The transfiguration is a revelation of the defeat of death. Elementary observations about the event are often overlooked or unspoken.
On the mountain Moses and Elijah, dead to history, are very much alive and once again embodied. They are speaking with Jesus. This is not telepathy. Human speech requires tongues and tongues require bodies.
The disciples are witnessing not cleverly devised mythology (2 Peter 1:16), bits and pieces of the Israel story artfully arranged to reinforce pious sentiment, but a palpable experience of the resurrection amidst our death-drunk reality.
Resurrection is just outside our ken, just beyond our ability to perceive it, and yet we see here on the mountain that it is nevertheless everywhere, and near us, and greater than death.
Transfiguration shows us that resurrection is the end of all things, not death.
On the holy mountain the law and the prophets are in a conversation with their embodied human perfection, Jesus Christ, and their talk is about sacrificial love, about the “Passover” this One would “accomplish” at Jerusalem.
For a fleeting moment of “eternal now” the disciples witness the glory of what Eastern Christians call the “uncreated light” that is waiting to be unveiled everywhere and in every ordinary thing in creation, the light of resurrection.
This uncreated light reveals not the color, shape, size, and texture of a thing or a person as natural light does—this is not the direct or reflected light that causes photosynthesis or moon shadow.
No, this light discloses the goodness, beauty, and verity instilled in the tree or the tiger or the orchid or the human by God.
This unique illumination, unavailable apart from self-sacrificial love, is made possible by the profound humility of our incarnate God.
The suffering of God in the human flesh of Jesus is what fills the universe with a divine light that’s more radiant than all stars.
The universe is called out of nothing and sustained in movement and life by the triune God who gives all of himself for this cosmos they as One make, and this selflessness is what in the end illuminates everything that exists with supernatural radiance...from the inside out.
When by grace we participate in the triune selflessness by the Spirit, we inherit the permanence that God is by nature; we become one with the Father who by the Son said “Let light shine out of the darkness.”
This is the light that shines from the face of Moses; that envelopes the chariots of fire that carry Elijah beyond the sight of Elisha; that radiates in the cloud that descends on Tabor.
Our Father has “made this light shine in our hearts so that we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ, his Son” (2 Corinthians 4:6).
And from this human and divine face, shining like the sun in full strength, everything in creation will in the end be transfigured by light, a consuming fire which reveals the true essence of all things, and redeems further still beyond all original goodness, heals from every participation in evil, elevates to participation in the divine nature.
The Transfiguration shows us that love is a conversation, a conversation that brings Elijah down from heaven and raises up Moses from the ground, a conversation that brings heaven and earth together in the resurrection.
This conversation invites us (like Peter, with all our misunderstandings, sins, and frailties) into the eternal discussion that is the divine life shared between the Father, Son, and Spirit.
And what is the conversation that Love speaks? What are Moses and Elijah talking about with Jesus?
Love talks always and everywhere about the cross, about the suffering of God in the flesh of Jesus that makes us heirs with the One who has the words of life, words about “a sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel” (John 6:68; Hebrews 12:24).
Moses, Elijah, and Jesus are talking about the cross because “where there are no graves there are no resurrections” (Nietzsche).
Graveyards and tombstones are all that we now know but here is a sacred conversation that tells us that death dies; that death is trampled down by death.
“To preach the word of the cross seems like sheer nonsense to those who are on their way to destruction, but to us who are on our way to salvation, it is the mighty power of God *released within us*” (1 Corinthians 1:18).
This word of the cross is a far superior, more life-granting conversation than the one that takes place on social media, on broadcast news programs, and on talk radio—a far more fruitful conversation than our present one, driven by political partisans, corporate commissars, and conspiracy daydreamers.
The glory on this mountain is in speaking well of the cross, telling of a suffering pain that heals and does not destroy God or humanity, because Love is stronger than death.
Once again, in case we cannot yet hear the song of creation: the Transfiguration reveals a divine conversation, the conversation about self-sacrificial love that the triune God forever is.
A light-radiant cloud descends on Tabor, the same cloud that descends on Sinai when God signs his law on stone tablets, the pillar of cloud that follows and defends the children of Israel in the wilderness.
The self-same cloud that fills the temple when the musicians play and sing praise to the God who is good, who’s mercy endures forever and ever.
When later Isaiah envisions the Lord ascended on a throne (and this God’s only throne is a cross), as the six-wingéd seraph fill the air with their thrice-sung “holies,” like the train of his billowing robe, the interior of the temple is filled with this cloud.
This cloud is the Spirit.
And here on Tabor, from deep in the light-radiant cloud, comes the voice of the Father, “This is my Son, marked by my love; listen to him.”
Moses and Elijah fade from view, and heeding the Father’s voice, we now only read their Scriptures in light of this human who is God, we only see Jesus on the pages of Scripture.
The Scriptures are veiled for those who don’t begin their experience and witness of God with Mary’s son, with the one who the people of God rejected for a criminal, the one who dines with sinners, who touches the unclean, the one who never kills or destroys, this transfigured one who instead raises the dead and rebuilds the world.
Jesus is the human God intends from the beginning and therefore he is the truest self of every human, not our ancestor Adam.
Pride is not your truest self, humility is what you were made to embody; hate is not the essence of your person, love is what you forever are.
You were made to incarnate the divine disposition that Jesus reveals, one of service to every creature in this grand and beautiful cosmos he loves more than his own life.
This moment on the mountain reveals the truth about every person and that truth is that the sacred life of Jesus is now the measure and the meaning of human nature.
Transfiguration folds time, brings disparate events together, for this is not just a real moment between Moses, Elijah and Jesus, and between the disciples and the triune Love; it’s not just this actual historic moment on Tabor where a resurrected humanity communes with the divine life.
This moment also reveals the encounter with Moses and the triune Love on Sinai, and later on Sinai, Elijah’s encounter with the one God, who is not present in the earthquake or the fire or the mighty wind but in a still small voice.
This moment on Tabor participates also in the moment where John encounters this still small voice as the figure walking amid the seven-branched Menorah in the opening of the Apocalypse.
Here at the outset of Revelation the description of Jesus is nothing but a composite of all the descriptions of the Transfiguration in Matthew, Mark, and Luke.
This One, transfigured by the uncreated light of heaven, this revelation in human flesh of the conversation that the triune God is, lays his right hand on John—and in Matthew’s account on Peter, James, and John—and on everyone in this room, and on every human who has ever lived or ever will live, and this is what Jesus Christ says: “Fear not, I am the first and the last, and the living one; I died, and behold I am alive for evermore, and I have the keys of Death and Hades” (Revelation 1:17-18).
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