Patrick Comerford
We are in the last days of this period of Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar. Today is the Sunday before Lent (15 February 2026) and Lent begins this week on Ash Wednesday (18 February 2026). Many churches and parishes mark this Sunday as Transfiguration Sunday and the traditional name for this Sunday in the Book of Common Prayer was Quinquagesima.
Later this morning, I hope to sing with the choir at the Parish Eucharist in Saint Mary and Saint Giles Church, Stony Stratford. Then, after wall-to-wall rugby yesterday, watching Ireland’s victory over Italy and England’s defeat by Scotland in the Six Nations Championship, I hope to find an appropriate place to watch Wales and France this afternoon. But, before my day begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
Matthew 17: 1-9 (NRSVA):
1 Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain, by themselves. 2 And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became dazzling white. 3 Suddenly there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 4 Then Peter said to Jesus, ‘Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ 5 While he was still speaking, suddenly a bright cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud a voice said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!’ 6 When the disciples heard this, they fell to the ground and were overcome by fear. 7 But Jesus came and touched them, saying, ‘Get up and do not be afraid.’ 8 And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone.
9 As they were coming down the mountain, Jesus ordered them, ‘Tell no one about the vision until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.’
Today’s Reflections:
This morning’s Gospel reading (Matthew 17: 1-9) challenges us to hear God’s word, to see God as God would want us to see God, and to see ourselves as God sees us.
Jesus takes Peter, James and John up a high mountain, by themselves. What were they expecting?
They have been with Christ for some time, but have they had an encounter yet with the Living God?
What did they think God was like?
Whatever they thought of God before this, it certainly was not an encounter or an experience they were expecting.
They have an encounter with the Living God, who within God’s own single existence is also community: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
God the Father is heard speaking, ‘This is my Son, the beloved.’
God the Holy Spirit is experienced as the cloud hovers the whole scene.
God the Son is revealed to be the living Christ in a way that they had never seen him before.
What do you think God looks like?
God is not some, monolithic, totem-like idol, who needs sacrifices and seeks vengeance, who makes crushing demands on people.
Instead, God is community.
This is also the God of Creation.
Think of how we heard last week as we looked at the Creation story (Genesis 1: 1 to 2: 3) how the Spirit of God swept across the creation like the wind.
This is the God of promises and covenants.
Think of how the Ten Commandments are given to Moses on the top of Mount Sinai, how Elijah has an encounter with the God of promises in the cleft in the mountainside.
This is the God who fulfils all the promises of the covenant: here is Moses on one side.
This is the God who fulfils all the promises of the prophets: here is Elijah on the other side.
This is a God who calls us to action.
When I was back in Rethymnon for the Easter celebrations in Crete the year before last, I managed also to return to the village of Piskopianó in the hillside above Hersonissos, which I have known for more than 30 years, since the mid-1990s.
The new village church in Piskopianó, which has been renamed the Church of the Transfiguration was built in 2002-2008 and was dedicated in 2014. A fresco of the Transfiguration in the church shows, on the left, Christ leading the three disciples, Peter, James and John, up the mountain; in the centre, these three disciples are stumbling and falling as they witness and experience the Transfiguration; and then, to the right, Christ is leading these three back down the side of the mountain.
In other words, we are invited to see the Transfiguration not as a static moment but as a dynamic event. It is a living event in which we are invited to move from all in the past that weighs us down, to experience the full life that Christ offers us today, and to bring this into how we live our lives as Disciples in the future, a future that begins here and now.
The Transfiguration is both an event and a process. The original Greek word for Transfiguration in the Gospels is μεταμόρφωσις (metamorphosis), which means ‘to progress from one state of being to another.’ Consider the metamorphosis of the chrysalis into the butterfly. Saint Paul uses the same word (μεταμόρφωσις) when he describes how the Christian is to be transfigured, transformed, into the image of Christ (II Corinthians 3: 18).
This metamorphosis invites us into the event of becoming what we have been created to be. This is what Orthodox writers call deification. Transfiguration is a profound change, by God, in Christ, through the Spirit. And so, the Transfiguration reveals to us our ultimate destiny as Christians, the ultimate destiny of all people and all creation – to be transformed and glorified by the majestic splendour of God himself.
The Transfiguration points to Christ’s great and glorious Second Coming and the fulfilment of the Kingdom of God, when all of creation shall be transfigured and filled with light.
According to Saint Gregory Palamas, the light of the Transfiguration ‘is not something that comes to be and then vanishes.’ It not only prefigures the eternal blessedness that all Christians look forward to, but also the Kingdom of God already revealed, realised and come.
The Transfiguration is described in the three Synoptic Gospels (see Matthew 17: 1-9; Mark 9: 2-8; Luke 9: 28-36), and all three accounts are very similar in wording.
The Transfiguration is an encounter with God as the Trinity; it is a reminder with the presence of Moses and Elijah that Christ is the fulfilment of the Law and the Prophets; it is a meeting of past, present and future; and it is a reminder of how frail is our humanity in the responses of the three Disciples present, Peter, James and John.
The Transfiguration is a reminder that God has created us in God’s image and likeness, that in Christ’s Incarnation, God took on our image and likeness, and that now we are called once again to take on the image and likeness of God.
In a lecture in Cambridge many years ago [2011], I heard the late Metropolitan Kallistos [Ware], who was the pre-eminent Orthodox theologian in England, speak of the Transfiguration as a disclosure not only of what God is but of what we are. It reminds us of our beginning, but also reminds us of the possibilities and the potentials of what it is to become like God once again.
But is the response of the disciples to the Transfiguration one that we should imitate or emulate?
As they hear the voice of God, they fall down in terror, they are overcome by fear, they are made speechless.
They are immobilised and when they think of acting, look at what they want to do: they want to put up three booths, or tents, or dwelling places, in which they can keep Jesus and Moses and Elijah. It is as if, frightened of the new, they want to fall back on the old certainties.
It is as if they want to contain God, to capture God, to keep God in a place where they can be assured of the old certainties, to turn God into a god that they can contain, capture and control. They want to put God in a box, to keep God in a box.
And, so often, instead of wanting to be in the image and likeness of God, people want God to be in our image and likeness, doing our bidding rather than listening to what God wants of us.
Seeking to capture God, to make God a captive and to control God, are strong religious instincts throughout history. In the 20th century, Hitler used the German Churches to control the people of Germany. In more recent years, the simple faith of many American people has been hijacked to support extreme politics in a land that once prided itself on the separation of state and religion.
This is what Professor Rachel S Mikva of Chicago Theological Seminary describes as ‘dangerous religious ideas’ (Dangerous Religious Ideas: The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Penguin, 2020).
In an ‘Opinion’ column for USA Today in the wake of Donald Trump’s attempt to storm the Capitol in Washington five years ago [6 January 2021], she argued that ‘Religion is a dangerous business.’ In the response to the insurrection and violence in Washington, she tried to go beyond the revulsion all of us must feel when white Christian nationalism turns violent, and she drew attention to the ‘substantial number of Christians who plan to take the country for Jesus another way.’
The Christian right is ‘distorting the very meaning of religious freedom,’ she wrote. There is the obvious danger we have seen recently, with extremists who call themselves Christians ‘ready to bring on the apocalypse.’
But she warned of ‘a more resilient threat’ posed by people who claim the mantle of being Christians and who are ‘embedded throughout the governing institutions in the US – courts, military, legislatures, agencies and the police.’ In her words, they pose a real threat ‘to religious pluralism in the United States.’
She argued cogently for the need for ‘consciousness of the vital self-critical dimensions of faith,’ and said: ‘Whatever one’s spiritual life stance, we are choosing in every moment whether its power will be wielded for harm or for blessing.’
Power for harm; or power for blessing.
Do we want to keep God in a box as a power for harm; or do we really want to see God being God, and empowering us to be a power for blessing in the world?
I see this as the first great challenge posed by the Transfiguration.
And the second is like it: to see humanity as Christ in the Transfiguration would see us and would have us see each other.
Do I, so often, put people in a box in a way that denies they are made in the image and likeness of God? That they are called to become, once again, like God in Christ … what the Orthodox call ‘deification’ …?
The Revd Dr Kenneth Leech (1939-2015), the Anglican ‘slum priest’ in the East End of London, once said: ‘Transfiguration can and does occur “just around the corner,” occurs in the midst of perplexity, imperfection, and disastrous misunderstanding.’
Every time I dismiss someone because of their social background, where they were born, their gender, sexuality, ethnicity or parentage, I am making these differences more important than the way God sees them: made in God’s image and likeness, and holding, embodying the light of God in Christ.
Because those characteristics, those traits, are not self-chosen; they come at birth, we do not ask for them, you might say they are God-given. For, indeed, God sees us in God’s own image and likeness, God sees in each one of us the potential to reflect the light of Christ in the Transfiguration.
Let’s not box God in, hidden away under a booth or in a tent. Let God be God, and let’s stop trying to control him by using him to our political and social advantage.
Let’s stop categorising people so we marginalise them instead of seeing them in God’s image and likeness.
For, when we love God and love others, we see the light of God in them and, hopefully, they see the light of God in us.
When she was the guest chaplain in the House of Representatives in 1995, Rabbi Rachel Mikva included these thoughts in her prayers:
However passionately we may cling to our vision of truth,
we must never fail to recognise your image, God,
reflected in the face of the other …
Ultimately, we stand before you,
naked of power or possessions,
seeking only to understand your will
and do it with a whole heart …
God, we pray that our words and our deeds
may be for your sake,
bringing healing to our world
and wholeness to all those whose lives we touch.
Amen. אָמֵן׃
Today’s Prayers (Sunday 15 February 2026):
The theme this week in ‘Pray With the World Church,’ the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), is: ‘Look to the Amazon!’ (pp 28-29). This theme is introduced today with a Programme Update by the Most Revd Marinez Bassotto, Bishop of Amazonia and Archbishop of the Igreja Episcopal Anglicana do Brasil:
‘Looking after both people and the planet is central to the mission of the Anglican Church in Brazil. As the Bishop of the Anglican Diocese of the Amazon, I have come to see myself as an Amazonian, despite being born in southern Brazil. This land is rich in culture and natural beauty, yet it faces profound challenges - from deforestation and mining to violence against traditional populations and the invasion of Indigenous territories. I often urge people to look to the Amazon, to recognise the urgent need for justice and to defend both life and creation.
‘The Church has a critical role in responding to these challenges. Through outreach work such as the Popular Educators Course, we train local teachers to carry out projects such as reopening the Alternative Cultural Centre, supporting the Movement of Black Women Artisans (MOCAMBO), and teaching art skills to young people in the neighbourhood through Tinta Preta (Black Ink). In preparation for COP30, the diocese also collaborated with the government, ecumenical partners, and interfaith organisations to ensure Indigenous voices were heard and environmental agreements are honoured.
‘USPG’s support is vital in this work. We rely on prayers, advocacy, and practical support to strengthen the diocese’s initiatives and broaden community engagement. The Anglican Church of Brazil, through our Environmental Justice Network, provides guidance, training, and resources to protect God’s creation, but this work succeeds only when the Church and its partners act together in unity and purpose.’
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Sunday 15 February 2026) invites us to pray as we read and meditate on the Gospel reading, Matthew 17: 1-9.
The Collect of the Day:
Almighty Father,
whose Son was revealed in majesty
before he suffered death upon the cross:
give us grace to perceive his glory,
that we may be strengthened to suffer with him
and be changed into his likeness, from glory to glory;
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
Holy God,
we see your glory in the face of Jesus Christ:
may we who are partakers at his table
reflect his life in word and deed,
that all the world may know his power to change and save.
This we ask through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Additional Collect:
Holy God,
you know the disorder of our sinful lives:
set straight our crooked hearts,
and bend our wills to love your goodness and your glory
in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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