In praying with Scripture, I generally like to take a very focused approach – isolating a pericope, parable, or even a single phrase and entering into it apart from the surrounding text. But in this particular instance, what comes before and after is crucial to our understanding of Luke’s retelling of the Transfiguration and its liberative effects on our daily lives.

In the verses prior to leading Peter, John, and James “up onto a mountain to pray,” Jesus both predicts his Passion (Luke 9:22) and lays down the conditions for discipleship – primarily, that we shoulder the crosses of our lives in the work of self-denial so that we may be more available to others through God (Luke 9:23-27). He makes these claims not from the heights but from level ground, showing they are the foundational elements of our ascent to his glory, truth, and justice.

Jesus gives the disciples some time to digest this – eight days, according to Luke’s account, and six in Mark and Matthew – before guiding them on their vision quest up the slopes of Mount Tabor. Here, in the presence of their ancestors Moses and Elijah, they experience the uncreated light of God as it is filtered through creation. The fourteenth-century Byzantine Greek theologian Gregory Palmas explains how this was effected:

“[T]his Light is not a light of the senses, and those contemplating it do not simply see with sensual eyes, but rather they are changed by the power of the Divine Spirit. [The disciples] were transformed, and only in this way did they see the transformation taking place amidst the very assumption of our perishability.”

Closer to our own time, Dr. Cory Hayes teases out the subtleties of this supremely divine light, which the Orthodox Church defines as “neither a created thing, nor the essence of God, but is rather uncreated and natural grace, illumination, and energy which everlastingly and inseparably proceeds from the very essence of God”:

“[T]he Transfiguration of Christ discloses, reveals or manifests God in such a way that it is God himself that is seen or experienced in a direct way, and yet the directness of the manifestation does not compromise the transcendence of God. . . . [T]he apostles were recipients of the vision of God in this life at the Transfiguration.”

Having deepened their understanding of Christ “on the ground,” the disciples become perceivers of and partakers in what Palamas calls the “ineffable” or “inscrutable” light of the heights of the mountain. The moment is a monument to the preparatory power of prayer, where we in some way purify ourselves to receive the message of God. As the author known as A Monk of the Eastern Church writes, quoting from the Second Letter of Peter that we also read today, “The prophetic word, like the light of the Transfiguration, ‘shineth in a dark place until the day dawns, and the day star arise in your hearts.’”

For socially engaged Christians, it is this “prophetic word” that spurs us on to action and the next turn in the movement of the Transfiguration. We hear with the disciples the voice of God from the cloud that commends us to Christ, who has, in a luminous transposition, revealed to us his resurrected body before his death on the cross. He thus gives us a foretaste of the kingdom where we will greet each other in the fullness of his light, and in so doing communicates the presence of that light whenever we concede the “Christness” of the other. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, a Russian Orthodox priest, articulates how we ought to receive this revelation in a homily for the Feast of the Transfiguration:

“[I]f we attentively and seriously accept what is revealed to us here, we must change as profoundly as we can our attitude toward everything visible, toward everything tangible; not only toward humanity, not only toward [humans], but toward [our] very flesh, and not only toward human flesh, but toward everything around [us] that is physically perceptible, tangible, and visible.”

So it is that we come to the end of the reading, sharing in the stilled silence of the disciples who see “no one but Jesus standing there.” With Christ’s radiance secreted away in our hearts, we tell nothing of what we have seen, knowing that words are always secondary to actions and that actions must now proceed out of the reality that others bear the image of the resurrection within themselves. We follow Jesus down the mountain, where, as Luke tells us, he wastes no time in resuming his ministry by healing a boy with a demon.

In his Life of Moses, the fourth-century Cappadocian father St. Gregory of Nyssa writes, “He teaches, I think, by the things he did that the one who is going to associate intimately with God must go beyond all that is visible and (lifting up his own mind, as to a mountaintop, to the invisible and incomprehensible) believe that the Divine is there where the understanding does not reach.” Meditate on this quotation, particularly how you balance the “invisible and incomprehensible” attributes of God with the visible, tactile, and timebound work of social justice. How can we “lift up” our own minds while remaining anchored in a daily effort toward liberation? What does this imply about the nature of prayer? Can we touch those places “where the understanding does not reach” and let them inform our understanding of our mission here and now?

Reflection Questions

• The reading informs us that the disciples “did not at that time tell anyone what they had seen.” Is there a truth, experience, or insight that you have refrained from sharing with others? What has prevented you from doing so?
• How do you see others as bearing the image of the resurrection, and how does this change the ways you approach, listen to, and communicate with them?
• Dr. Cory Hayes writes that “human beings can experience theophany (the vision of God) with their bodies and not just their souls.” Have you ever experienced such an “embodied theophany,” either through the sacraments or by some other means? If so, what was its impact on your spiritual life?

The Leadville Trail 100 is a hundred-mile ultramarathon held every summer outside of Leadville, Colorado. The race began in 1983 as a way to draw visitors to the local community, which had been decimated by the closure of a mine that was the area’s largest employer. Participants ascend nearly 16,000 feet of elevation over the course of the race and must finish within 30 hours. Fewer than half typically do.

In 2001, race organizers founded the Leadville Trail 100 Legacy Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports the people of Leadville through scholarships, grants, and direct aid for housing and medical expenses. One of the foundation’s major fundraising efforts is the DreamChaser campaign. Local athlete and “DreamChaser” Rodrigo Jimenez starts the race in the very last place – a position that recalls Christ’s words in Matthew 20:16 that “the last will be first and the first will be last” – and secures a pledged donation for every person he passes. To date, the DreamChaser initiative has raised $972,000 for local mutual aid.

Jimenez embodies Paul’s words to Timothy: “I have competed well; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith” (2 Tim 4:7). But he is also a paragon for the Transfiguration as a model of service: running through the mountains, ascending the peaks, following the breath of the Spirit, he turns his very body into an agent of caritas or charity. His exertion becomes the vehicle by which he lifts up others, much as Christ energizes the disciples through the current of his transfigured self.