The Transfiguration of our Lord Jesus Christ
Fr. Al Demos, August 6, 2017
The Transfiguration of Christ is a theophany, i.e., a manifestation of God that displays His uncreated Divine Energy. In the Transfiguration we celebrate the divinity of Christ and the call for His faithful followers to allow God to live in and enlighten their lives. The participation of the three disciples, along with Moses and Elijah, reveal to us the entire Church: the disciples representing the Church on earth and the prophets the heavenly Church. God’s covenant in the Old Testament is fulfilled in Christ. The testimony of these two prophets and three disciples is the revelation of the two natures in Christ - the divine and human; and of God in Trinity: The Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The way in which we become members of the body of Christ is through the Sacraments of Baptism and Chrismation into the Faith, in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We accept the belief in the Holy Trinity by faith alone. We have God's word through Divine Revelation that this is so. Some might say we believe in something intangible, and in a sense they could be correct. For God is beyond and above all human limitations and terminologies. One might ask, then do we deceive ourselves with these beliefs? All I know is that these divinely revealed teachings bring peace and joy to our hearts and souls. If we are in error then we will die in peace and joy. But I am sure that what you and I experience in our being comes from a power far beyond anything we could possibly summon up within ourselves. It is a peace and joy that carry with them a sense of God's presence - of God's grace - of God's love. For me, God is more real than life itself; and true life will only be realized when we are all together with God in His Divine Presence – forever and ever.
God, then, while revealing His divinity, remains incomprehensible to our human understanding! In his Commentary on the Song of Songs, St. Gregory of Nyssa speaks to us about the soul in quest of its Beloved: “It rises afresh and in the spirit passes through the intelligible and hypercosmic world, which it calls the city, where there are (angelic) Principalities, Dominions and Thrones assigned to Powers, it passes through the assembly of (these) celestial beings, which it calls the public square, and their innumerable multitudes, which it calls the way, looking to see if its Beloved is among them. In its quest it passes through the whole angelic world and as it does not find the One it seeks among the blessed ones it encounters, it says to itself: ‘Can any of these at least comprehend the One whom I love?’ But they hold their tongues at this question and by their silence make it realize that the One whom it seeks is inaccessible even to (the angelic powers). Then, having by the action of the Spirit passed through the whole of the hypercosmic city, having failed to recognize the One it desires among intelligible and incorporeal beings, and abandoning all that it finds, it recognizes the One it is seeking as the only One he does not comprehend.”[1]
We don't know historically when the belief in the resurrection occurred in Judaism; it is not in all apocalyptic writers and not universally accepted in the New Testament period. But according to one Jewish Tradition, those Rabbis who believe in the resurrection distinguish seven degrees commensurate with seven heavens. The last and highest degree is to see God.
Christ always appears’ in the fullness of His Godhead, glorified and triumphant: even in His Passion; even in the Tomb. Dead and laid in the tomb, He descends as a conqueror into Hades and destroys forever the power of the enemy. Risen and ascended to Heaven, He can be known by the Church under no other aspect than that of the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, seated at the right hand of the Father, having overthrown eternal death. The ‘historical Christ’, ‘Jesus of Nazareth’, as He appears to the eyes of alien witnesses; this image of Christ, external to the Church, is always surpassed in the fullness of the revelation given to the true witnesses, to the sons of the Church, enlightened by the Holy Spirit. (Christ's) deified humanity always assumes for the Orthodox Christian that same glorious form under which it appeared to the disciples on Mount Tabor: the humanity of the Son, manifesting forth that deity which is common to the Father and the Holy Spirit.
St. Gregory Palamas develops this teaching in relation to the question of mystical experience. The light seen by the apostles on Mount Tabor is proper to God by His nature: it is eternal, infinite, existing, outside space and time. It appeared in the Theophanies of the Old Testament as the glory of God - a terrifying and unbearable apparition to created beings, foreign and external to human nature as it was before Christ and outside the Church. That is why - according to St. Symeon the New Theologian – St. Paul, on the road to Damascus, not yet having faith in Christ, was blinded and struck down by the apparition of the divine light. Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, according to St Gregory Palamas, was able to see the light of the resurrection, which filled the tomb and rendered visible everything that she found there despite the darkness of the night. Since the ‘physical day’ had not yet illumined the earth, it was this light that enabled her to see the angels and to talk with them.
At the moment of the Incarnation, the divine light was concentrated, so to speak, in Christ, the God-Man, ‘in Whom dwells the whole fullness of the Godhead bodily’. That is to say that the humanity of Christ was deified by hypostatic union with God’s divine nature; that Christ during His earthly life always shed forth the divine light which, however, remained invisible to most men. The Transfiguration was not a phenomenon circumscribed in time and space; Christ underwent no change at that moment, even in His human nature; but a change occurred in the awareness of the apostles, who for a time received the power to see their Master as He was, resplendent in the eternal light of His Godhead. The apostles were taken out of history and given a glimpse of eternal realities. St. Gregory Palamas says, in his homily on the Transfiguration, ‘The light of our Lord’s Transfiguration had neither beginning nor end. It remained unbounded in time and space and imperceptible to the senses, although seen by bodily eyes . . . but by a change in their senses the Lord’s disciples passed from the flesh to the Spirit.’[2]
This is the new reality then - to seek to know the unknowable - while being united to God by His grace. St. Simeon often repeats, "This new reality is present in all Christians, for it is nothing other than baptismal grace. The fact that we have entered the Church by the grace of Baptism makes us members and partakers of the divine promise. We are given the opportunity to grow in the grace and love of God and thereby find eternal salvation.