A homily from St. John’s Russian Orthodox Mission Church in Winfield, PA, by Priest Paul Siewers, for Theophany 7534/2026.
If you wish to transfigure your life, this is the holiday for you. For today on Mount Tabor our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ has shown forth the pattern of Transfiguration, just as more than 1,500 years before he had shown the pattern of the tabernacle to Moses on Mount Sinai. Today’s holiday is for us as Christians, to help us realize how in Christ we may fulfill our life in Him and our body as the Temple of the Holy Spirit, in the Church, the Bod f Christ.
St. Gregory Palamas fought a long and sometimes lonely battle in the 14th century to preserve the sacredness of this message, this pattern on the mount, for us as Orthodox Christians, when the Scholasticism or academic approach of the heterodox West threatened to erase it. For the Orthodox Church alone preserves the full teaching of Christianity on the uncreated light of God manifest in the Transfiguration, when Jesus Christ appeared full of that uncreated grace shining before his closest apostles, Peter, James and John, while conversing with the greatest prophets of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah, who had left this year many centuries before.
St. Gregory Palamas wrote that what was revealed in the Transfiguration was the purpose of our lives, that is theosis, or oneness with the uncreated energy or light of God. St. Gregory wrote:
“So when the saints contemplate this divine light within themselves, seeing it by the divinizing communion of the Spirit, through the mysterious visitations of perfecting illuminations—then they behold the garment of their deification, their mind being glorified and filled by the grace of the Word, beautiful beyond measure in His splendor; just as the divinity of the Word on the mountain glorified with divine light the body conjoined to it. For the glory which the Father gave Him, He Himself has given to those obedient to Him, as the Gospel says, and He willed that they would be with Him and contemplate His glory.” (p. 33, Triads, Paulist Press)
The Transfiguration occurred 40 days before the Crucifixion to assure the Apostles of Jesus’ Divinity and inspire their faith in the Resurrection to come. This is why today’s Feast is 40 days before the feast of the Exaltation of the Cross coming up in the new Church year. It was moved from Great Lent by the early Church because the Transfiguration was too joyous and glorious for that season, and instead it was placed at the time of harvest and during the Dormition Fast, pointing toward the Exaltation of the Cross. Originally, the Transfiguration in the Gospel was associated with the Festival of Booths or tabernacles, based in Old Testament worship commemorating the 40-year wandering of Israel in the desert.
In the Gospels the Church everywhere become the tabernacle, and the people each a temple in their body so to speak. It was said of our patron St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco that, “A prayer of supplication was sung after which Vladyka, standing before a lectern, was delivering a sermon. I was standing next to my mother, and we both saw light surrounding Vladyka down to the lectern—a radiance around him a foot wide. This lasted a rather long time. When the sermon was over, I was struck by such an unusual phenomenon. I told what we had seen to our friend, who replied to us: ‘Yes, many faithful saw it.’ My husband who was standing a little way off, also saw this light.” (Bishop Alexander Mileant, Life and Miracles)
Mount Tabor itself is located in Galilee not far from Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth and from Cana where he turned the water into wine in his first public miracle. As such, it is located outside Judaea proper, and points like the Transfiguration to the Church as Israel for all nations. Galilee was more influenced by Gentile people and trade troutes. The mountain itself symbolizes a practical aspect of the Transfiguration, as St. Nikolai Velimirovich wrote the location on a mountain taught two virtues: “love of labor and godly thoughts—for climbing to the heights requires labor and the heights themselves represent the elevation of our thoughts t the things of God” (pp. 148-149, Prologue of Ohrid, vol. 2, 2002))
Our founding first hierarch of ROCOR, Metropolitan Antony, adds to this that “The prayers sung in Church today explain to us, brothers, that the Lord revealed His divine Transfiguration with the specific goal of persuading His followers that they, too, are to adorn their inner image with virtues and to shine also with external spiritual beauty” (Sermon, 1898).
The Apostles at first reacted by thinking of erecting tabernacles from the Old Testament tradition. But the Transfiguration was for us all, in the sense that the Theotokos, the greatest of human saints, having fulfilled the tabernacle in becoming the Mother of God, and the Body of Christ which she bore becoming the Church, in which we all are joined.
The uncreated light energizes this whole, the mystical unity given by God that sustains us in His Providence, what in Slavonic is called sobornost.
Jesus said “I am the light of the world,” of which we sing in the ancient Vespers Hymn “O Gentle Light,” and from that He also said to his disciples, and to us really, “You are the light of the world.” The Transfiguration illustrated this for the apostles and for us as hearers of the Gospels.
The pre-revolutionary Russian Abbess Thaisia wrote of her own experience, “I saw myself in some other world—in heaven, as I thought. An ineffable sweetness filled my soul. Everything was so full of light, so wonderfully beautiful” (p. 40, Autobiography). And of course we have the famous account given by Motovilov of his experience with St. Seraphim of Sarov of the uncreated light.
Sometimes today is called the Summer Theophany, because at the Transfiguration the Holy Trinity again was revealed, as it had been early in Jesus public career, now near the end. The Father’s voice was heard, Christ the Son revealed in the light that comes also from the Trinity as a whole, and the Holy Spirit’s presence seen in the cloud. Even to this day, tradition records a cloud that appears over Mount Tabor yearly above the Orthodox Christian monastery there on Transfiguration.
Finally I acknowledge my debt for most of the quotations about Transfiguration today to the study booklet Climbing Your Mount Tabor, a copy of which I picked up on Monday at Holy Trinity Monastery and Seminary in Jordanville. It is now in our library, I highly recommend borrowing it for family or individual study, and when I post a copy of this homily, I’ll include a link if you’d like to order it. https://a.co/d/0iGUUxR0
Brothers and sisters, I want to leave you with one final thought as we after the Eucharist will bless the fruit, a yearly tradition. As we bless the fruit, think about how one message from the Feast of Holy Transfiguration is that we are the fruit, as we share in the uncreated light of the Holy Trinity given to us by our Lord and God and Savior Jesus Christ. Glory to Him!