The Transfiguration

“Our Savior’s Transfiguration” – Theophanes the Greek, c. 1400.
Tretyakov Gallery. Public Domain.

 

In his sermon on the First Sunday of Epiphany, Father Matt introduced the season with T.S. Eliot’s poem**, “Journey of the Magi.” Eliot recounts, from the magi’s perspective, what it was like to make the long journey from the East. In the end, the magus finds himself “no longer at ease…in the old dispensation” with its “summer palaces” and “silken girls bringing sherbet.” Now that he has seen the glory of God wrapped in human flesh, all worldly comforts are pitifully inadequate.

Each Gospel story throughout Epiphany carries the same transformational weight: Jesus’s baptism. His call to the disciples. His rebuke to the demons. And on this, the final Sunday of Epiphany, Jesus’s Transfiguration. Jesus leads Peter, James, and John up a high mountain and, Mark writes, “transfigures before them.” Each of the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) describe Jesus’s transfiguration, appealing to metaphors that only hint at the glory of his transformed body. Mark describes his clothes, dazzlingly white, “such as no one on earth could bleach them.” Matthew focuses on his face, which “shone brighter than the sun.” Luke’s description is matter-of-fact: “The appearance of his face changed.” Whatever happened on that mountain, it was beyond the capacity of human language.

The events of Jesus’s life observed during the Epiphany season blur the lines between heaven and earth. Human ears hear God’s voice and human eyes behold the radiance of his glory. In the moment of Christ’s Transfiguration, God opens heaven to Peter, James, and John. And like the magus, they will no longer be at ease in the old dispensation. Nor, by God’s grace, shall we. These are the stories we tell during Epiphany, and in telling them, we are changed. Bobby Gross writes, “Epiphany is a time both to inhabit the Story and to tell the Story, for in the telling itself we are further enlightened.” The light and truth of God the Father has been revealed to us through Jesus Christ and is continuously illuminated in us by the Holy Spirit. Thanks be to God, Alleluia, Alleluia.

For that one moment, ‘in and out of time’,
On that one mountain where all moments meet,
The daily veil that covers the sublime
In darkling glass fell dazzled at his feet.
There were no angels full of eyes and wings
Just living glory full of truth and grace.
The Love that dances at the heart of things
Shone out upon us from a human face
And to that light the light in us leaped up,
We felt it quicken somewhere deep within,
A sudden blaze of long-extinguished hope
Trembled and tingled through the tender skin.
Nor can this blackened sky, this darkened scar
Eclipse that glimpse of how things really are.
Fr. Malcolm Guite, “A Sonnet for the Feast of the Transfiguration”

Bree Snow

**An audio recording of Eliot reading “Journey of the Magi” can be found here.