The fullness of love both human and divine

SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT [C] | 16 MARCH 2025 | LUKE 9:28-36

Though the Feast of the Transfiguration on 6 August has been celebrated in the East since the sixth century, where it is still one of the Twelve Great Feasts, and in the West since the fifteenth century, officially at least, when it was instituted to commemorate the victory of Christian armies against the Turks at the Battle of Belgrade in 1456, the gospel accounts of the Transfiguration have been used in the Roman Rite on this second Sunday in Lent since the seventh century.

Significantly, the account of the Transfiguration, believed since the third century to have taken place on Mount Tabor, 11 miles west of the Sea of Galilee, is among only a handful of episodes in the synoptic gospels that are recounted at precisely the same point in the narrative of all three and in almost identical detail.

The event has traditionally been understood as a revelation of Jesus’ divinity, given by way of reassurance to Peter, James and John, in the light of what is about to take place. (It’s they who will later accompany Jesus to the Garden of Gethsemane). But this reading runs the risk of regarding the real Jesus as the divine Jesus, as opposed to the human Jesus. On this occasion, according to this reading, his divinity is glimpsed, for once un-obscured by his humanity: his human mask is allowed to slip, as it were, revealing his true nature.

But this reading comes perilously close to one of the earliest Christian heresies, namely Docetism, the view that Jesus was not truly human but only appeared to be so; and that, being divine only, not truly human, he only appeared to suffer and die.

This is closely tied to a certain kind of piety that early emerged (and persists still in some quarters) under the influence of specific philosophical convictions that the human body is of no ultimate importance, but rather a hindrance in this life and an irrelevance in the next.

Jesus is, of course, divine, and his divinity is indeed manifested at the Transfiguration: but what Peter and James and John see on the mountain is also a vision of Jesus’ glorified humanity. They see him as he will be, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven. They see, in other words, not his divinity otherwise concealed by his humanity, but divinity revealed in and through his humanity.

Both the heterodox doctrine and the dualistic piety are rooted in a failure to take seriously both the Incarnation and the Resurrection of the Body. They fail to grasp, in other words, that in the Incarnation, God disclosed himself in our frail, mortal flesh; and that at the Resurrection of the Body, we will share in both his glorified humanity as well as his divinity, which is forever united to his humanity. Jesus is “seated at the right hand of the Father”, as we profess in the creed, as both the Son of God and the Son of Man, as a human being, in other words.

The disciples were certainly given this vision as a reassurance. In Jerusalem, Jesus would be defeated and would fail in his mission to convince Israel of the truth: and the price of his failure would be his death. But it was precisely in the awful reality of his suffering and dying, having become a human being out of love for us, that he was glorified, and God is revealed.

Peter, of course, cannot begin to accept this will happen, neither here, at the Transfiguration, nor earlier, when Jesus predicts what is to befall him in Jerusalem. And not only Peter: eventually all his disciples will be scattered in disbelief and disillusionment.

What eluded them, as it does us, is that Jesus would be glorified in his humanity precisely through his acceptance of, first, failure, and finally, death. (All true sanctity, as Herbert McCabe once memorably said, begins in the acceptance of failure.) But it’s precisely because of our identification with Jesus in his acceptance of death out of love, and therein his glorification, that we can accept and even embrace our own death as our path to sharing his glory.

At the Transfiguration, then, Jesus shows us both the glory of God and the glorified life for which we were created, just as on the Cross, he shows us the fullness of both divine and human love.

That’s why this gospel, narrating the Transfiguration, falls always on the second Sunday of Lent. When the five weeks of Lent begin to feel like an eternity, we’re reminded that Lent has no other point than to help us to grow in our love for God and one another, love in and from our hearts, that is, not just on our sleeves.