Exodus 24.12-end; Psalm 2 (or 99); 2 Peter 1.16-21; Matthew 17.1-9

ON THE Sunday before Lent, Christians prepare for abstinence by means of a vision of light. Only Matthew and Mark describe it in terms of “transfiguration” (in Greek, “metamorphosis”). Luke instead refers to Jesus’s becoming “other”. John does not record it directly.

As Jesus is transfigured, his “face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light” (verse 2 is more accurate in the AV than in the NRSV). I usually think of this sudden brightness in Jesus as a sign of the divinity present in all humankind.

Every Christian is called to be transformed, transfigured. Both terms refer to a change of shape or arrangement, not to becoming something or someone completely different. We are to embrace being the same person (the same stuff, or essence, or components), but differently configured: not to reject what God has made us and called “good”, but to reshape the stuff of which we are made, to rearrange it into a better pattern, according to God’s true design. This is a message that what we are is not what we must always be. Somehow, we must learn to know ourselves as God made us.

There is a case to be made, based on the example of Jesus in this Gospel, for the transfigured body as the truest and most lasting version of the self, while the “everyday” body — which is untransfigured — is a passing self, subject to change and decay. But there is a risk in arguing that the transfigured self is the true self. It might imply that ordinary, everyday humanity is less authentic, and regarded with less honour, than the ultimate versions of ourselves which will find their abiding home with God.

That risk is not unique to the transfiguration of Jesus, or to the ways in which we draw lessons for ourselves from it. It is potentially present in every theory or vision that divides the person, whether as body/spirit, “ego”/“id”, trans-/cis-, inner/outer — or any other compartmentalisation. This is because it is a fundamental lesson of the resurrection to acknowledge the restoration and the divinisation of the whole person; not the abandonment or correction of some aspects of the human person (what we might think of as the biological self) with the endorsement of others, such as the transfigured self.

The Lenten journey will carry us to a conclusion that is ever old and ever new: that the message of the resurrection is not one of the escape of the soul from its imprisoning body, or of the inner self from the outer. Rather, the resurrection points to the end of the selected self. Like creation itself, or holy scripture, we are infinite in our complexity; so it is a matter of human necessity to highlight some aspects of our being while downplaying others, or setting them aside. But God knows us as all that we are, not the edited highlights that we show to others.

Alongside the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s being transfigured, or becoming “other”, two other passages of scripture (both written before Matthew’s and Mark’s Gospels) reflect on the concept of Christian transfiguration/metamorphosis. One is Romans 12.2: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be ‘metamorphosed’ by the renewing of your minds.” The other is 2 Corinthians 3.18: “All of us . . . are being ‘metamorphosed’ into the same image from one degree of glory to another.” There is also a trace of later reflection on the meaning of transfiguration in 2 Peter 1.16-18: “We had been eyewitnesses of his majesty . . . while we were with him on the holy mountain.”

Jesus’s clothing, Matthew says, becomes “white as the light”. I picture him, on that mountaintop, on a cloudless day when the brightness causes the disciples to shield their eyes. When someone faces us with the sun behind them, their face is dark and unrecognisable. But, in my vision, the light is not behind Jesus, or shining on him as he looks towards us. It is pouring out of him, because he himself is “the Light”. Although John does not describe the transfiguration in the same way as the other Gospels, he alludes to it twice in his Gospel: “I am the Light of the world” (8.12; 9.5).

One last thought. At the start of his ministry, Jesus follows his beatitudes (Matthew 5.1-12) with a development of that Johannine declaration that we can choose as the hallmark of our Lenten transfiguration: “You are the light of the world” (5.14).