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Every year, despite how familiar it ought to be, the Transfiguration being presented to us in the midst of Lent comes as a bit of a surprise. We expect that the theme of penance should continue: we had the story of the Lord’s temptation last Sunday, and on Ash Wednesday His exhortation on fasting. Thus on first hearing today’s glorious events in the Transfiguration may feel a bit out of place. And to complicate things further, the Gospel today ends with another puzzling thing: having seen the most incredible thing in their life, the three disciples are told, confusingly, to not speak of this until the Resurrection — which itself sounds incredible.
The Transfiguration would be indeed out of place if Lent was supposed make us feel *bad* somehow. Many approach Lent with a degree of fear because they think that somehow it’s supposed to be grim: as if it were about suffering, as if it were something to just put up with. But that is entirely the wrong end of the stick. Lent is about true freedom, about glory, and about becoming who God intends us to be: not bound by sin, restored to Him, and dead to death itself. What *is* grim and what *is* hard therefore is the sin that makes us weak and degraded in the humanity that God loves and created to be “very very good”.
We started Lent by Jesus calling us to observe our fast by first anointing our heads and washing our faces: the experience of fasting that the Lord calls us to is one of spiritual *splendour*. That is the message that today’s Gospel further develops.
The Transfiguration, as dazzling as it is, is not a revelation of Jesus’ divinity, but His Perfect Humanity. It is not yet the beatific vision, St Leo reminds us in his homilies, but the glory of a human being who is without sin, who is fully free and alive. Moses and Elias seem to share the same dazzling glory that the Lord does, and they are human. Christ speaks with them freely: the entire scene reminds us a little of paradise, when sinless man walked together with God and conversed with Him face-to-face.
The Transfiguration is a glimpse of the sacred humanity that is bestowed on us through sanctifying grace.
The Breviary’s ancient cycle of readings at Matins draws a deeply mystical parallel here by presenting the story of Jacob and Esau alongside today’s Gospel. As Israel, their father, is growing blind and is about to die, he sends Esau to hunt and bring him the meat to eat, so that he may impart Esau his blessing. Jacob, however, wants the blessing for himself, and so aided by his mother, he takes on the appearance of Esau by wrapping himself in Esau’s clothes and goat skins — he is like Esau to touch, he smells like Esau, and so Israel blesses him.
Mystically, we are Jacob, and Esau is our Lord Jesus Christ. The Father’s blessing that is reserved for His Son is imparted to us when we are clothed in the glory of the Son. Jacob being covered in fur to resemble Esau is parallel to how sanctifying grace clothes us in the eternal merits of Jesus Christ won on the Cross. We *become* Esau. The blessing becomes *ours*, irrevocably.
And of course we have to remember the context of Lent — it is originally a time for the instruction of those seeking Baptism, the Catechumens. It is their preparation to be both physically and internally clothed in dazzling white: the newly baptised were allowed to wear white for the entire Octave of Easter, a special privilege granted to them. Their white garments reflect the spotless, sinless new life given in Baptism at Easter – the glory of the Resurrection, an image of the glorified humanity that awaits us, and what Jesus shows Peter, James and John on the Mountain when he is Transfigured.
And this is also why the Lord instructs His disciples to keep quiet about the events of the Transfiguration. Speaking of this without the experience of the Resurrection would send the wrong message. The same way the life of grace only makes sense once we have encountered the power of the Resurrection. The Resurrection is where the power of the Sacraments originate: the power of the Lord that conquers sin and death objectively at Easter is also what achieves sanctification in us through the reception of every sacrament.
So in Lent, through drawing close to God in the Sacraments, we chip away day by day at whatever is *truly* grim, and through carrying out spiritual practices, through customs bestowed on us in Apostolic Tradition, we heed the calling of our Mother like Jacob did, and allow ourselves to be clothed in the glory of the Firstborn; to whom be glory with the Father and the Holy Spirit now and forever. Amen.