While Jesus was praying up a mountain, his face changed in appearance and his clothing became dazzling white. The Church today remembers an event of great importance that took place in the life of Jesus: the transfiguration. According to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, at some point in the course of Jesus’ ministry, Jesus took with him three of his disciples and led them up a high mountain in order to pray. And as the four were praying, the appearance of Jesus suddenly changed. His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as snow. To cap it all, Moses and Elijah appeared in glory and conversed with Jesus. It must have been a life-transforming moment in the lives of the three disciples who were present. Peter even points to the event as proof that their message is prophetic and their movement authentic.
The transfiguration of Jesus is one of those events that afforded the disciples a rare glimpse into what the divinity of Jesus entailed. In addition to anticipating the Father’s glory with which Jesus will come at the end of the ages, the transfiguration was also a vindication of Jesus’ sonship. Not everybody had come to accept Jesus as the Son of God and as the long-awaited Messiah. There were those who still saw in Jesus an impostor, a position that would gather momentum shortly in in Jerusalem as Jesus would be arrested, persecuted and crucified. This connection between the event of the transfiguration and the passion becomes even more apparent if we consider the fact that in the three synoptic gospels, the transfiguration takes place immediately after the first prophecy of the impending passion in Jerusalem. And in the Lukan account, we are told that the content of the conversation between Jesus and his two guests (Moses and Elijah) was his upcoming passion.
In the first prediction of the passion, Jesus rebukes Peter for praying that he (Jesus) be preserved from the impending passion (cf. Mark 8:31-33; Matthew 16:21-23). The event of the transfiguration which takes place six days later has thus been understood as providing further clarification to Peter (and the others) on why Jesus could not be “preserved” from the passion. It was through the passion that Jesus’ full glory would be revealed. Jesus’ crucifixion and death, far from marking an end to Jesus’ ministry, was instead going to be the apex of Jesus’ mission. Jesus’ passion was going to culminate in the resurrection, the greatest event in the history of the universe.
In addition to the change in appearance of Jesus, there are two other important things that took place on that mountain: the vision of Moses and Elijah having a conversation with Jesus, and a voice from heaven proclaiming Jesus as God’s beloved. The appearance of Moses and Elijah, representatives of the law and the prophets, affirms that Jesus’ ministry is a continuation of the prophetic mission of Israel. In the proclamation from the heavens, God adopts Jesus for the second time (the first one being at the baptism) and presents him as a role model to be emulated and listened to. The voice not only vindicates Jesus and his mission but also reminds us that it is in Jesus that God re-creates and begets us as God’s beloved. All that is required of us is to pay close attention to Jesus.