^{On the 6th August the Church celebrates the Transfiguration of the Lord. It recalls the story, first told by St Mark (chapter 9), about Jesus taking Peter, James and John up a high mountain, where he was ‘transfigured before them.’ His face shone with divine brilliance, and his clothes were bright, ‘as no laundry on earth could whiten them.’ The disciples saw Elijah and Moses talking to Jesus. Peter, ‘not knowing what he was saying,’ suggested they should make three tents, one each for Jesus, Elijah and Moses. But a cloud enfolds them, and a voice says, ‘This is my Beloved [or, my Only] Son: listen to him.’ And Jesus is seen alone, with his normal appearance, and tells his friends not to speak about the experience till the Son of Man is risen from the dead. This story is repeated in Matthew and Luke, with variations.}

What is the story about? Jesus’ own religious experience? Or that of his disciples, like us? A vision of how Jesus fulfils the Law and the Prophets? Perhaps: we are all allowed to hear different things in gospel stories. But the key is perhaps, ‘Who is Jesus?’ In all three gospels this incident comes just a week after Peter’s famous confession, ‘You are the Christ,’ and the difficulty Peter has when Jesus predicts that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be crucified and die. Peter now gets it wrong again. He suggests three tents. Moses on Mount Horeb was commanded to make a ‘tabernacle’, the ‘tent of meeting,’ where the Lord regularly came down and met Moses face to face. Elijah too had met the Lord on the mount Horeb, and met God there in the ‘still, small voice.’ Peter apparently wants to perpetuate the divine presence, so that Jesus can go on talking with God as Moses used to do in the wilderness.

Peter did not know what he was saying, and the voice of God rebukes him from the cloud, the same glory-cloud perhaps which had once descended on the tent of meeting, when God spoke with Moses. The voice says, ‘This is my Son: listen to him.’ Jesus is not another prophet, meeting God on the mountain like Moses and Elijah. He is himself that Lord who spoke to them. Jesus, the same Christ who must suffer many things, is the Lord of all. The voice of God always was, and is, the voice of his only Son, the Crucified.

Contributed by Stuart Hall