Transfiguration, a Pre-Resurrection Sign

Last Epiphany C March 2, 2025
Exodus 34:29-35 Ps. 99
2 Corinthians 3:12-4:2 Luke 9:28-36 

Lectionary Link

The New Testament word for transfiguration is the Greek word from which our English word metamorphosis derives.

We learned this word in elementary school when we studied the life cycles of butterflies and moths.  By appearance, an egg, caterpillar, chrysalis, and butterfly seem significantly different, but in fact they are only phases of the same being.  They undergo such dramatic changes that if one did not witness the changes while they happened one might say that there is a complete discontinuity between the phases.

We in our human life cycle observe the phases of human life and they too are different.  Photographs taken at different times in the span of one's life could not be proof knowing that such pictures were of the same person.  How many babies could even be identified from their sonograms?  There is apparently significant discontinuities between how people appear at different times in our life.

One of the great mysteries of human life concerns imagination and speculation about the phase of human life that we designate as the afterlife.  We presume to be superior to butterflies.  We can note that butterflies leave their objective immortality behind in the eggs which they lay for the next generation of butterflies, but their beautiful butterfly phase does not have an afterlife, except as their wings and bodies decay and transform to something else.  Humanly speaking with human presumptions about our anthropocentric importance, we love and cherish our butterfly phase so much that we would hope that this phase of how we have been constituted would have continuity beyond the grave.

The belief in the life of human metamorphosis including post-life continuity phase or phases became articulated in the New Testament writings as the way to cope with the greatest apparent discontinuity that we know in human existence, namely, death itself.

Can death be the cessation of all continuity of a being with itself?  Will I have continuity in my afterlife with the person whom I know myself to be now?

I would submit that the account of the Transfiguration, in being identified as the Light shining within Jesus, was given as a pre-Resurrection sign in the life of Jesus as he was making his metamorphosis toward death and his re-appearances in significantly different presentations in his afterlives.  Why his afterlives?  His reappearances were different for different people, because they were tailored to the experiences of the people who experienced him in his afterlife phases.

St. Paul might be one who most poignantly wrote about the transfiguration feature of the life of Christ, or the afterlives of the Risen Christ within the lives of those who experienced one of those appearances.

St. Paul said that the Risen Christ was revealed, not to him, but in him.  This indwelling Christ was the light and the energy and the down payment proof of the future resurrection of his spiritual body.  This Indwelling Risen Christ was the energy of the metamorphosis, the transforming, and transfiguring which was happening within Paul and all who invited this indwelling Risen Christ to be known within them.

St. Paul promoted this notion of transfiguration in life in his mystagogy.  He wrote that Christ was within us as the hope of glory, that is being transfigured by the holy presence of the Spirit and Lord of life.

The mystagogy of transfiguration came to be presented in the phases of the life of Jesus of Nazareth.  The story of the Transfiguration of Jesus was a presentation of Jesus meeting two other persons who had transfiguring events on mountains, Moses and Elijah.  Moses received the law on Mount Sinai and his face shone with a glow from having been within the cloudy and blazing presence of God.  Elijah experienced the fire from heaven on Mount Carmel.  These mountain events were mid-career events for Moses and Elijah and punctuated their prophetic importance, as well as their re-appearance in the apocalyptic fervor which so dominated the religious context of the Jews during the time of Jesus.  Moses and Elijah appeared on the mount of the Transfiguration to fulfill their apocalyptic roles and affirm Jesus as the logical successor in the train of the law and the prophets.  Jesus was an ending and a beginning; ending of a phase of the law and the prophets, and the beginning of a significant new way for God to be manifestly known to more people in the world.

The Gospels present the transfiguration phases of the life of Jesus as mystical teaching for us anticipate transfiguration energy in our lives which counters the devolving process of the apparent entropy which ends in death.  Just as the transfiguration was a sign of the ultimate triumph of the inward life Jesus in his resurrection reappearances, so too, the Holy Spirit is the sign of the counter life to the entropy of death which will result in our afterlives as our future selves, beyond our selves that we know in this life.

Let us accept the hope narrative of the transfiguration as we defy the seeming demise of our earthly appearances, with vision of what the hope implant within us might ultimately be.

Jesus was transfigured, so that we too might embrace the transfigured life as proof that energy never dies, it only undergoes constant change.  Today, let us embrace with the faith of the transfiguration life and ponder what we might yet be in our future.  Amen.