It was a hot summer day in the Texas Hill Country. (A hot summer day in the Hill Country is when you can fry an egg on your forehead, when streetlamps wilt like week-old flowers, and when the Devil himself says, “Forget this; I’m moving to Canada.” It was hot.) Griffin was a baby, and my parents had come to visit us in Austin. We took a day trip to the little town of Fredericksburg to visit the National Museum of the Pacific War, a seemingly odd place for a grand exhibit until one learns that Fredericksburg is the hometown of Admiral Chester Nimitz. The museum is impressive, and in addition to its indoor exhibit, there is an extensive outdoor portion arranged like an Ikea store, where you follow a lengthy path in a single direction until you come out on the other end. As we—Jill, my parents, baby Griffin in a stroller, and me—entered the maze, a burly WWII veteran was volunteering at the turnstile. He was gruff and perfunctory, but hey, he’d earned it.
The sun beat down on us like hammered gold, and within a few minutes it was impossible to enjoy the outdoor exhibit. Griffin went from being fussy to lethargic, and Jill worried about him. When we were only twenty minutes into a maze designed to last an hour or more, Jill said, “I’m going to go back through the entrance and get Griffin inside into the air conditioning.” At a double pace, she wheeled Griffin in his stroller back to the veteran at the gate. The gate had on it in large letters, “No Exit,” and this veteran, long accustomed to following orders, was not going to break them for a twenty-something mom and her baby. From the distance, my parents and I could hear snippets of the conversation: “Can’t go out this way, Ma’am…” “Too long the other way…” “I don’t make the rules…” “My baby needs to get out of this heat quickly…” “This is not an exit…”
And then, my mother, father, and I witnessed something scarcely less amazing than Peter, James, and John in today’s Gospel. Jill was transfigured before our eyes! Though she is barely five foot three on her best day, Jill suddenly seemed to tower over the veteran. Jill’s countenance blazed with something other than the Texas heat. Power emitted from her. And we weren’t the only ones who noticed. The grizzled veteran manning the gate had stormed Guadalcanal or Iwo Jima, but before my wife—no, before Griffin’s mother—he receded and cowered in fear. That vet tilted his head as if in supplication or prayer, and he dutifully opened the gate for Jill and Griffin. And my petite wife, now transmuted back to her normal countenance, took her baby and walked right through.
Today, Peter, James, and John go up Mount Tabor with Jesus. On the mountain, Mark tells us, “Jesus was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no one on earth could bleach them.”
This account is what we call the Transfiguration. The original biblical word is the Greek μεταμόρφωση, or metamorphosis. That word can be translated into any number of synonyms: transfiguration, transformation, transmutation. This last one gets the closest, perhaps, to what we have in mind when we think of the Transfiguration, because “transmutation” is the term most closely associated with the medieval practice of alchemy.
Alchemy was a broad field of endeavor, but its most well-known pursuit was the attempted transmutation of base metals to precious metals, i.e., lead into gold. The hope was to discover some catalyst that would alter the base metal’s structure and change it—metamorphosize it, transmute it, transfigure it—into something valuable, to transform one thing into something else, something better, that it was not.
Alchemy is, I think, what we carry around with us when we think about transfiguration. For instance, the most recent, pervasive use of the term “transfiguration” beyond Christianity is in the Harry Potter canon. The kids at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry take a course called “Transfiguration,” and the course description is, “A required class…Transfiguration is the art of turning one thing into another, changing the form and appearance of an object by altering its very molecular structure.”[i]
But is this in what transfiguration consists? Is this what happens at the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor? Is Jesus transmuted from being a mere human into something more, much greater and more valuable? The key to understanding is the voice of God, as God speaks to Peter, James and John. God says, “This is my son,” but we usually put the emphasis on the word “son.” If we instead emphasize the demonstrative pronoun—the “this” in God’s statement—then the reality behind the Transfiguration shifts. God is saying, “This is my son.” In other words, to Peter, James, and John who have followed Jesus down the roads of Galilee for months now, God is saying, “This is who Jesus has been all along.” On Mount Tabor, God doesn’t transmute Jesus into something or someone different. Rather, God drops the veil to allow Transfiguration Light to shine through and reveal who Jesus already and always is.
For the past seven hundred years, the Greek Orthodox tradition has held to this understanding of the Transfiguration. St. Gregory Palamas taught that God’s Transfiguration Light, which bathed Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration of Jesus, “is not something that comes to be and then vanishes, nor is it subject to the sensory faculties, although it was contemplated by corporeal eyes for a short while upon [that] inconsequential mountaintop…The initiates of the Mystery, (the disciples) of the Lord at this time passed beyond mere flesh into spirit through a transformation of their senses, effectualized within them by the Spirit.”[ii]
In other words, on Mount Tabor Transfiguration Light doesn’t change Jesus. It changes the way the disciples are able to see. The Orthodox point to other places in the bible where God illuminates the world with Transfiguration Light: the burning bush, Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus.[iii] In no instance does Transfiguration Light alter reality. Rather, in each instance, Transfiguration Light pierces the veil and reveals the Really Real that was there all along.
Friends, Transfiguration Light is not a phenomenon only of the biblical past. Now, as then, God allows Transfiguration Light to pierce our world, not to change things but to reveal them as they already truly are. Transfiguration Light transforms and illuminates our human senses so that, for a brief and blessed moment, we are able to see through illusion. We see flashes of it in those moments—few and far between and the more blessed for that fact—when the veil drops and we see God’s world as if through God’s own eyes. I’ve glimpsed it; so have you: When, in the course of an otherwise ordinary day, you are unexpectedly stopped in your tracks by something that, to anyone around you, would be unnoticeable. Sometimes you see it through another person who cannot even detect it themselves. But for you, a different light illuminates the world in that moment. It’s confusing; it throws us off kilter; it doesn’t fit with our normal vision or routine. So, we often brush it aside or hurry past so that life will return to normal.
That is not God’s counsel. At the burning bush, on the road to Damascus, on Mount Tabor, God’s counsel is always the same: The only appropriate response to the world bathed in God’s Transfiguration Light is to pause, be still, pay attention, and listen. Transfiguration Light illuminates to show us that what we think is normal is not. Transfiguration Light enlivens with wonder the world we mistakenly believe is inert. Transfiguration Light does not change the world into something invaluable; it reveals the infinite value of the world as given, a world teeming with God, incarnate with Christ.
This is the Last Sunday of Epiphany, the liturgical season all about God’s disclosure to us in infinitely myriad ways. In just a few moments, we will pray in the Eucharistic Prayer for God to “open our eyes to your hand at work in the world about us.”[iv] This day, may our added prayer be that God grant us a flash of Transfiguration Light, and when God does, God also grant the grace to pause, look, and listen for the wonder of the Real.
[i] https://www.wizardingworld.com/fact-file/magical-miscellany/transfiguration
[ii] St. Gregory Palamas, “Homily on the Transfiguration,” https://orthochristian.com/38767.html.
[iii] Exodus 3, Act 9:1-9.
[iv] Eucharistic Prayer C, BCP pg. 372.
God in the Midst of the City 