As It Is: A Reflection on the Feast of the Transfiguration 2023

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration, which commemorates an event in the life of Jesus in which three of his disciples saw him completely suffused in and shining with the divine, uncreated light. It’s one of my personal favorite Gospel stories and it appears twice a year in the lectionary (August 6 for the feast and a choice between the ‘hinge’ Sunday between Epiphany and Lent and within Lent itself), and so I’ve written quite a bit about it over the years of the blog from slightly different angles. (A few posts you may want to check out are ‘Jars of Clay’, ‘You Are the Light of the World,’ ‘Transfigured Lives,’ ‘Hearts Unveiled’, and ‘Into the Luminous Darkness’.) Today what jumped out to me upon reading the story is how, according to longstanding Christian tradition, this miracle was not about Jesus being changed, but about the disciples’ perceptions of him being changed. It’s an idea that has helpful implications for all of us who seek to live out lives of faith.

First let’s remind ourselves of the story, as told by the Apostle Luke:

Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah” not knowing what he said. While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!” When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen. (Luke 9.28-36)

This story, while often a bit of a puzzlement to Christians today, has long been understood, particularly in the East, as having a central role in how we understand Christian spirituality. Just as the disciples, who had left behind their daily cares and concerns in order to pray in the wilderness, came to see Jesus shining in God’s glory and were able to enter into the luminous darkness of God’s presence, the hope is that so will we, through prayer and sacrament and faithfulness, be able to see Christ as he truly is and enter God’s presence, in foretaste in this life, and fully in the next.

But I think this has something to say not just about a mystical vision of God but also about having a truer vision of the world and our strange, wondrous, often anxious and difficult, lives in it. In a sense, I’m talking about an inherent connection between transfiguration and repentance. As I often like to say, repentance is not at its heart about confessing a laundry list of sins, but rather about coming to see our life and the impact it has on those around us through God’s eyes. To review, in the Greek word for ‘repentance’, metanoia, the meta- means ‘change’ (as in ‘metamorphosis’ or ‘metastasis’), and the noia is derived from the word nous, which is normally translated as ‘mind’, but refers far more to perception than cognition. The nous is that part of us that helps us interpret and understand what our eyes, ears, noses, and skin sense about the world. So repentance is less about a change in our thinking and more about a change in how we interpret our world.

In this way, we might say that what the disciples experienced on the mountain was a kind of ‘repentance’; their perception was altered so that they were able to see Jesus as he truly was. And I think there’s a lesson for us here. So often when we think about ‘progress’ or ‘transformation’, whether in our lives of faith or in our churches or in our cities and countries, we think about it in terms of our own agendas and beliefs about how things should be. We want to stop a certain habit, or rectify a specific injustice. And this isn’t bad — it’s even necessary. But it’s also partial. The life of faith is not a to-do list. And I wonder if true repentance — the true miracle of the Transfiguration for us in our own lives — might be more about seeing ourselves and our communities as we are deep down: Bruised and broken, but good. As places of revelation and theophany, but also as places needing transformation.

What would it mean to go through life, even for a day, with such a gift of perception? I imagine it would be beautiful and wondrous, with every tree revealed as a tenacious and glorious sign of God’s grace, and every person on the street a manifestation of the image of God. But I also imagine it would be heartbreaking, with our ability to ignore the injustice and lovelessness and loneliness all around us taken from us. And I think that’s the point. We gain nothing from going through the world with our eyes closed, insisting that it is as we want it to be. In order to truly be faithful, we have to first see, acknowledge, accept, and love the world as it really is, in all its glory and it in all its suffering. Only then can we understand the ways we might rightly and justly act to make it better, apart from our own ideas and egos.

And so, on this Feast of the Transfiguration, may our hearts be changed. May God give us eyes to see and ears to hear.

For “the heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.” If only we have eyes and ears to perceive it.