from
within. “All of us, gazing with unveiled
face on the glory of the Lord, are being transfigured into the same
image from
glory to glory.” And
06 August, 2006
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