The beginning of August inaugurates a series of great feasts of the Church extending into the middle of September. The first of these festivals commemorates the Transfiguration of our Lord. This strange and marvelous event is recorded in the first three Gospels, Matthew 17:1-9, Mark 9:2-9, and Luke 9:28-36. Lack of space prevents our retelling the story in any detail; those who do not remember may look it up in their Bibles. The central event in the Transfiguration is that Christ took three of His disciples aside from the main group and unexpectedly appeared to them in His glory, shining brighter than the sun. They saw Him conversing with the Old Testament prophets Moses and Elijah. Then, as abruptly as it had begun, the event was over, and the Lord, now restored to His normal appearance, warned the apostles not to tell anyone what they had seen until after His Passion and Resurrection.
The significance of the Transfiguration lies in its importance as the revelation of who Christ really was and of what that means for us. Christ shone first of all with the glory of His divinity; He revealed to His disciples as much as they could bear of His splendor as the Son and Word of the Father. He also appeared still in human form, however, because He came to share the glory of God with us, His brothers and sisters according to the flesh. The Lord came in order to reunite the fallen human race to God, and the majesty and righteousness which characterised His whole life become ours when we unite ourselves to Him. On only a few occasions, such as at His Baptism and at the Transfiguration, did He allow the true reality of His beauty to shine through. Then He shone both only with the radiance of His divinity, but He reflected that radiance in the purity of a cleansed and sanctified human nature. During most of His ministry, however, Christ’s glory was obscured because He had taken upon Himself the consequences of our fallen state and the results of our sin. Many let themselves be deceived into believing that Christ was a mere man; some were so blinded that they even considered Him an evil man, in league with Satan (Matthew 12:24; Mark 3,22; Luke 11:15). Still, His teachings and miracles made His true nature evident to anyone with the spiritual insight to appreciate their significance. The time, however, had not yet come for the Lord to reveal His full glory, both His divine nature and the redeemed human nature which He had taken up. This full revelation could happen only after He had completed His mission of salvation by dying and rising from the dead. The Gospels tell us that the Transfiguration was only a foretaste to help the disciples understand the meaning of the events to come, the Passion and the Resurrection.
Christ calls us to share His glory, to be transfigured ourselves. In the Kingdom, those who are faithful to Him will shine with a brightness greater than the angels. But, just as Christ manifested His glory even during His time on earth, before His Resurrection, so too are called by Him to manifest even in this world the glory which is ours as His followers and as members of His Church. To do this we first need to transfigure our lives. We need to strengthen and deepen our faith through fervor in prayer, the study of the Scriptures, and participation in the Sacraments. Most of all, we need to use the grace we receive from prayer, the Sacraments, the Scriptures. To do this we must pursue a thorough daily examination of our lives, to seek out the ways in which we have betrayed the name of Christian, to amend our lives through repentance, and to open our hearts and minds to the will and grace of our Master. In this way Christ transfigures us, and we come to reflect His light in the world.
What happens if we do not reveal ourselves as Christ’s faithful servants? Then we must remember that another revelation awaits us, the Judgment. In this world our true identity is often hidden. We deny or excuse our sins; we try to justify the ways we fall short of God’s glory; we pretend we have virtues we do not really possess. In this world we can often get away with this pretense. But, at the Judgment all will be made known; on that day our true selves will be revealed (Matthew 5:14; 10:26). How will we appear then? Will we shine as Christ did; will we be bathed in the beauty of a righteous life, reflecting in our pure souls the light and glory of Christ? Or will we be revealed as servants of the evil one, separated from God, trapped in eternal darkness and condemnation by our sins and our lack of repentance?
We are already writing the answer to these questions. While we may try to hide we are not always successful. Both a virtuous life and a sinful one leave their traces. Just as people even before the Resurrection could catch a glimpse of Christ’s true nature in the beauty of His teaching and the wonder of His miracles, so also our thoughts, actions and words expose to the world our true nature. What we really are can be seen in the way we speak and think and behave, in our attitudes toward others and our treatment of them, in our willingness to forgive others and our sincere effort to repent, in our devotion to the Lord and our faithfulness to His Church. What do our lives show, what are they like? Are we full of the light of faith, or are we dark with anger, envy, selfishness, lust, vanity, rebelliousness, spitefulness, indifference to the needs of others, indifference to our own spiritual needs?
Neither of these situations is completely true. Our lives in this world are not all black or white but a mix of the two; that fact makes the spiritual life a struggle. Only the grace of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit enable us to separate the two, so that the light can shine out in all its brilliance and purge away the darkness. Christ called Himself “the Light of the world” (John 8:12), and He has challenged us also to be “the light of the world” (Matthew 4:14). He is light, and He has come to fill us with light and to banish darkness from our lives and from the world around us. He has made it possible to share in His Transfiguration by practicing His love, patience, and charity. Let us then accept His gift and make His Transfiguration our own.
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