Second Sunday of Lent
Transfiguration of Christ, Luca Giordano (1685).
In today’s Gospel, the endearing, ever-erring Peter infamously responds to the dazzling self-revelation of Jesus as the all-glorious Son of God, Light from Light, by offering to build Him and His friends Moses and Elijah a tent. Even if one recognizes in Peter’s words a reference to the Sukkot tradition, it’s still a somewhat humorous scene, as he is interrupted by none other than the bright cloud of God the Father who—Luke is amused to note—cast his shadow over them “while Peter was still speaking.” It’s marvelously funny, as God often is. So much so that it’s easy to miss what Peter revealed when he identified the three men he was looking at: “One for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”
Peter has never seen their faces, yet he recognizes Moses and Elijah and calls them by name. How does he know?
We have conventions that make it easy for us. In the Western artistic tradition, the players in the scene of the Transfiguration are often identifiable by their iconographic attributes: Moses, symbolic of the Law, usually holds the tablets on which he inscribed the Ten Commandments; while Elijah, representing the Prophets, might carry the scrolls of their writings if his notable cloak isn’t evidence enough. We are so used to seeing the figures positioned just so—a mountain setting with three men above and three men below—that we recognize the scene immediately, even if Peter and James and John are rendered with somewhat interchangeable faces. The focus is on Jesus’ divinity anyway, so all that fleshy human differentiation is set aside.
But Peter had no iconographic attributes to look for. He may have had his ancestors’ account of the God of Israel manifesting in cloud upon Mount Sinai to go on, but that doesn’t prepare you for the theophany actually happening to you, for the presence of God overshadowing you, for the fact of two strangers appearing beside your best friend and the instantaneous realization that these are no strangers at all.
It was not Peter’s eyes that changed, but the uncreated Light with which they suddenly saw.
In His Light, we are reconciled. In His Light, we know as we are fully known. In His Light, we see each other as we truly are and call one another by name.
The scene of the Transfiguration is meant to be a foretaste of heaven, in all its shining glory, and it is. For by the grace of our incarnate God, heaven will also be a little funny, human, real, as each of us greets the saints and prophets and patriarchs across the millennia on a first-name basis, quite casually, no standing on ceremony as we are caught up in the air, because it’s over now. The distance between us has evaporated into his bright cloud. Let us build a tent.
Catherine Addington is a novice with the Daughters of St. Paul, a religious congregation devoted to communicating Christ through modern media. She writes from Boston, MA.