The Transfiguration of The Lord

The Transfiguration according to Matthew.

·      Any consideration of Matthew’s Transfiguration cannot ignore St. Peter’s profession of faith when he stated: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God”.[i]  And this has to be juxtaposed with Jesus’s first prophecy of his Passion: “From then onwards Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes and to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day”. [ii]

·      Putting Jesus’s identity as the Son of the Living God with his repeated claim that he was on his way to death in Jerusalem did not sit comfortably with his disciples and perhaps, not with us. Peter’s failure to accept these two aspects of Jesus’s teaching, and I imagine, he spoke for his companion disciples, provides the context for the experience on the Mount of the Transfiguration.

·      It is at this point that the homilist has a choice to make. Some commentators would see Matthew’s Transfiguration as a glimpse of future resurrection glory.[iii]That would not be my choice because it fails to take account of the link between Jesus’s divine identity and the importance of the Cross. The vision of the Transfigured Jesus is a revelation of his human and divine reality. Jesus is seen as the one who will certainly suffer and die and, while fully human, is absolutely united to the life of God. The three disciples saw the glory of Jesus as the Son of the living God, and they had to hold in challenging tension that this same Jesus would be crucified. [iv] The Transfiguration cannot be a fast track to the Resurrection bypassing the Cross. This Gospel always connects, for me, with Thomas’s insistence that he could touch the Lord’s wounds on that second Easter Sunday. Only after he had been offered that opportunity, and there is no evidence that he took it, could he profess Jesus to be his Lord and God. What is crucially at stake is the central facet of the incarnation that everything the Cross represents about broken humanity is irrevocably connected to Jesus as the Son of the Living God forever. [v]

·      Jesus’s face shining like the sun, his clothes becoming as white as light, the presence of Moses and Elijah, the high mountain, all express the truth that Jesus, who is one of us, is equally at home in the life of the Trinity.

·      Then there is Peter’s suggestion of three tents. An admirable desire to keep the experience as an abiding reality. But Peter is interrupted and ‘cut off’ while he is still speaking by the voice which urged Peter and the others to listen to Jesus. To hold together the fact that Jesus is the Son of the living God who will suffer and die. Something we know he found difficult.

Application to our lives:

·      What difference does it make to us that Jesus is truly human and truly God?

·      Jesus was on his journey to death in Jerusalem supported by his Father’s love. How can Jesus’s experience of his Father’s love give us courage on our life’s journey?

·      The abiding theme in Matthew is that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. We do not need to remain on the ‘mountain’ to experience this. He is always with us.

·      Baptism makes us members of the Body of Christ putting us on a journey of transfiguration from one degree of glory to another[vi]

·      The Transfiguration offers the homilist an eschatological dimension.

·      And our mission: to proclaim that our world and all men, women and children are on a journey towards a share in Jesus’s Transfiguration.

[i] Matthew 16.17

[ii]Matthew 16.21

[iii] Cf Daniel Harrington, The Gospel of Matthew in Sacra Pagina page 256

[iv]Cf Brendan Byrne, Lifting the Burden, Reading Matthew’s Gospel in the Church Today, pages 134-137

[v] Cf John 20.24-29

[vi] 2 Corinthians 3.18

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