On St. Peter's Transformation

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, The Last Sunday after the Epiphany (Quinquagesima), February 15, 2026]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

Today, we get to hear about the Transfiguration. Again. After all, didn’t we just do this in August? One gets the feeling that the powers that be want us to cement this in our mind. Certain stories in our tradition do get repeated throughout the year: the Passion and Crucifixion, the Resurrection, the Annunciation. Scripture is full of stories and instructions, why do certain ones get repeated frequently?

Truth be told, the repetition of important stories, of foundational stories, is a key part of our make-up. For example, the older we get, the more we repeat our stories, sometimes to the annoyance of the younger generations who perhaps mockingly behind our backs start pantomiming us elders as we tell the same story for the millionth time, but it turns out that their ability to mimic us word-for-word, albeit ironically, means that we as members of our species have accomplished a key goal of our kind and that is to pass down information to the next generation so they may take those lessons and relay these experiences in their own way to the next generation, preserving ancestral knowledge and contributing to the survival of our species.

The Church makes heavy use of this function of human nature, mostly because the Church is composed of human beings who have to learn as human beings, and because the stories we pass down within the Body of Christ are packed full of insights and perspectives that take multiple lifetimes to unlock, digest, and convey. The Transfiguration[1] is one such story, telling us things about Our Lord and His mission that are critical for us to know: that He is begotten of the Father; that He Himself partakes from His very Being and Nature of the Uncreated Light; that He is the fulfilment of both the Law, as acknowledged and supported by the presence of Moses, and the Prophets, as affirmed and bolstered by the presence of Elijah. As if this was not clear enough, the Father also chimes in, proclaiming His favour and pleasure with Our Lord, telling us in no uncertain terms to listen to Him.

However, as we hear this for the umpteenth time, our minds do tend to wander a bit and lean toward speculation or even hare off in wildly divergent tangents. As I was wrestling with the readings, wondering what else I could possibly say about this event, I started to drift and think about St. Peter. Wonderful, flawed, scatterbrained, and at times incredibly ditzy Simon Peter. To be honest, many of us hear St. Peter’s story arc in the Gospels and wonder how this man could tie his sandals, let alone become the rock of the Church, the primus inter pares[2] of the Apostles, the great preacher and missionary and martyr. St. Luke is fairly frank in his assessment of him, St. Mark is almost brutal, but this is for a specific and exacting purpose. They broadcast this less than flattering information to show that as St. Peter had to evolve and grow to become the saint we now commemorate, so we also have to evolve and grow to become fully Children of God in Christ.

In our Epistle today,[3] St. Peter tells us that we are not following “cleverly devised myths,” as he put it, but tells us that he and the other Apostles were eyewitnesses of Jesus’ time among us. Up until then, everyone had to make do with the Law and the Prophets, the ancient stories about their ancestors, the precepts handed down by Moses, and the admonitions and exhortations of the Prophets. Some of it was myth, much of it was other flawed humans telling us other flawed humans, “Thus says the Lord,” with much of it open to endless debate. Some of it was very clear, but a lot of it had proven over the centuries difficult to grasp, pored over line by line, precept by precept, here a little, there a little.[4] Then this Jesus appears and more than explains it, He raises the ante. Frequently his disciples and listeners hear, “You have heard it said,” where Jesus quotes a precept of the Law then follows up with, “But I say to you,” clarifying and sharpening the point, not with a mitigation but a focus on the actual will of God, not with a, “Thus says the Lord,” but with an, “I say to you.”[5]

However, it did not sink in all at once. “We ourselves have heard this voice come from heaven,” St. Peter writes, but he does not mention, perhaps because he expects us to remember (or hoping we don’t!), that even with the voice of the Father he did not quite get it at the time, and it was not an isolated incident either.

Take, for instance, the events leading up to the Transfiguration. In one account,[6] the disciples head out by boat ahead of Jesus with the assurances that He will catch up to them. He did, but not as they expected. Jesus surprised them by taking a more direct route, instead of walking around the lake by walking ON the lake. St. Peter sees this, and at first full of faith at Jesus’ urging comes out to Him, walking on the water, trusting that God would sustain the wonder, but then he got cold (or is it wet?) feet, and immediately lost his footing, not fully taking on the lesson but instead taking on water, missing or forgetting the point that God bends the created order to His will and not the other way around.

In another account,[7] Jesus had taken His disciples on a field trip to Caesarea Phillipi in the border country between Galilee and Syria to the base of Mt. Hermon near the source waters that eventually flowed into the Sea of Galilee. This town was noted as a Pagan pilgrimage centre, about as contrary to the Kingdom of God as one can get (I will spare you the mind-scarring details), with the sacred grotto in the temple precinct decried by faithful Jews as the Gates of Hell. There before the Gates of Hell Our Lord asked His disciples what they thought of Him. St. Peter confessed Him to be the Messiah, the Son of God, to which Jesus replied that it was the rock of this confession upon which the Church would be founded and that the Gates of Hell (with Jesus likely pointing back at the grotto) would not prevail against it. Here it seems St. Peter gets it, until Jesus starts talking about His upcoming Passion. St. Peter takes Jesus aside and tells Him to stop the crazy talk, but Jesus resets St. Peter’s expectations firmly, in effect telling him that if he had been paying attention to the message, he would not have assumed that Jesus as Messiah would be a temporal military commander fighting a purely human battle, but that the Messiah would fight a battle with higher stakes and in a different dimension.

Fast forward to the account of the Transfiguration. Ss. James and John, very rattled, wisely decided to say nothing, but St. Peter, seeing Our Lord in full glory next to Moses and Elijah, presupposed that they are here to stay to wreak the vengeance of the Lord upon the unfaithful. It is at THIS point that the Father chimed in, telling St. Peter and the others that indeed, Jesus is His Son, His beloved, and more importantly, to dig the dirt out of their ears and actually listen to him. While St. Matthew’s account that we read today does not give us the subject of Jesus’ discussion with Moses and Elijah, St. Luke’s rendition tells us that Moses and Elijah were specifically there to confer with Jesus not just about the visit to Jerusalem, but the upcoming invasion of Hell and its overthrow as well, a somewhat important detail that St. Peter (and to be fair likely Ss. James and John too) completely missed.

Finally, we look at the accounts of that terrible night when Jesus was taken,[8] when Jesus allowed himself to be taken, and in fear and disillusionment St. Peter lost all trust and denied ever knowing Him. This was the most bitter of the failures, that when he realized what he has done, his only response being his bitter wailing as he felt his hope and his self-respect die at cockcrow.

However, unlike Judas, who had succumbed to total despair and had taken his own life,[9] St. Peter waited. Granted, his waiting was also of utter despair and likely crushing depression. Yet he waited, and finally his despair gave way when His Lord, now risen from the dead, appeared to him and to the other disciples to restore their faith, to restore their hope, and to restore their honour in the sight of God.[10] It is only until St. Peter’s presuppositions were shattered beyond rationalization and denial that he became receptive to the whole message, that yes, Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, but His target was not Rome and Israel’s constant political oppression but the Devil and humankind’s constant oppression by Sin and Death, a lesson blazed into all the Apostles’ minds as their once dead Master is now clearly and obviously alive before them.

St. Peter now asserts that they did not follow cleverly devised myths because he himself had seen the many wonders and received the teaching of Jesus, a teaching that was in full accord with the Law and the Prophets. St. Peter goes on to tell his readers that they, “will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in [our] hearts.”[11] He gives us this advice because he lived it. He had to listen, to pay attention, to misapprehend, until the light broke through his clouded understanding. His hope for us is that the light shines upon us more quickly and less painfully than it did for him, that learning from his example we too will encounter the Risen Lord. He begs us not to disdain the Scriptures but to wrestle with them, to walk with them, because eventually if we allow it the Holy Spirit who speaks through them will lead us into the truth. St. Peter’s struggle is our struggle. He saw the Transfiguration; he heard the words of the Father but it took time to comprehend them. He asks us to trust that we trust God the same way, to walk in faith until it becomes real for us, because he himself waited until it became real for him. His words are words of encouragement, assuring us that as he finally understood, if we hold faith we too eventually will understand, and in so doing experience the Transfiguration in and for ourselves.

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, the Holy Apostle Peter, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Mt. 17.1-8, Mk. 9.2-8, Lk. 9.28-36

[2] Latin for “First among Equals,” a description offered for chief bishops with no real magisterial authority outside their provinces, like the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

[3] 2 Pet. 1.16-21

[4] Cf. Is. 28.9-10

[5] Mt. 5.21-48 passim

[6] Mt. 14.22-33

[7] Mt. 16.13-23, Mk. 8.27-33; Lk. 9.18-22 is a much more abbreviated account.

[8] Mt. 26.69-75, Mk.14.66-72, Lk. 22.54-62, Jn. 18.25-27

[9] Mt. 27.3-10,

[10] Cf. Jn. 21.15-19

[11] 2 Pet. 1.19