Jesus takes three disciples up a mountain to join him in a moment of profound spectacle. There they witness Jesus’s face being transfigured — a word that suggests that his appearance is changed.

Church people have long resisted the idea that Jesus would be transformed here, which is to say, they don’t want to consider him substantively changed — which then makes one assume it is only about appearance, that it is all for show. But this response is too fixed in Enlightenment and binary thought, for a transfigured appearance is something of some true substance.

I suspect we want to know how this transfiguration changes things — and I suspect it is less a change for Jesus, but for how these three disciples see and treat him. That his changed appearance inspires them to see him in a new way, as one of a different character and makeup than they assumed. The outside now reveals something else about him than before. And in seeing him, the disciples take note.

There is consistency in Jesus, for sure. Consistency in who he is and what he values. The very things that make him him. And now he is being presented to them differently, and they have to adjust. Which, of course, confuses them. But that isn’t the whole story — or where we end it.

Their confusion is cut through by a voice, to listen to him. He’s still the one.

That’s where it continues. In the listening. Not for what is the same. But for the voice in the midst of confusion. Listen to God’s beloved.