This glory shall be for all His saints
By Alan Fimister | 6 August 2025
On 6 August, the Church commemorates the Transfiguration of the Lord. A week before this great self-revelation of the Incarnate Word, St Peter had made his confession of faith and been entrusted with the keys to the kingdom. Immediately afterwards, Peter was rebuked for rejecting Christ’s prophecy of the Passion. Now, to strengthen him for that great trial, the Lord shows him, along with the sons of Zebedee, the glory which He had with the Father before the existence of the world (Jn 17:5). “[T]his glory,” St Gregory of Nyssa explains, “is the Holy Spirit,” Who descends upon the Lord like a cloud as He did upon the tent of meeting in the wilderness in the days of Moses and upon the Temple at its consecration at the beginning of Solomon’s reign. At the same time, for one brief moment, the Lord ceases to hold back the overflow of the beatific vision from His human soul, as He had done since His conception as man and would continue to do until the moment of His death on the cross. This beatitude, which He enjoys in His human intellect and will, as a “direct consequence of his ontology as Son of God made man”,1 manifests His divinity because only the God-man possesses the Beatific Vision by nature — “no one has ascended to heaven but He who descended from heaven, the son of man who is in heaven.” (John 3:13) At the same time the voice of the Father thunders forth: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” (Mt 17:5)
As St John Chrysostom explains, Peter had said that some thought Jesus to be Elijah, while confessing Him as the Son of the Living God. Now the Lord stands before them manifestly as the Son of God and clearly distinguished from Elijah. Likewise, St Luke tells us some thought “one of the former prophets is risen again.” (Lk 9:19) The presence of Moses, to whose assumption St Jude alludes in his epistle (Jd 1:9), confirms that one of the former prophets has indeed risen again — but he is not Jesus. Elijah on the other hand has yet to die at all. The great Archbishop of Constantinople comments, “To inform them that He has power both of death and life, is ruler both above and beneath. For this cause He brings forward both him that had died, and him that never yet suffered this.”
Chrysostom goes on to explain that the Lord revealed Himself to them in his glory to “show the glory of the cross, and to console Peter and the others in their dread of the passion, and to raise up their minds. Since having come, they by no means held their peace, but ‘spoke’, it is said, ‘of the glory which He was to accomplish at Jerusalem’ (Lk 9:31); that is, of the passion and the cross; for so they call it always.”
God the Father speaks three times in the New Testament. First, He speaks at the Baptism in the Jordan at the beginning of the first year of Our Lord’s public ministry: “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Mt 3:17). Secondly, He spoke on the Mount of the Transfiguration at the beginning of the second year of Our Lord’s public ministry: “This is my beloved Son; listen to him” (Mk 9:7). Finally, He spoke in Jerusalem just prior to the Passion in answer to Our Lord’s words “Father, glorify Thy name” the Father replies: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again” (Jn 12:28).
It is not unreasonable to suppose that these three statements, each given in a different year of Our Lord’s public ministry, correspond to the three ages of the interior life. In the first of these, the believer is a beginner. Recognised as a beloved son by adoption through the sacrament of Baptism, he is driven by the Spirit into the wilderness to do combat against the world, the flesh and the devil in the purgative way, the way of Katharsis. In the second age of the spiritual life the believer having been stripped of the sensible consolations with which God sustained him at the beginning enters the illuminative way and receives the infused contemplation of the mysteries of God, the way of Theoria. All of this is to strengthen him for the loss of even the spiritual consolation of God in the great trial posed by the second dark night of the soul, the dark night of the spirit. The name of God is glorified in him as he is made perfect by being united to God in charity, the way of Theosis.
The illuminative way therefore exists to strengthen the Christian for the trials of the second dark night, that of the spirit, just as the Transfiguration occurred to strengthen the apostles for the darkness of Our Lord’s suffering and death. There is, however, another “exodus” through which the mystical body of Christ must pass before the general resurrection and Our Lord’s return in glory. This is the persecution of the Antichrist, and at that time it seems Moses and Elijah will appear once more, since the Book of Revelation tells us that, during that final and most terrible persecution, two heavenly witnesses will appear who will “have power to shut the sky, that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying, and they have power over the waters to turn them into blood, and to smite the earth with every plague, as often as they desire” (Rev 11:6). Their prophesying will be a torment to the human race who worship the Beast and when they have finished their prophecy they will be slain by the Antichrist, but after three and a half days they will be resurrected and assumed into heaven to the terror of the worldlings.
No doubt such wonders will indeed be consoling and strengthening for the remnant of the faithful who still live upon the earth in those days. But what of Our Lord Himself? Undoubtedly He will not return until all these tribulations have ended, so what will be the eschatological equivalent of His own transfiguration on the mountain?
The glorious manifestation of the Lord to the faithful before the final persecution is described in the previous chapter of Revelation where an angel appears standing with one foot on the land (symbolising the Jews whose conversion will then be imminent) and one foot in the sea (symbolising the remnant of the faithful gathered from every tribe and tongue and people and nation). As the Lord’s face was on Mount Tabor, so the angel’s face will shine like the sun (Rev 10:1; Mt 17:2 — πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος). But though we are told that “the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father” (Mt 13:43), this will not happen until after the end of the Church’s earthly pilgrimage. So what does this angel represent? St Augustine helps us: “for the time being,” he advises, “treat the scripture of God as the face of God” — ergo pro facie Dei, tibi pone interim Scripturam Dei. Melt like wax before that face in the tears of compunction and you will not be consumed by it when He returns in glory.
In the last moments of the Church’s pilgrimage, on the eve of the final persecution, the meaning of the sacred page will become lucid and clear to the remnant of the faithful. Andrew of Caesarea in his Commentary on the Apocalypse writes of this passage that “the final understanding and the clear interpretation of them [the scriptures] is reserved for the last times”. In this way the faithful will be able to pass from the second to the third age of the spiritual life in preparation for the agony that is to come before the Second Coming.
St Peter wished to abide in the awesome power of that illumination. But he assures us (through St Mark) that “he did not know what he was saying” (Mk 9:6). The exodus at Jerusalem still awaited them as it awaits us. This bliss of the lucid understanding of God’s word will be given to the faithful in that day because they will be so few (Lk 18:8) and the promise of indefectibility (Mt 16:18) will therefore be realised with proportionately much greater intensity in preparation for the final tribulation. “The Church,” the Catechism teaches us, “will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection.”2
Let us then take in hand the sword of the spirit that is the word of God (Eph 6:17, Hebrews 4:12, Rev 19:15) knowing that it will not fail us in the hour of need and that with the high praise of God in our mouths the glory of Mount Tabor shall be for all that remain, for His saints.
Notes