Glory on the Mountain

Before he began his public ministry, Jesus dismissed Satan's initial temptation with a simple quote from the book of Deuteronomy, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Today's feast day takes us high up a mountain, where the word from the mouth of God is: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him.”

But it wasn't only a matter of words on the mountain. That message came with a demonstration of transcendent power. With their own eyes, the apostles saw Jesus as “the Word of Life that was with the Father and was made visible” (cf. 1 Jn 1:1-2). The glory on the mountain tells us what Jesus knew (and lived) all along: The transcendent dimension of existence is far vaster than the aspects we see and experience through our ordinary senses. Maybe that is why it was precisely Moses and Elijah who were there. In addition to representing the Law and the Prophets, both of these prophetic leaders encountered God in a mysteriously hidden presence (remember the “tiny whispering sound” Elijah heard in the cave on Mt Sinai?).

Jesus lived this way: He was not dominated by societal expectations or threatened by disapproval or intimidated by the risk of imprisonment—or crucifixion, a cruelty that the Romans seemingly didn't have the imagination to invent (they adopted it from the Persians). Knowledge of the Father's ever-present faithfulness was the secret of the freedom which allowed him to continue his mission at the cost of his life (we'll celebrate the Exaltation of the Cross in just over a month). For us, it is the confident hope of heaven, the revelation, as if on the mountain with Jesus, of a reality that has been here all along, even if unseen. For the Coptic Christians martyred in 2015, it was no different: They died calling on the Lord as someone present, active, listening, ready to welcome them “from shadows into truth” (as Blessed Cardinal Newman put it).

The Transfiguration was to strengthen the apostles for the coming scandal of the Cross. It can do the same for us when our faith is shaken by suffering or injustice, assuring us that there is much more reality present than we perhaps can bear: “We are God's children now; what we shall later be has not yet come to light. We know...we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is” (1 Jn 3:2).