We have a relatively rare gift this year with the celebration of the Transfiguration on Sunday. This feast falls in the calendar every year, but the place where most people are likely to hear the gospel of the Transfiguration in the modern Roman Rite is the Second Sunday of Lent, where the story begins to set us up, much like how it does in the Gospels, for the events of Holy Week.
But the focus today has a different tone, supplemented by readings from Daniel and 2 Peter emphasizing the awesome majesty and glory of God. This is not merely a way of preparing us for the suffering to come, but is itself a glimpse of our heavenly vocation and of the true incomprehensible brilliance of the Incarnation.
First, in Daniel, we hear the vision of the “Ancient of Days.” His raiment is “white as snow,” his throne is “fiery flames.”
Theologians—and I’m one of them—are often suspicious of artistic representations of God the Father. Traditionally he is, as the transcendent source of divinity, undepictable. Only God the Son became incarnate and therefore capable of visible representation. Yet many of the artistic traditions, especially in the West, draw on this scene in Daniel, so the depictions are usually not of God the Father, per se, but of this image—which is depictable, because Daniel saw it—of the “Ancient of Days,” a figure expressing not so much what God the Father actually looks like, but something giving us some visual hints as to his attributes and his nature.
The key thing in Daniel, for our purposes today, is that this “Ancient One,” resplendent with all glory and power, shares his power and authority with the “Son of Man.” Certainly we don’t have in Daniel a full explanation of the Trinity, but we definitely have a warrant, picked up immediately by the early Church, for the compatibility of God’s Trinity with what we know about him under the Old Covenant.
This glorious Son of Man, St. Peter tells us, is the source of our faith. We do not follow “cleverly devised myths”; we follow God himself, who on the mountain revealed himself to Peter, James, and John. This particular revelation was, at the moment, private, but its contents are revealed by the holy apostles later as further testament to the events of the Resurrection.
Christianity has always centered on public events, not secret histories. Though as Catholics we have no doubt that God and his saints can continue to speak to people directly, such revelations are always subject to the judgment and the standard of what has been known publicly. That is an especially crucial reminder in these days, when any number of figures love to go around proclaiming that this or that thing is “of the Holy Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is and has always been the Spirit of God revealed in Jesus Christ. His message to us is exactly what the Father reveals at the Transfiguration: “Listen to him.”
Peter tells us that the words of the Lord are like “a lamp shining in a dark place,” guiding us “until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.” The next phrase, sadly cut from the lectionary, provides a caution against private interpretation: “No prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation.” In other words, the apostolic tradition—that personal continuity going back to the eyewitnesses to glory—is the authentic interpreter of the revelation represented by Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets. We see in the twenty-first century what happens when everyone thinks he can simply read Scripture on his own apart from the Church: we end up with a thousand different churches, each claiming to possess the authentic word of truth.
Unfortunately, this isn’t completely new. Surely Peter mentions it because it is a live concern even in the first century. By the early second century, we see St. Ignatius of Antioch insisting that we cannot claim to follow the apostolic faith if we do so apart from the apostolic ministry of the bishops. Why do we continue falling into this habit?
Well, what is the first word of Jesus after the divine voice instructs us to listen to him? “Rise, and do not be afraid.” How much of our division and distraction is driven by fear? Not legitimate fear—not what Scripture describes as the “fear of the Lord,” which is a proper awe in the face of transcendence—nor the proper fear that we describe in the classic act of contrition, the “dread” of the pains of hell and the loss of heaven. This is the fear of losing things that were never ours to begin with (which is basically everything); the fear of being wrong about something and having to repent; the fear of not getting everything we want; the fear of being despised or rejected by the same world that despised and rejected Christ.
The modern world is built on fear. Contemporary politics is built on fear and anxiety. It’s hard to imagine an alternative.
Many of the divisive tendencies of this and every age have focused on giving in to this or that fear and finding a solution. Yet the gospel suggests to us that the only real way out of fear is not finding some worldly solution, but rather finding a way to worship the transcendent God here and now. The liturgical tradition of the Church is, I would argue, the apostolic response to worldly anxiety. We will never learn true peace until we encounter the glory to which we are called. And the only way of encountering that glory is through worship.
In his gloss on the Transfiguration, St. Chrysostom writes, “But if we will, we also shall behold Christ, not as they then on the mount, but in far greater brightness. For not thus shall he come hereafter. For whereas then, to spare his disciples, he discovered so much only of his brightness as they were able to bear; hereafter he shall come in the very glory of the Father, not with Moses and Elias only, but with the infinite host of the angels, with the archangels, with the cherubim, with those infinite tribes, not having a cloud over his head, but even heaven itself being folded up.” In the Mass we join with those hosts of angels; we lift our hearts to heaven. And the joys of heaven can teach us what it looks like to be free of the fears and anxieties of the world.