This past Sunday, August 6th, was the Feast of the Transfiguration of Christ.

I know that, because—though I am not Episcopalian—I have come to treasure the daily prayers and Scripture readings in the Book of Common Prayer (1928 or 1945). So, on Sunday last, the Collect for the Transfiguration of Christ came as a pleasant surprise to this liturgical neophyte.

And yet, on another level, I was a bit disappointed as well. It seemed to me that the Collect, while beautifully crafted and deeply true, actually missed the main point of the transfiguration, a point suggested by the very Scripture readings mandated for the day (in the 1945 BCP).

Put simply, I am convinced that the transfiguration is not so much a revelation of the deity of our Lord Jesus as it is a preview of his coming human glory in the resurrection and ascension. The transfiguration is not so much a call to escape this world into the worship of the divine (“being delivered from the disquietude of this world”) as it is an astounding picture of God invading this world and imbuing it (and us) with his transformative presence.

Now, for the record, let me affirm (as I do almost every day in my prayers), that Jesus is (always has been and always will be) “God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God.” With reference to his divine nature, he is “of one substance with the Father” and in that sense utterly and ever distinct from us humans. But Jesus is also now (since his incarnation) fully human—interestingly, even more human than we are at the moment—and that’s what we’re talking about here. And that’s what the transfiguration seems to be all about.

The words from heaven certainly point in that direction: “This is my beloved son; listen to him” (Mk 9:7). The “beloved son” language casts Jesus as the Isaac-like sacrifice whom his Father is willing not to spare (Gen 22); the charge to “listen to him” shows him as the Moses-like prophet to come (Deut 18:15). Matthew adds the phrase “with whom I am well-pleased” (and Luke, “my chosen one”), reminding us of the allusion to Isaiah’s Servant (Isa 42:1) in the words spoken at Jesus’ baptism. Above all, the language of sonship in these words almost certainly alludes to the long tradition in the Old Testament of calling the Davidic king the “son of God” (see, e.g., 2 Sam 7:14; Ps 2:7).

Isaac. Moses. David. The Servant. These are all human figures in the Old Testament, used here to point to the calling and identity of Jesus. And one of them, with yet another prominent OT character, actually shows up on the mountain with Jesus. That would be Moses, of course, along with Elijah. This is important, because Moses and Elijah are also said to appear “in glorious splendor” (Lk 9:31), presumably a revelation of their very human glorification as a result of having been in God’s presence. It is no accident that these are the very two men who were themselves ushered into the cloud-like presence of God on Mount Sinai in the Old Testament and that one of them, Moses, was explicitly said to have been glorified (as a human, obviously) as a result.

Moreover, it is probably these same two men that show up at Jesus’ resurrection (“two men stood beside them in dazzling attire, Luke 24:4) and his ascension (“suddenly two men in white clothing stood near them,” Acts 1:10). Moses and Elijah continue to be witnesses of that to which their glorification—Jesus’ transfiguration—pointed: the bodily resurrection and glorification of Jesus as a human!

This is why I so appreciated the Scripture readings appointed in the Book of Common Prayer (1945) for the Feast of Transfiguration. The first was Exod 34:29-35, the account of Moses’ own transfiguration as a result of his encounter with God’s presence. The second was 2 Cor 3:1-18, part of Paul’s poignant rebuke to the Corinthians for failing to appreciate the benefits of his suffering ministry among them: that they, like Moses, were themselves already being transfigured by the presence of the Spirit among them (2 Cor 3:18) in a way which anticipated their further transformation in resurrection (2 Cor 4:16-5:5).

This, I think, is the best application of the transfiguration of the Lord to our own lives:

And we all, with unveiled faces reflecting the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, which is from the Lord, who is the Spirit” (2 Cor 3:18).

Though we will never be like Jesus in his divinity (he’s God and we’re not), we will be like him in the present fullness of his resurrected human glory. Indeed, that’s a good part of our Christian hope (see Rom 8:23-24)!

So, with the Collect for the Transfiguration of Christ, let us indeed pray that we “may be permitted to behold the King in his beauty” who with the Father and the Spirit “liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end.” Jesus is God and we rightly long to see and worship him as such. Amen.

And yet perhaps I may be permitted to suggest that the transfiguration account itself calls us to behold the messiah in that resurrection glory which is our own very human hope and proper destiny. And that we should pray not so much that we will be delivered from the disquietude of this world as that “the creation itself will be set free from the bondage of decay” when we are finally conformed to that glory (Rom 8:20-21). Amen.