The Transfiguration

The world around us has a good idea of what it thinks glory is. Most of the time it is seen as human success and triumph. Just think of people winning a gold medal at the Olympics, people waving flags and making lots of noise, open-topped buses, parades, and the like. God’s idea of glory is something entirely different. In fact, it is the exact opposite of human glory. We will see God’s Glory today on three high places: Mt Sinai, Mt Tabor, and on the hill of Calvary.

We visit the first of these high places in our first reading from the Book of Exodus. Moses goes up Mount Sinai to receive the Law, the Ten Commandments, God’s rules to show Israel both what to believe and how to live, just as Jesus will later teach in the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount. Moses spends time in the close presence of God, and this changes him. When he comes back down the mountain we learn that he is shining, he has been transformed and transfigured by his close encounter with the Divine. It is an experience which takes time, it doesn’t happen instantly. God tells Moses to come up the mountain and wait. The Patriarch waits six days before being invited to climb up further. Moses spends forty days on the mountain, which prefigures Our Lord’s forty days in the wilderness before the start of his public ministry and our own forty days of Lent.

In the passage from Book of Exodus we see a glimpse of the glory of God and the worship of heaven. It is the same glory that the Apostles see in the Transfiguration, recorded by Luke. This is a glimpse of heaven, a foretaste for us of what Christ gives us His Church. The glory of the Transfiguration is something which the Second Letter of Peter stresses. As Christians we do not follow a false or made-up religion — it is not a work of fiction. It is a life-changing reality. Through spending time with Jesus, the disciples such as St Peter, saw their own lives transfigured and transformed by the power and the love of God.

Jesus has been with the disciples in the Jezreel Valley in Galilee and this morning He goes up Mt Tabor and takes his closest disciples with him to show them something of the glory of God. He ascends the mountain to pray, to be alone with God the Father. Jesus’ public ministry was rooted in prayer, in being close to the Father, in listening and speaking with Him. As Christians we are to follow this example, and do likewise.

Jesus appears with Moses and Elijah to show His disciples and the Church that He is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets. They point to Him and they find their fulfilment in Him: He is the Messiah, the Son of God. Peter makes a very human response. He knows that it is good to be here and that what he is experiencing is life-changing. Peter’s suggestion to make three booths points to the Feast of Tabernacles when Jews remembered the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt Sinai. But, despite Peter’s hope, this experience is not to be prolonged. This is just a glimpse of the future glory, a moment to be experienced, and not a place to dwell.

When God speaks He tells us three things about Jesus: first that He is the Son of God, secondly that He is loved, and thirdly that we should listen to Him. What Jesus says and does should affect us and our lives. Like Moses and the disciples, we have to be open to the possibility of being radically changed by God.

Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone about this until after he has risen from the dead. Jesus has another height He must climb: the hill of Calvary, where He will suffer and die upon the Cross. There He takes our sins upon Himself, restoring our relationship with God and each other. This is real glory – not worldly glory but the glory of God’s sacrificial love poured out on the world to heal and restore it.

“Three important scenes of Our Lord’s life took place on mountains. On one, He preached the Beatitudes, the practice of which would bring a Cross from the world; on the second, He showed the glory that lay beyond the Cross; and on the third, He offered Himself in death as a prelude to His glory and that of all who would believe in His name”

Fulton Sheen The Life of Christ 1970: 158

We are here this morning to see the self same sacrifice with our own eyes, and to touch and taste what God’s love is really like. We go up the mountain of the altar and experience the glory of God, so that God’s love may change us. We are given a foretaste of heaven, and prepared to be changed by God. This is true glory – the glory of the Cross, the glory of suffering love lavished upon the world. 

The Transfiguration looks to the Cross to help us prepare ourselves to live the life of faith. It helps us to comprehend true majesty, true love and true glory. The wonderful glory that can change the world and which lasts forever, for eternity, unlike the fading glory of the world, which is here today and gone tomorrow.

So let us behold God’s glory, here, this morning. Let us touch and taste God’s glory. Let us prepare to be transformed by His love, through the power of His Holy Spirit, so that we may be built up as living stones, into a temple to God’s glory. That we may be healed, and restored, and given a foretaste of eternal life. May God take our lives and transform us, so that everything that we say, or think, or do, proclaims Him. Let us tell the world about Him, so that all people may believe and trust and have new life in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, to whom be ascribed, as is most right and just, all might, majesty, glory, dominion, and power, now and forever.