Epiphany Last

Have you ever thought of salvation as transfiguration? I offer the following from The Christian Century:

The transfiguration provides a window through which the Christian narrative may be viewed. J.W.C. Wand, an Anglican theologian, wrote several decades ago that "it is actually possible to regard transfiguration as the fundamental idea in the Christian religion and as placing in a nutshell the whole story of the individual Christian life as well indeed as that of society as a whole." The transfiguration looks backward to God's presence in creation and the history of Israel and forward to the redemption of the world and its final, glorious consummation in Christ. In the theology of the patristic period and the later Christian East, the transfiguration is interpreted as a disclosure of the divinity of Christ, a unique visual display of the glory of God that shows the salvific nature of Christ's life, death and resurrection and the eschatological consummation of all things. The transfigured body of Jesus anticipates the divinization of humanity (in the language of the East) and the final transformation of the cosmos.

--Ian Curran

This, then, is the blessed hope, isn't it? The final transformation of the cosmos. It is quite wonderful to look at today's gospel reading as a foretaste of that ultimate redemption.