Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Celebrated in the midst of summer, it perhaps gets short shrift from many Catholics. Catholics more regularly are reminded of the Transfiguration each year on the Second Sunday of Lent, when we read of it in one of the three Synoptic Gospels. It’s put there, relatively early in Lent, to remind Catholics of two things: that our destination is the transformation of all things that begins with the Resurrection, and that you can’t get to Easter without the journey through Passion and Death, for which Lent should prepare us.

Notice I say the “destination is the transformation of all” that starts with the Resurrection. We err if we consider certain Biblical occurrences as merely isolated events. Jesus took Peter, James, and John up Mount Tabor not to “show off” His Glory but to buck them up against what was to come between then and His Resurrection. (Remember, it was Peter who was rebuked as doing the devil’s work when he declaimed, after Jesus said the “Son of Man must suffer,” “may it never happen to you!”)

The Transfiguration gains its sense from the Resurrection. That’s what it’s pointing towards. And the Resurrection also does not just stop on Easter. It gains its fullest sense from the Last Day, when good (i.e., God) has the last word in human history, Jesus turning over all to His Father “so that God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28). It is not, then, accidental that the First Reading for today’s Feast (here) is from Daniel, a text that has long been regarded as eschatological, as prefiguring the Final Judgment. The Transfiguration is a preview of that Final Judgment, too. Jesus appears in white garments, whiter than any “fuller on earth could bleach them,” because it’s not the work of a human fuller but a God-Man who bleached them in His Blood, something John is reminded of in the First Reading for All Saints Day (also an eschatological reading: Rev 7: 2-4, 9-14; see here). There those in white robes are identified as they who “washed their robes in the Blood of the Lamb.” Transfiguration starts in every act of contrition and conversion.

Today’s Gospel also makes clear what it takes to be on “the right side of history” (to steal a politician’s phrase): to recognize Jesus Christ as “my Beloved Son” and “to listen to Him.” Faith and good works, together.

The Transfiguration reminds us of the dignity of the body. Jesus’ Body is not eliminated, it is transfigured, it is transformed. This is apparent in the Resurrection, where the Apostles and Mary Magdalene both recognize and don’t recognize Jesus; they recognize He is “not a ghost” (nor merely their mental projection) because they can touch Him and He eats and drinks. But there’s something different about Him, something that makes Mary think He’s a gardener and blinds the disciples on the road to Emmaus until they celebrate Eucharist. Recall the disciples to whom Jesus first breaks open the Word: “and beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” (Lk 24:27).  Today, on the Feast of the Transfiguration, we have Moses and Elijah — the greatest of the prophets — testifying to Him. Any observant Jew, like Peter, James, and John, knew what this said about the One to whom they are bearing witness, in whom what they foretold is fulfilled.

The Transfiguration speaks of the dignity of the body and bookends nine days that end August 15, the Solemnity of the Assumption. The Assumption also speaks of the dignity of the body, which is raised to heavenly glory, not left to earthly corruption. The Assumption also is part of that eschatological continuity from Transfiguration to Resurrection through Assumption to the Last Day. Given the depreciation of human enfleshedness in our world, a weird blend of sensuality and gnosticism, I have often suggested these nine days should be a novena to refocus on Catholic teaching about the body (for example, see here). People have extraordinarily confused ideas about this subject and that confusion is increasingly seeping into public life and policy.

So, Transfiguration is hardly marginal to Christian life, even if the Feast falls in the middle of summer. Transfiguration is what Christian life is all about.