ON THE HOLY SUMMIT OF TRANSFIGURATION* - When We All Face the Lord.

ON THE HOLY SUMMIT OF TRANSFIGURATION* - When We All Face the Lord

“You were transfigured on Mount Tabor, and thus demonstrated the transformation mortal men shall, with Your glory, undergo at Your fearful Second Coming, O our Savior.”**

As the apse over the altar of an Orthodox Basilica represents eternity, portrayals of Christ there typically evoke the Second Coming: What could more powerfully remind those gathered underneath not only why we are present in church – but on this earth?

Παλιγγενεσία – the restoration of all things – which to Cicero means restoration from exile with his return to Rome – for ancient Christianity means restoration from exile with its return to God at the Second Coming of Christ, when all sorrow will be erased in the light, not of a lamp, or of the sun, but of the Lord God.

The presence of Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration thus serves as a graphic illustration of the fulfillment of the Law and Prophets in the light of the kingdom of Heaven – shortly to be made possible at the exodus of Christ from the passions of this life by “the glorious – through the Cross – and saving Resurrection.” Thus, in an intimately personal way, both prophets see the now-incarnate Christ at the Transfiguration with the clarity they longed for on Sinai, which was impossible to them then.

As Moses and Elias can now see Jesus clearly – so can we – enabled by the Holy Spirit whose kingdom Christ has opened to all those who reach, not as Moses with his hands for the precursory Law, but as His Most Pure Mother with her heart, for the Law of grace that perfects and fulfills it.

If classical philosophy prepares civilizations for knowledge of the divine energies by its own inability to recognize them – and if every human being’s greatest longing is for the experience of those energies – the apse over Divine Liturgy on the Holy Mountain of Sinai encompasses the answers held in trust by Christ since the inception of the age.

Holding a candle to their mystery the way monks hold a candle to liturgical readings in the darkness before dawn, the hushed calm of the unlit cathedral exudes ageless wisdom. The reverence of Christian antiquity, the insight of the saints, the architecture of the church itself whose apse unseals the gates of heaven – and above all – the stirrings of the holy of holies placed within each soul by the Creator as His most-treasured sanctuary, all conspire to share those secrets.

At the intersection of Old and New Testament revelation, then, the Transfiguration of Christ mystically encompasses not only the Creation but the Second Coming. In a remarkable departure from iconographic custom, with the cosmos depicted only by colored bands encircling the mosaic’s rim, neither Tabor nor Sinai appears in the basilica’s brilliantly-restored mosaic. Instead of a high and holy mountain, Christ reigns surrounded only by the infinity of heaven, with gold tiles skillfully placed by sixth century artisans at angles designed to reflect the dazzling resplendence of His kingdom upon the Liturgy below.

And, at the intersection of heaven and earth, Christ’s Transfiguration discloses the icon of our own. For, as the God-bearing fathers and mothers say, the Second Coming lies perpetually before each soul in that no one knows the hour of his exodus from this fallen life. The hour when, released from the ever-shifting shadows of its fears and uncertainties, His true servants will depart them all, as the Israelites from Egypt, to meet the Savior Christ upon the clouds of His glory …

* From the Article "On the Holy Summit of Transfiguration" by Sr. Joanna, in the FMSM News Blog: https://www.mountsinaimonastery.org/news-blog/on-the-holy-summit-of-transfiguration

** From the Matins of Transfiguration