For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.
II Peter 1:16-19
These words are the eyewitness testimony of the Holy Apostle Peter, testimony to what he saw and heard on Mount Tabor when Jesus Christ was transfigured before his eyes, and he heard the voice of God the Father testifying that Jesus was His beloved Son. St. Peter insists that this experience was objectively real, and that therefore his preaching of Christ’s divinity and saving mission is not a fable but rather a report of the facts.
Untold millions of believers, including countless saints, have accepted this testimony for 2000 years now. The martyrs have confirmed it by their sufferings, the fathers have upheld it by their lives and teaching, the righteous have demonstrated its reality by their transfigured way of life. But even to this day, there are people who insist that it is a fable. What is their motivation?
St. Peter’s words a few verses before the quote above give us the answer. Here is what he says: “Grace and peace be multiplied unto you through the knowledge of God, and of Jesus our Lord: According as his divine power hath given unto us all things that pertain unto life and godliness, through the knowledge of him that hath called us to glory and virtue: Whereby are given unto us exceeding great and precious promises: that by these ye might be partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through lust.” (II Peter 1: 2-4).
Having beheld Christ’s human nature transfigured by His divinity, Peter came to realize that the goal of human nature is to escape the corruption of the world that has come about through lust and to become “partakers of the divine nature.” When men choose to believe this and be baptized into Christ, they make a commitment to combat lust and other passions by the power of the Holy Spirit in order to acquire the divine energies and become partakers of the divine nature, to be transfigured by the Divinity.
This world’s “wise men,” however, worship their sinful passions, and lust in particular, and therefore they fanatically deny Christ’s divinity and saving death and resurrection, because if they accepted that these things are true, they would have to fight the sins which they adore. Thus they have a frantic obsession with discrediting the testimony of the Apostles.
On Saturday, August 19th (6 August on the Orthodox calendar), we will once again commemorate the Transfiguration of the Lord. By so doing, we proclaim that the testimony of the Apostles is true: Jesus is the Son of God, He calls us to share in His Divine Nature by grace, and we can do so if we obey His call to escape the corruption of this world through combating our lusts and passions. These are “great and precious promises” indeed; we have only to believe in Him Who promised, and to follow the narrow but joyful Way He has laid out for us.
Man Transfigured by Grace
God the Word has become Incarnate, has become man (St. John 1:14). By His Incarnation, matter has been magnified with Divine glory and has entered into the grace- and virtue-bestowing, ascetic aim of deification, or union with Christ. God has become flesh, has become human, so that the entire man, the entire body, might be filled with God and with His miracle-working forces and powers. In the God-Man, the Lord Christ, and His Body, all matter has been set on a path toward Christ —the path of deification, transfiguration, sanctification, resurrection, and ascent to an eternal glory surpassing that of the Cherubim. And all of this takes place and will continue to take place through the Divine and human Body of the Church, which is truly the God-Man Christ in the total fullness of His Divine and Human Person, the fullness "that fills all in all" (Ephesians 1:23). Through its Divine and human existence in the Church, the human body, as matter, as substance, is sanctified by the Holy Spirit and in this way participates in the life of the Trinity. Matter thus attains its transcendent, divine meaning and goal, its eternal blessedness and its immortal joy in the God-Man.
The holiness of the Saints—both the holiness of their souls and of their bodies—derives from their zealous grace- and virtue-bestowing lives in the Body of the Church of Christ, of the God-Man. In this sense, holiness completely envelopes the human person—the entire soul and body and all that enters into the mystical composition of the human body. The holiness of the Saints does not hold forth only in their souls, but it necessarily extends to their bodies; so it is that both the body and the soul of a saint are sanctified.
- from an article by Fr. Justin Popovich