TRANSFIGURATION. The appearing of the Lord in glory during His earthly life, related in the first three Gospels (Mt. 17:1–13, Mk. 9:2–13, Lk. 9:28–36), and alluded to in 2 Pet. 1:16–18. This vision of the Lord, transfigured, with Moses and Elijah, was witnessed by Sts Peter, James, and John, and is described by the Evangelists as a historic event.

In the Book of Enoch the adjectives used by the Evangelists to describe the transfigured Christ is associated with the Divine Presence and the Celestial Throne. The event was significant as showing the testimony of the Jewish Law and Prophets to the Messiahship of Christ, as furnishing a further Divine proclamation of His Sonship, and as foreshadowing His future glory. In patristic theology it also foreshadows the future glory of the People of God.

The Feast of the Transfiguration is observed on 6 Aug. It originated in the Eastern Church, where it appears to have been at first a local and unofficial feast, but it had become widely adopted before 1000 AD. In the West Peter the Venerable wrote an extensive homily on the Transfiguration and urged the observance of the feast at Cluny and more widely in the West; howevere, its general observance in the West goes back to 1457, when Callistus III ordered its universal celebration in commemoration of the victory gained over the Turks at Belgrade on 22 July 1456, news of which reached Rome on 6 Aug

G. H. Boobyer, St Mark and the Transfiguration Story (1942); H. Riesenfeld, Jésus transfiguré: L’ Arrière-plan du récit évangélique de la transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur (Acta Seminarii Neotestamentici Upsaliensis, 16; 1947); A. M. Ramsey, The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ (1949); H. Baltensweiler, Die Verklärung Jesu (Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments, 33; 1959); J. A. McGuckin, The Transfiguration of Christ in Scripture and Tradition (Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity, 9; Lewiston, NY [1986]), incl. Eng. tr. of relevant texts from the Fathers; B. E. Reid, OP, The Transfiguration: A Source-and Redaction-Critical Study of Luke 9:28–36 (Cahiers de la Revue Biblique, 32; 1993). J. P. Heil, The Transfiguration of Jesus (Analecta Biblica, 144; 2000). R. W. Pfaff, New Liturgical Feasts in Later Medieval England (Oxford, 1970), pp. 13–39.

 (Eph 1:3-12 RSV)

 Jesus’ transfiguration[1] is likewise, in its indissoluble tension between old covenant and parousía, and because of its increasingly clear reference to the coming Passion, ultimately to be seen as testimony to the hiddenness of the glory. The numerous riddles and seams that are present already in the text of Mark are not removed satisfactorily by any analysis of the sources that would go behind Mark. It must be accepted that the kernel is an epiphany in a sublime event which has itself generated the development of the references back to the old covenant—to apocalyptic, to Elijah, and to Sinai —and the prospect of the end-time (both to the suffering and to the parousía, seen in unity with the Resurrection). The attempt to disentangle from this husk the event that has been formulated in this way with reference to the whole of the Bible and to explain it on its own—as an historical psychological experience of Jesus,[2] or as a visionary experience of the disciples[3] leads nowhere.[4] The strong Old Testament colouring, and the lack of references to a perceptible δόξα in the accounts of the appearances of the risen Lord, exclude the possibility that what we have is an original Easter narrative projected back into a time before Easter.[5] One can identify the immediacy and what we might call the vertical character of the event most precisely because it is expressed from the beginning in an apocalyptic scheme of expression that was first prepared by the visions of Daniel and then utilised further, as M. Sabbe has shοwn.[6] The apparition of light in heaven, shining garments, falling to the ground in fear, hearing the heavenly voice, being touched by a hand that comforts and strengthens, the command to keep silence: all these elements are found in Daniel and are taken up in Rev 1.12-16 together with other details of apocalyptic.[7] However, the apocalyptic framework provides nothing more than the form of a vertical penetration of temporality into what lies ‘above’, into the timeless and true world of God that has become open for a moment; at most, it has also provided the reference to the (imminent) eschatological future that is anticipated in the apocalypses. However, nothing in the scene of the transfiguration entitles us to speak of an ‘enthronement’ of Jesus as the coming (Danielle) Son of Man.[8]  Rather, the reference to the future that the transfiguration possesses now, appropriately, directs our gaze to Jesus’ ‘departure’ (ἔξoδoς, Lk 9.31) with a freshness of vision in which the suffering, the Resurrection and the second coming are interwoven and not yet differentiated: together, they are the apocalyptic breaking-in of the new age, which is now—vertically—present in Heaven. Nevertheless, the apocalyptic imagery remains only a framework: the decisive contents are provided by the original Mosaic tradition of the kabod. The cloud of the kabod, from which God’s voice resounds, comes down as a tent already in Mark (ἐπισκιάζειν, Mk 9.7 = Mt 17.5 = Lk 9.34), and is appropriately made clearer in Matthew as a ‘cloud of light’, because the light of the glory was within the cloud;[9] at Ex 40.35, ἐπισκιάζειν is the translation of Sakan, to ‘dwell in a tent’; further references to Sinai are the ascent of a ‘high mountain’ and the descent (Mark, Matthew; 2 Pet 1.18: ‘holy mountain’), with three disciples identified by their names (cf Ex 24.1,9); the radiance of Christ’s face (Matthew, cf 2 Cor 4.6) can be a reminiscence of Moses’ face which shone with the reflection of the glory as he descended, while the huts that Peter wishes to build echo the feast of tabernacles and its memorial of the giving of the covenant; and perhaps the six days, which Mark mentions in a puzzling way when he dates the transfiguration, may be an allusion to Ex 24.16. Should one therefore posit as the original kernel a repetition of the epiphany on Sinai, in which Jesus is proclaimed as the new Moses and the Messiah?[10] But nothing permits us to detach such a kernel from the apocalyptic formulation. Rather, the original kabod tradition appears from the beginning as taken up into its late prophetic-apocalyptic form, and it may be significant here that Mark will speak of the appearance of ‘Elijah with Moses’[11] The path leads up from Sinai, by way of Elijah, to Daniel and thus to an imminent future that is already present in a hidden manner; thus (presumably in the course of redaction) the event of the transfiguration can be linked as closely as possible to the coming suffering. There certainly exists (especially in Mark) a close link between Peter’s confession at Mk 8.29 and the proclamation made by the heavenly voice at 9.7; Matthew clarifies this with the statement that Peter’s confession too was inspired by the Father in Heaven (16.17). But the disciple’s profession of faith becomes the occasion for the first prophecy of suffering, which is immediately followed by a second prediction after the descent from the mountain (and the healing of the epileptic boy); between Peter’s profession and the transfiguration comes the discourse about discipleship with two logia about the coming of the Son of Man ‘in the glory of his Father’ (Mt 16.27) and the coming ‘in his kingdom’ that is soon to be seen by some of those present (16.28). The second logion will have been given this position because of the transfiguration which comes next; the first speaks of the Danielic Son of Man, who will be seen proleptically in the vision of the transfiguration, Mark and Matthew place the discussion about Elijah (who is to return, or has already come as the Baptist) during the descent from the mountain: here Elijah becomes completely the precursor of the suffering Jesus. Matthew develops the open statement of this form from the somewhat obscure statement in Mark (Mt 17.12).

This movement of thought is present in all the narratives, and Luke does no more than expose it clearly when he defines the Old Testament theophany evoked here by means of the expression δόξα (glory). The two men who belong to the divine sphere appear ‘in glory’, and Jesus is not merely lit up by this glory from outside himself, nor introduced into it: it is his own glory (‘when they awoke, they saw his glory’: Lk 9.32). This had been prepared by Matthew, where it is not only the garments of Jesus that are radiant (as at Mk 9.3), but his face that shines like the sun (Mt 17.2); but the Lucan clarification is fundamentally present already in the concept of transfiguration, which he—unlike Mark and Matthew—does not employ. The second clarification in Luke points towards the suffering, which now forms the contents of the ‘conversation’, already mentioned by Mark and Matthew, between Jesus and the heavenly figures. And the cloud of the kabod, which finally encloses the three and withdraws them from sight, is a darkness that bears a coming night in its womb, since it is the same three disciples who will be witnesses on the Mount of Olives of the object of the conversation on the mountains of transfiguration. The formulation of the voice of God follows schematic patterns; quotations from the Bible obviously cannot reproduce what the voice of the Father actually said. It is probably put together from Is 42.1[12] and Deut 18.15, like the voice at the baptism; but here, it is clearly the disciples who are addressed, and in the redactional context it is unmistakable that the reference is to the Son as the one chosen to suffer, the one whose Life is orientated towards his coming suffering. From this perspective, it is not easy to interpret the command, found in all the Synoptists, to silence: is it only three of the disciples who are to profit from the divine confirmation of the coming suffering?[13] Is it the Marcan ‘messianic secret’ at work here in shaping the narrative, or (more probably) the older Danielic scheme of the sealing of the secret (Dan 8.26; 12.4)? But the reference forward to the Mount of Olives also shows the validity in the New Testament of an understanding of the mysteries of the Passion, and an initiation into these, that go by stages. These stages run from the confirmatory voice of the Father, via Moses and Elijah who give the explanation that points to the Passion (‘they told’ him ‘about his departure in Jerusalem’, Lk 9.31), to Jesus himself, who knows about ‘what has to be fulfilled’, to the three who are witnesses to the prophecy but do not understand adequately, and finally to the rest, who here are waiting at the foot of the mountain and later will wait outside the garden.

The astonishing thing about the transfiguration is that, in this night on the high mountain,[14] the ever elusive doxa of the Old Testament becomes present for a moment in all its stages and forms, and attains its immediate fulfilment in its Old Testament form in Jesus and at the heart of his prayer to the Father—not as in John, where the glory as it were goes beyond itself and is dissolved into this relationship so that the entire existence of Jesus is a more or less concealed or open glory; and an individual transfiguration scene becomes superfluous; but in such a way that the intermediary stage becomes visible, the moment in which the Old Testament glory concentrates itself in a single point, so that it may enter and cross over into the glory of the New Testament. But this gathering together of scattered elements from Sinai via Elijah to Daniel is at the same time their concentration to form an arrow that now points straight at the final goal: the unity of the Cross and the parousia. What was said above about the double temporal horizon of Jesus must be kept in view here: the Cross is the end of the world, and what lies beyond it is the parousia. The transfiguration of the earthly Jesus, of his earthly clothes and in some manner of the world upon which he shines, is the promise and first instalment of the eschatological transformation of the world as a whole,[15] and for Paul this truly begins with the living of the Christian life—as a reflection of the glory of Christ—in a way that is both invisible and visible (2 Cor 3). But all this takes place in the deepest concealment—in Luke, in a scenario that is strangely close to that of the temptation on the Mount of Olives[16] far from men, before three witnesses who are half asleep and who must seal up in strict silence what they have seen. It is only right at the end of the apostolic period that, drawing on two allusions of the First Letter of Peter (1 Pet 5.1; 1.11), the Second Letter will draw the event forth from its concealment and make of it ocular testimony to the eschatological glory that is still to come (2 Pet 1.16­18);[17] but this account of a pseudonymous ‘eye-witness’ has somehow gone back into apocalyptic in its ‘disclosure’, and is en route to the gnostic uses of the event that are found in the apocryphal literature).[18]

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