On this Sunday before Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent, we tell the story of Jesus with Peter, James, and John and their experience of transfiguration. On that mountaintop, the disciples are permitted a glimpse of God’s transcendent glory on the face of Jesus, and so are shown the point of it all. For a brief moment, the veil which separates the invisible from the visible, the future from the present, is lifted, and as an old friend of mine used to say, their lives were re-figured.
I have always believed that moments of transfiguration need not be as magnificent as the one recorded in the synoptic gospels, though when such moments happen to us, we may perceive them magnificent as well. I think more often than not, what we see in “transfiguration” is some aspect of God’s full world which we do not normally see or some quality of a person’s unique spirit which breaks through in a way we have not noticed before. In the Gospel description of the transfiguration we have just such a “breaking through.” It is Christ’s unique relationship with the divine, and the ultimate destiny of his life that is brought forth on that holy mountain. The glory of God shines through his humanity. We behold it and we are strengthened—there is light we can trust no matter the hardship before us.
Pray for the grace this week to see “not with the eye, but through the eye,” as William Blake so eloquently put it, that with such vision, we live into the gifts and challenges that life presents.
O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen
— Collect for Last Sunday after the Epiphany, BCP, p. 217.
