Transfiguration

The body of Christ is the sacrament of human salvation and God’s glorification.
The liturgy creates in the Church the transfiguration of the “whole body”,
which is now growing, the transforming union in which men become God. – Fr. Jean Corbon

Today’s Feast of the transfiguration does a rare thing – it takes the place of the normal Sunday liturgy, precisely because it is a Feast of Christ. Sundays are “little Easters,” and you might say that the transfiguration is itself a little Easter, as the disciples get a foretaste of the glory that is to come.

The transfiguration – metemorphōthē in the Greek of Matthew’s Gospel – is a visible transformation of Jesus’ appearance (‘figure’) before the three ‘core team’ disciples, Peter, James and John. It stands between Jesus’ second and third predictions of the upcoming Passion, and prepares them in a stunning way to face that upcoming crisis.

In the tradition of Israel (see the first reading from Daniel), this is a full-throttle ‘theophany,’ or visible manifestation of the divine glory, on a mountain, at a crucial moment of God’s acting in history to rescue his people. As when Moses saw God in the burning bush, where God commanded him to return to Egypt to lead his people in exodus out from slavery, so now the disciples see Jesus ‘all-afire’ preparing them for the event of his New Exodus.

It is also a thoroughly trinitarian event, as the Father’s voice thunders out of the overshadowing Spirit’s “shining cloud” to express his delighted joy over the beloved Son. And it is revelatory, radiating light, deepening the disciples’ understanding that the Son is the definitive voice of the Father – “listen to him” – and that this Son is the centerpiece and interpretive key for Moses (the Law) and Elijah (the Prophets).

Jesus reveals himself on the mountain as the visible image of the invisible God, and so as a “sacrament of God” that translates, through a sign language entrusted to Israel, the plan of the Father to not only liberate humanity from its slavery to sin, but the whole created order affected by the sin of himanity. All that has been taken up into this transfiguration of the God-Man on the mountain. Christ, who has “clothed” himself in our humanity, suffuses his clothing with the uncreated divine light as a sign, symbol and sacrament. And the seven Sacraments will become the extended ‘transfiguring’ events in time and space, through the ministry of the Church, which is Christ’s body, by which both humanity and the whole cosmos will be transfigured, transformed, divinized.

Not bad for a Sunday.