Transfiguring Love
This Thursday is the Feast of the Transfiguration, and as it is one of the great feasts of the year, I’d like to take a moment to reflect on it and on its importance to us.
You all know the event: Peter, James, and John are taken aside by our Lord onto a mountaintop -- which the Church has consistently identified as Mount Tabor -- and there they behold him transfigured and speaking with Moses and Elijah. The whole mountaintop is overshadowed by a cloud which overshadows the disciples as they enter into it, and they are very afraid. The disciples hear a voice from the cloud, saying, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him”. Suddenly, the vision is gone, and the three disciples are alone with Jesus.
This experience obviously had a profound impact on Peter, James, and John: not only are they overcome with fear and awe at the moment, but the implications and effects of the experience remain with them. Many years later, Peter wrote in his second Epistle: “For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount”. And John, many years after Peter, wrote, “And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”.
It’s important to understand that the Transfiguration wasn’t just a sort of special-effects show designed to impress Peter, James, and John. Peter and John make it clear in their later writings that what they were seeing was the glory and majesty of the God-Man, Jesus Christ. His divinity was veiled during his earthly ministry, because he wanted men to believe his words, which were the very words of God, and so having power in and of themselves. He wanted men to hear, to know, and to love the truth in him, and not to follow him because of outward experiences. This is why he revealed his divinity in the Transfiguration only to those three disciples who had most wholly given themselves over to him in love and trust and obedience.
But also, he veiled his divinity because he had joined his divinity to the weakness of human nature, and he lived and suffered in that weakness alongside his own creatures, bearing their burdens with them so that he could take their burdens from them. He told Peter, James, and John to tell no one about the Transfiguration until he had risen from the dead, because the revelation of divine love is made perfect in its union with mankind’s suffering and death -- that is its true power and majesty. Also, it taught the disciples that Christ’s death and union with us had not been a sort of “plan B” because people didn’t believe in him, but had been the divine plan from the beginning, and that Christ, who was fully God, laid down his human life at the time and place, and under the circumstances, of his own choosing.
We learn from this what St. Paul learned from Christ: Christ’s strength is made perfect in weakness. It is in our weakness that Christ’s strength comes to us, in our blindness that his light shines on us, in our dying that his life pours into us. God’s presence in the Old Testament is almost always shown by a cloud accompanied by either dazzling light or thick darkness, or sometimes both. This is because of the weakness of fallen humanity: God’s unveiled glory would be too much for us -- we could not bear it and live. Our Lord took to himself a human nature in order to bridge this gap between God and man, in order to make God visible to man in a human face. St. Paul noted as much in 2 Corinthians 4: “For God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ”.
In the Transfiguration we behold the coming-together of the unknowable essence of God in the cloud, and the making-known of God in the face of Jesus Christ: we see the glory of the cloud manifesting itself in a human nature. We see Moses and Elijah, the two greatest of the Old Testament prophets, speaking with God face-to-face, in the cloud and in the person of Jesus Christ. I’m inclined to believe that it’s only in the Transfiguration that the seeming contradiction of Moses’ relationship with God is resolved. Moses could not see God’s essence, but he could speak with God face-to-face as a man speaks with his friend. Christ is fully God as well as fully man, and that means that the Incarnation has aspects and effects that are not bound by time. Moses ascended the mount of God and was forty days in the cloud, and because time has no power over God, because he is not bound by sequence or cause-and-effect, I believe that what the disciples saw was what Moses encountered within the cloud. Moses returned with his own face transfigured, to show even in the Old Testament that human nature, fallen though it is, has the capacity through the regeneration of grace, to bear the uncreated glory.
In fact, this is exactly what the Transfiguration is: the created, in the human nature of Christ, bearing and showing forth the uncreated. And this is why Christ became Incarnate: to make men the bearers of divinity. St. Athanasius wrote, “God became man that man might become god”, or as St. Peter wrote, to make man “partakers of the divine nature”. The Transfiguration is a vision of what human nature was created for, of how human nature can have by grace that which by nature it cannot have: the divine nature.
It’s a commonplace of writing about the Transfiguration to say that Moses and Elijah were there to show that Christ is the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, that is, of the Old Covenant. But the Transfiguration was not a choreographed event set up to make a point about how the Old Covenant is fulfilled in the New. Moses and Elijah are there because they are signs of what human life is supposed to be: alive to God and overflowing with his life here and now, in the midst of human weakness. Moses and Elijah, seen in the light of the Transfiguration, are not dead men made perfect in heaven, but living men who show forth the very life and power of God in the weakness of human life in this world. Moses and Elijah are there because they are alive in Christ.
The process of our sanctification, if you want to put it in technical language, is never complete this side of heaven -- because God’s nature is infinite and our sanctification involves our increasing participation in that nature, I’m inclined to say that the process is never complete even in heaven -- but what is certain is that it is to have reality now, in this life, in this world, in the place where God’s power meets our surrendered weakness.
This is not a subject fit for our imaginations, because we cannot picture what God is doing within us, nor what it looks like in each individual circumstance. It is best not to have certain expectations for what concrete results the new life of grace will have, beyond that we will grow in love for God, for man, and that we will long to fulfill the commandments and to see God’s will done in all things.
But we have among us a very certain token of God’s work in us, transforming our human weakness by his divine power: we have the Eucharist. St. Peter wrote that he was making known “the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ”, and for the early Church the “power and coming” of Christ is realized principally in the Eucharist. Each Eucharist is a sign of the Resurrection, and the Resurrection is a sign of humanity given life and glorified by the power of God. And so each Eucharist is a sign of the Transfiguration, when the created bore and showed forth the uncreated, for in the Eucharist the weak and powerless created beings of bread and wine become the Uncreated divinity of Christ, and the divinity of Christ is always and for all eternity joined to his created human nature.
The Transfiguration shows us what we are called to be, even now, in this life -- perhaps especially now, in this life, for we cannot postpone Christ’s work in us, telling him to wait until the next life to show his healing forth in us, for we cannot reap in heaven what we do not sow on earth; we cannot have fruit in the next life if the bloom has not begun in this life; and anyway, there is a certain impatience in the divine love, for Christ longs to make us his here and now, longs to heal us and to give himself to us fully. It is in the Eucharist that we have the means for our transfigurations, already begun in us at baptism, for it is here that God, fully alive in human nature, gives himself to us to make us fully alive in our fallen nature. It is here that God comes to give us what he gave to Moses and Elijah: the gift of meeting and speaking with him in the Person of Christ Jesus, and in that meeting, to be transformed into the likeness of his glory.
