Transfiguration Sunday: A Mountaintop Experience
Today we celebrate Transfiguration Sunday. And transfiguration is really just another way of saying transformation. It simply means a change in form or appearance. And indeed, Jesus, on the mount of transfiguration, his appearance drastically changed. He suddenly began to shine like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. In Mark’s gospel he notes that his clothes were so white that they couldn’t be bleached. I take it to mean that it’s so white that if you were to bleach it with the whitest bleach on earth, you’d only darken it. The question is: what does this mean? Why does Jesus suddenly appear in this way? I believe that this event is meant to signal nothing less than Jesus’ full divinity. In Daniel 7, Daniel is given a vision of God as one whose clothing was white as snow. Psalm 104 speaks of God as being wrapped in light as a garment. And in Isaiah 60 as Isaiah has a vision of the perfect future, the new he...