“After six days, Jesus took Peter and James and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain apart.”
That, or very close to it, is how Matthew 17:1 reads in almost every Bible translation. It is unfortunate that the lectionaries, and even the older missals, seem to obscure this small detail at the very start, replacing “after six days” with the generic “at that time” (in illo tempore in the Latin typical editions), a customary way of separating Gospel passages that in the text itself often run right into one another. Usually this little insertion is helpful, but here it removes something that was actually quite significant for the Fathers reading this same passage. After six days. That is, on the seventh day, when God rested from all his work in creation. Jesus is leading the disciples back to paradise, where they will behold God face to face.
If they can handle it. This entering the cloud also recalls Moses on Sinai, who emerged with face shining from merely glimpsing God’s glory from the back. We should also recall the story of Elijah waiting for the revelation of God on the side of the mountain; there, the storm and fire could not contain the glory, so he had to be content with a “still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). No wonder these very two figures show up to witness the truth to which their own mountaintop experiences ultimately point.
It is not clear that Peter, James, and John do handle it very well. They fall down in awe. One ancient commentator suggests that they fall on their faces because the wicked would have fallen on their backs. But I am not so sure that this is some great sign of their sanctity so much as it is a sign of their grounding in reality. Transfiguration is such a nice word in English, meaning very little. What we mean to suggest here is the searing, blinding bright holiness of God’s own mysteries, what the Dionysian Mystical Theology describes as lying “in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence, outshining all brilliance with the intensity of their darkness, and surcharging our blinded intellects with the utterly impalpable and invisible fairness of glories which exceed all beauty.” We could, like the Areopagite, use a lot of poetic language, or we could just throw our faces to the ground, which for the three chosen disciples seems a good choice.
Yet Peter, on rising, seems a little stuck in the moment. Or perhaps we should say more bluntly that he is preparing himself to be stuck in the past. The divine command to “listen” seems directed at this idea of memorializing a moment as a possession. The problem is not that Peter desires to remember—we read this story in the context of an entire collection of apostolic memories entrusted to the Church’s memory and tradition—but that he thinks of the memory as a sort of monument to past success rather than as the way we continue to hear the voice of God.
That idea of movement, rather than stasis, is a clear theme of the day’s readings. Peter Kreeft suggests that together they show us something of the greater journey of faith. In Abraham’s call we see the basic vehicle of the journey: faith. The scriptures, as the psalm (and the smaller propers for those of us who use them) suggests, are a roadmap. Holiness, according to 2 Timothy, is the direction. And glory, as we see in Matthew, is the destination.
It is also commonly suggested that St. Paul’s theme, in 2 Timothy, about persevering through hardship is also central to the purpose of the Transfiguration. Jesus shows them a glimpse of his glory to give them strength to face the difficult days ahead.
I have heard this idea many times, and preached on it, but I have this lingering question: did it, in fact, give them strength to persevere? I’m not sure that it did, at least in how we might normally understand the concept. When faced with the Passion, most of the disciples fled. They fell backward, not forward, in that unholy opposite of their reaction on the mountain. So I wonder what consequence the Transfiguration has.
Unsurprisingly, the Byzantine liturgy, that ancient repository of ecclesial meaning, provides a striking answer in a kontakion on the Transfiguration quoted by the Catechism (555): the vision convinced the disciples, through seeing Christ’s glory, that his crucifixion was “voluntary.” In other words, it’s not that the Transfiguration somehow steeled the nerves of the disciples and enabled them to get through the Passion like good Stoics. Rather, the vision of Christ’s glory gave them, literally, a theology of the Passion. Through all the horror, and their own inescapable human variety in responding to it, they returned to this deep paradox: somehow this suffering man is the king of glory. Though, from the view of anyone else, the Passion was something happening to Christ, for these men, at least, it was clear that the Passion was also something that Christ was doing, and that he knew what he was doing, and that therefore, despite everything—and no doubt this is the implication that takes some time even for these three to process—it must in the end turn to the good.
So it should be for us. I don’t know that hearing about the Transfiguration every year on this second Sunday of Lent somehow makes Lent more tolerable. For my part, I don’t think it has ever made me feel any better about giving up comforts or doing hard things, which makes sense, because . . . well, it is always going to be hard to do hard things, and sacrifices aren’t sacrifices if they’re easy.
But in the Transfiguration we have the knowledge that these hard things can be useful and not in vain. It encourages us in our suffering and our sacrifices—not to just let them happen as passive observers, but to own them, to offer them, confident not just that Christ is our destination, but that Christ is our whole journey as well.