The Church celebrates many feasts that recall important events in the life of Jesus.  We have His birth, His Presentation in the Temple, His Baptism in the Jordan River, the Last Supper, and His Crucifixion and Resurection.  But there is only one event between His Baptism and the Last Supper that we celebrate with a feast that is considered so important that when it falls on a Sunday it takes the place of the regular Mass readings and prayers.  It’s the Feast of the Transfiguration.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all record how Jesus and three of His apostles—James, John, and Peter—went up a mountain where Jesus was “transfigured.”  As Luke describes it: “His face changed in appearance and His clothing became dazzling white,” and Moses and Elijah appeared in glory to talk with Him (9: 29-31).  In his Second Letter, St. Peter tells us what happened next: “He received honor and glory from God the Father when that unique declaration came to him from the majestic glory, ‘This is My Son, My Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.’ We ourselves heard this voice come from heaven while we were with Him on the holy mountain” (1: 17-18).

Jesus’s Transfiguration occurred at a time when He was teaching the apostles that He would have to suffer and die and then rise.  They resisted His words and it is as though in the middle of His talk about suffering Jesus wanted to give them a taste of His glory in order to strengthen them.

But the Transfiguration wasn’t just for the apostles.  We continue to celebrate it as an important feast day because what happened to Jesus will happen to us.  We too, as beloved sons and daughters of the Father through Baptism, will be transfigured.  We too, in Heaven, will shine with glory because we will share in the glory of God Himself.  A few verses before the passage from St. Peter’s Second Letter we read about the “very great promises” of God—that we will “come to share in the divine nature” (1: 4).

Many great theologians, including St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, have said that God became human so that humanity could share in the divinity.  The Mass prayer which the priest says when he puts a few drops of water in the wine of the chalice is: “By this mystery of water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ Who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.”

So, as we celebrate the Transfiguration of Jesus let’s remember that we too are made for glory, a glory that is already shining into our world through us.  For, as St. Paul wrote: “All of us … are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, as from the Lord Who is the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3: 18).