+ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
“You were metamorphosed on the mountain,” we sing today in the Kontakion, “and as your disciples had room for your glory, O Christ God, they saw it, so that whenever they would see you crucified, they would know that your passion was voluntary, they would proclaim to the kosmos, that you exist truly, as the radiance of the Father.” Kontakia are the Byzantine equivalents of the Syriac memre and madrashe, the antiphonal expansions on biblical literature with theological commentary in poetic form; and like any instance of expanded, or rewritten, or commented Bible, there is something creative and original, put into the text, as well as something intuited and brought out of the text, already present within it. The Byzantine hymnographer who composed this song for the Transfiguration is seeing in the story of the Transfiguration his Trinitarian theology: Christ is himself God, the “radiance of the Father,” and the Transfiguration manifests that.
Now, when I say that the hymnographer reads this into the text, I do not thereby mean to say that it is not true: Christ is indeed God, the radiance of the Father, but of course, the Synoptic Evangelists are not Nicenes, and have had no reason to probe the mystery of the exact relationship between Christ and God as their later readers have had. For them, the heart of the Transfiguration’s message is very much in the men who appear side-by-side with Christ: Moses and Elijah. The conclusion of Elijah’s story comes in the early chapters of 2 Kings: at the end of a long and suffering career as a prophet to the Northern Kingdom of Israel, he is whisked away to heaven in a chariot of fire, and succeeded by Elisha. The end of Moses’s life in the Torah is much more ambiguous: “Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab, at the Lord’s command. He buried him in a valley in the land of Moab, opposite Beth-peor, but no one knows his burial place to this day. Moses was one hundred twenty years old when he died; his sight was unimpaired, and his vigor had not abated. The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the period of mourning for Moses was ended” (Deut 34:5-8). Modern scholars suspect that this fairly late conclusion to the life of Moses was written with a variety of ends in mind: perhaps to dispute a well-known site of Moses’s tomb, but certainly to dispute a belief a widespread belief in his deification. Despite the Deuteronomist’s best efforts in this regard, though, many Ancient Jews did believe that a variety of kinds of deification had befallen Moses at the end of his life, and that this Pentateuchal story was intended as a kind of obfuscation. Moses was transformed, depending on the text or the thinker, at the end of his life: into an angel, into a celestial form, into pure mind. And so we must assume that the Synoptic Evangelists know such traditions, for otherwise Moses’s apparition in heavenly light, at the side of the living Jesus, and the living Elijah, would make little sense.
What do these three share in common? One traditional reading, that Moses and Elijah are representatives of the Law and the Prophets, respectively, each testifying to Christ, makes little sense and betrays too great a Christian reduction of Jewish scripture. Moses, after all, is also a Prophet, and Elijah left us no written prophetic text included in the canon of the Tanakh. But both Moses and Elijah suffer great anguish for their prophetic witness to Israel, and are later vindicated by God for that suffering with divine translation (Elijah going up to heaven in a chariot of fire and whirlwind would surely have signified to the ancient reader that he had gone to live in heaven, among the gods). Another, more ancient traditional reading among Christian commentators, which notes correctly that both Moses and Elijah have theophanies on mountaintops, is more apt. While the Synoptics are not Nicene, they do, nevertheless, see Jesus as the messianic Son of Man and Son of God, God’s cosmic representative in revelation and judgment. This synkrisis of themes led some ancient Christians to see the event of the Transfiguration almost as a form of time travel: Moses on Mt. Sinai, Elijah on Mt. Horeb (a different traditional name for the mountain of the covenant), each coming forward to behold God in Christ with the disciples.
It is here that for as much as the hymnographer reads into the text he is also reading out from the text. It is surely the case that the juxtaposition of Moses, Elijah, and Jesus on the mountain tells us something about what the first two mean for understanding Jesus: Jesus, like them, is a paradigmatic prophet of Israel, and Jesus, like them, is going to suffer for it. The scene of the Transfiguration in all three Synoptic Gospels occurs just after Jesus’s inquiry as to who they think he is, and the Petrine confession: in Mark, that Jesus is the Messiah; in Matthew, that Jesus is the Messiah Son of God; and in Luke, that Jesus is the Christ of God (Mk 8:27-30; Matt 16:13-20; Lk 9:18-20). In all three, Jesus replies by telling them to shut up about it. This is the so-called Messianic Secret that immortalized the German biblical scholar William Wrede, who argued that the presence of sayings in the Gospels where Jesus dismisses or downplays the messianic identification signifies that the historical Jesus did not think of himself as a or the messiah. It is indeed true that an explicit claim to messianic identity is not a fundamental component of Jesus’s public preaching in the synagogues, villages, and countryside of Judea and Galilee, or in Jerusalem; it is true that when presented with the opportunity, by divine or human beings, to publicly demonstrate his messianism, Jesus declines.
But the Transfiguration offers us another way to understand the meaning of Jesus’s Messianic Secret, or at least his Messianic Reluctance. After this command to silence comes, in all three Gospels, the first Passion Prediction, that he will go up to Jerusalem, suffer and die at the hands of the chief priests, elders, and scribes, and rise again on the third day. It is Peter, the same Peter who confessed him messiah, who takes issue with this: presumably, Peter, like every Jew of his day, knows of many possible messiahs, but none that suffer and die and are raised again. Jesus in turn rebukes him as Satan—perhaps implicitly denying, as he did to Satan, the honor of all the kingdoms of the world that Peter now perhaps expects Jesus to take up—and follows up with two surprising logia in Mark and Matthew. First, “If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (Mk 8:34). Think of what this would have sounded like in the first century, if you can imagine: crucifixion was the Roman punishment for seditionists and insurrectionists, a brutally horrible way to die inflicted on those who dared to resist the might of the Roman machine, no matter how just, noble, or romantic their cause. Thousands of Jews were crucified in Roman Judea and Galilee during the lifetime of Jesus; thousands more were crucified throughout the Empire at large, including in Italy, where famously the slave rebellion of Spartacus, the Third Servile War of 73-71 BCE, ended with six thousand of Spartacus’s men crucified along the Appian Way. Yet Jesus tells his students that if they wish to follow him they must take up the cross: to follow Jesus is to embrace martyrdom, not to seek to circumvent it. Why? Because “those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it” (8:35). If these words go back to the historical Jesus, one wonders what he might have meant: is Jesus making a general observation about the inevitability of death for humans, and teaching us a means by which we can make use of our mortality to, paradoxically, save our lives? Or is Jesus speaking about a coming pressure, a looming tribulation, in which the nation’s crucifixion by Rome is inevitable, but martyrdom for Jesus’ sake can make it redemptive? It is not entirely clear.
What is clearer, however, is the second logion that comes hot on the heels of this one: “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Kingdom of God coming in power” (9:1). There are many scholars who see these words as, if Jesus spoke then, an indication of the imminence of his eschatological hope, and his firm belief that the Kingdom would come within his lifetime and that of his disciples, not in the distant future. That may well be, or at least have been for the early portion of Jesus’s career, which reaches its midpoint in the Synoptic narrative during these scenes. But at least as the Evangelists report to us the life, words, and deeds of Jesus, these words must be read with the awareness that Matthew, Mark, and Luke each write long after Jesus died, rose again, ascended to heaven, gave the Spirit, and was delayed in his return; they are unlikely to include a logion that would intentionally discredit what they are trying to say about Jesus, even if, perhaps (and we cannot really know) its original significance suggested his millenarian hope. Still, we might find ourselves confused: Jesus has just declared that the Son of Man is to suffer and be vindicated. So what Kingdom and what power will the disciples see?
In the Synoptic narrative, this promise is fulfilled by the Transfiguration itself. On the mountain, flanked by Moses and Elijah and transformed with heavenly light, there can be no confusion: Jesus, too, is a pivotal messenger from God who, like these past two in the covenantal history of Israel, is going to suffer horrifically and then be vindicated with divine life and light. The disciples can trust the confusing words of Jesus about his own forthcoming death and resurrection; and so they can also trust his words to them about their own summons to martyrdom. The implication is that if this is his reward, it will also be theirs. And this is in fact the quintessential hermeneutical standpoint of the earliest Jesus Movement, the apocalyptic insight into scripture that made them unique among their fellow Jews for all the things that made them consistent with the wider world of Jewish diversity in the Second Temple period: the belief that “the Christ had to suffer and then enter into his glory” (Lk 24:26). So, too, Jesus’s students will follow in his footsteps. Our Byzantine hymnographer is right, then, to connect the Transfiguration to the resurrection: Jesus himself does, after all, when he commands the disciples to keep the vision of his metamorphosis to themselves until after the Son of Man has risen from the dead (Mk 9:9; Matt 17:9; cf. Lk 9:36). At least in the Gospels, the Messianic Secret is an intentional aspect of Jesus’s messianic vocation: Jesus is not looking to appear publicly as a or the messiah. His true mission is not well-served thereby.
But we have been promised a Kingdom coming in power. The second big piece of the Transfiguration comes when Jesus, Moses, and Elijah are overshadowed by the divine glory cloud and only Jesus remains visible. A voice from heaven, a bat qol, then reaffirms: “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (Matt 17:5); in Luke, it is not the Beloved but “the Chosen.” We have not heard these words in these Gospels since Jesus’s baptism, when he received the Holy Spirit and the prophetic commission to proclaim the Kingdom of God to the synagogues and villages of Galilee after God declares him his Son (e.g., Mk 1:15). Here, too, the affirmation of Jesus as God’s Son underlines his prophetic authority: Jesus is now what Moses and Elijah were, and in some sense, Jesus’s authority as their successor now outshines theirs. The implication is not supersessionist: Jesus has not now abrogated the Mosaic Torah or the chain of prophetic authority from Ancient Israel and Judah through to the Judaism of Jesus’s day. Instead, Jesus succeeds these precedents, as the Son that God has chosen and commissioned to the task of renewing the covenant with Israel. It is also in Luke’s Gospel, after all, that we hear that what Jesus discusses with Moses and Elijah is his forthcoming exodos, or “departure,” in Jerusalem (Lk 9:31). The Synoptics want to present Jesus as God’s final prophet to Israel, the eschatological prophet and messianic king sent by God. If the baptism was Jesus’s prophetic commission, then, perhaps this is his royal commission, as M. David Litwa suggested, in which the disciples do indeed see the Kingdom of God come in power in the person of Jesus, both the messianic Son of Man who will die and rise again as well as the Son of God.
All this our hymnographer has already suggested to us: Jesus’s Transfiguration helps to explain the paschal mystery and the strange character of Jesus’s messianic commission to bring the Kingdom of God. But he or she has also intuited that the way it explains these things has something to do with Jesus’s divine identity: that is, his metamorphosis is as much a revelation, an epiphany, as it is a reassurance. I said earlier that the Evangelists are not Nicenes; this is true, but it does not mean that their vision of Jesus is not as divine, only that they do not invoke the categories or vocabularies of Christians three centuries posterior to them to evaluate the character of Jesus’s divinity. The Transfiguration is, after all, one of the most obvious points in the Synoptics where Jesus’s divinity is on display. “Son of God” is a title that for Jews, Greeks, and Romans alike entailed divine honors in the ancient world, and potentially divine status and nature in some degree; in their literature, the Mind or Reason of the universe, gods, angels, demigods and heroes, emperors and kings, divine and holy men, and individually righteous people all could be named as such. And for nearly all ancient peoples, light, phosphorescence, and radiance were fundamental qualities of divinity. Humans, bound in flesh, might be made to shine from their otherwise opaque matter by some artifice or cosmetic (oil, significantly, gave the appearance of shining by reflectivity); but only gods shine from within, and we are told that Jesus’s face and clothes do just that. The crucial distinction between the lives of Moses and Elijah and that of Jesus as revealed by the Transfiguration is that where for them divinity was the reward of grace, in Jesus’s case his divinity is already a natural fact, one beholding which now prepares the disciples to accept Christ’s Passion, his pathos, to come as “voluntary,” on the grounds that, as our hymnographer puts it, he is both God and the “radiance of the Father.”
Here a bit of explanation is in order: why should Christ’s divinity mean that the Passion is voluntary? Ancient people took a fundamental trait of the divine to be impassibility, its pure actuality and activity. The Stoics, for example, felt strongly that there were two principles in reality, the active and the passive, that which acts and that which is acted upon; matter is the passive principle, and God/logos/pneuma the active, mixed throughout matter and vivifying it as a rational animal. Middle and Late Platonists got the idea of God’s pure actuality from them, which is in turn how it became a fundamental feature of Christian theology about the divine nature. In the later Christian centuries the Theopaschite formula, that “One of the Trinity suffered in the flesh,” was intended as a way of affirming the hypostatic union of divinity and humanity in Christ’s one subsistence, beheld on the Cross.
So the Transfiguration tells us who Christ is as Israel’s final prophet and messianic king; it reveals his divinity to us, our understanding of which has evolved over time, from the textured diversity of the Second Temple period through to the Nicene synthesis; and it therefore reveals to us, keyed as it is to the events of Christ’s Passion, that he embraces his martyrdom willingly, accepting the Passion as the means of accomplishing his exodos, entering into his glory, and renewing the people of Israel: what Christ suffers his consent renders activity. It also tells us, insofar as it is a mystery reserved for after the resurrection, that our own carrying of the cross after Jesus will likewise result in our own glorification. There is yet one part of our Kontakion we have not addressed, and it is the line about the apostolic “capacity” for the divine light: they saw Christ’s “glory…as far as they had room,” as much as they could.
In these words is contained the whole of our Christianity and the mystery of faith itself. In antiquity light was considered the intellectual substance which made things sensible and intelligible, and which crafted apprehension and intellection by means of emission from the eye of the beholder and return thereto having met its target. Knower and known are united by the knowledge that light is, on this epistemology; and insofar as to be known is to be, and to be is to be known—for the Platonic tradition in particular took being and being known to be coextensive—existence and intelligibility are mutually implicative. But this also means that the inner clarity of the knower, their purification and simplification of the mind, their freedom from distraction, from the distortions of irrational craving and addiction, their intentionality in thought, is the precondition of their ability to know. If I am drunk, the distinct whatnesses of the things that appear to my sensation will perhaps not be easily distinguished; still less the syllogistic conclusions I might arrive at by deduction or the intuitive acts of immediate contemplation I might be gifted in moments of gnostic impulse. So my capacity for light as the epistemic and gnostic medium is a necessary precondition of my knowing anything. the greater my inner man’s noetic clarity, just as the greater my outer man’s visual ability, the greater my ability to know in general. Hence everything which knows by grasping the phenomenon and the essence from the phenomenon from the average child to the highest archangel participates the dyadic but unified activities of Soul and Intellect; but God, who is utterly simple and One, knows himself in a pure, immediate, eternal, comprehensive, infinite act of contemplation, the hypostasis of the Father totally transparent and receptive of the hypostasis of the Son, the Son totally indwelt by and indwelling the Father, both of them completely contained within and containing the hypostasis of the Spirit.
Jesus does not entrust all of the disciples with the vision of his metamorphosis: only Peter, James, and John, the latter two sons of Zebedee, who constitute in the Synoptics an inner circle of sorts. Peter is perhaps the most surprising, coming as he does after his own confession and then failure to understand the meaning of Jesus’s messianic identity; here, too, he mistakes the need to build booths for Moses and Elijah alongside Jesus (suggesting to some interpreters, perhaps fancifully, the notion that the vision took place around the autumnal festival of Sukkot). And the radiance of his metamorphosed face is too much for them; they are overwhelmed by his glory, sensually and intellectually. Here the mystery of the cross and the mystery of the deity of Christ intertwine: it is the katharsis, the purification of taking up the cross, that enables our phōtismos, our illumination, concerning the nature of things in being illumined about the nature of God. This, in turn, is the means of our henōsis, our unification with God: for to see God is to come to host God within our souls, in the tent of our own bodies, where we cannot help but in the act of seeing to become one with that which we see.
I can tell you without any doubt or shade of turning, beloved, that it is the vision of the Taboric light, of the “glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor 4:4), that makes Christianity worthwhile. It is the only gift in return for which what Christ asks of us is worth it. If we cannot see it—if we did once but cannot anymore, or never have—we must seek as far as we can to deepen our own capacity for that divine and deifying light. We should not feel shameful for losing sight, still less guilty or hopeless. Christ tells us not to be afraid: if our vision is obscured, it can be restored; if our light has become darkness, it can be made light again.
And so we go from this feast not at once to the Pascha of the Lord, but to the “Little Pascha” of the Dormition of the Mother of God, the end of the summer, the last festival of the Church Year, and the archetype of the hope of our translation. Let us then behold the transfigured Christ like the splendorous light of late summer, as we turn towards the great length of autumn.
Icons are some of the only ways I can grasp this moment, Transfiguration. Most of them with the wound-shaped window around Christ, perpetually opening, illuminating. Thank you for this!
I very much appreciate this meditation. The mystery of it all can be so overwhelming at times.