The Two Theophanies: Epiphany and Transfiguration
All three of the Synoptic Gospels provide full descriptions, fairly unanimous as to detail, of the two great theophanies: that which the Church observes as the Feast of Epiphany; and that which it commemorates in August, as the Feast of the Transfiguration. It may seem odd to consider them together as I propose to do. In reality they can hardly be considered separately. It is not accidental that in the Greek Church both words, theophany and epiphany, are used more or less interchangeably.
Only a moment’s reflection will tell us why the Church gives such solemn and profound importance to the two feasts. It is because they provide an essential key for our understanding of the humanity of Christ, a humanity which to Eastern theology is never an abstraction, the humanity which reveals divinity. In both events the voice of the Father thunders out of the heavens; in both the Spirit is beheld, now in the form of a dove, now as a luminous cloud. This, then, is God’s economy for the revelation of the Trinity.
But to try and put divine matters into human terms—and this, after all, is the function of all preaching—is to suggest that it is also part of God’s economy for revealing to mortal man an image of himself, a truer image than he could otherwise have, reflected back by the mirror of immortality. To put this another way, which I trust you will not think too bold, if we are to be in all things like unto Christ, a claim which St. Paul makes again and again, then these two “epiphanies,” or “theophanies,” must be understood not only with reference to God in Christ, but also with reference to God in man.
Practically all ecclesiology acknowledges Paul’s claim with respect to baptism, which Epiphany obviously prefigures. It postulates that “washing of water by the word” which restores to something approximating its clear and unblemished complexion that image of God in man which disobedience has disfigured and sin has scarred. Paul speaks of our rebirth through baptism into “newness of life.”
But if all this be so, then the second theophany, the Transfiguration, must point to the place where that new path of life ultimately leads. If the first purposes the repair of the sin-scarred image, must not the second intimate the attainment of the likeness? Again, these are not casual, accidental terms in Orthodox thought. They are the precious coinage, common to all ages of theological speculation and interpretation, by which we obtain an understanding of man and the divine prospects that are his. Thus it must follow that if we are called to imitate Christ in baptism, in crucifixion— “. . . those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh” (Gal. 5:24 RSV)—and in resurrection, then surely we are likewise called to a transfiguration of our total selves.
This is no poetic, or homiletic, forcing of the meaning. It is a concept that underlies the whole of Eastern thought; one that seems to mark the “primitive” Church with the marks so rarely to be distinguished in it today. Man, quoting St. Basil the Great, “is a creature who has received a commandment to become God.” That commandment is addressed to human freedom and neither abridges nor abrogates it. Yet it is implicit in the gift of God’s grace, freely given, freely to be appropriated, which alone makes possible the restoration of our nature, mutilated by disobedience, defaced by sin, riven by the warring of its own desires. How that restoration begins, to use very mortal language, is shown us in the first epiphany, at Jordan; what the ultimate effect is, we begin to comprehend at the second, on Tabor.
~Adapted from Father Leonidas Contos, In Season and Out of Season: Sermons by Father Leonidas Contos
