Unveiling the Transfiguration

I shall begin with a confession. Of all the miracles and divine manifestations in the New Testament, I often experienced awkwardness when I encountered the Transfiguration. For a number of years, I complacently listened to, and read, the passage, tiptoeing around the event, not wishing to disturb it, because I did not know how to grapple with its mystery. My complacency was shattered when I read Jean Corbon’s The Wellspring of Worship. Originally a Parisian and a Roman Catholic, Father Corbon became a priest of the Greek-Catholic eparchy of Beirut. When I encountered Corbon’s Eastern Catholic exegesis on the Transfiguration in The Wellspring of Worship, I imitated St. Peter - I did not know what to say! I was aware that my literal reading of the Transfiguration had been shallow, and now I was meeting, through Corbon, the patristic tradition, which gave me completely new insights, particularly in respect to who was transfigured. Corbon quotes from St. John Damascene’s Second Homily on the Transfiguration: Christ ‘was transfigured, not by acquiring what he was not but by manifesting to his disciples what he in fact was; he opened their eyes and gave these blind men sight.’