In the modern world, seeing, the observation of our environment, is often a fundamental requirement of faith. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” we say. We’re all a bit like Thomas.
And yet we also will say “I’m seeing things” to imply that we are not only able to observe what is real, but ought not trust our sight because it can deceive us! We want to speak to some kind of objective reality that is beyond our sight, alone, but exists as matter in time and space.
This is a function of modernism, of enlightenment thinking. This is only worth the chasing down the rabbit trail if we’re willing to entertain that there is more to truth than absolutes and material conditions. Or at least, if we can mind how our minds work. That we trust what we can see while also ascribing a physical permanence to all things. Even to time.
Strange thing then, having to wrestle with the highly improbable — with the visual and the experiential of the Transfiguration. A moment in which nothing seems to change materially and yet we are left to consider that, in fact, everything has changed.
It isn’t just appearance or light which obscures the disciple’s vision of Jesus momentarily, but, as we will see later in the story, that it is themselves who obscure their own vision of the Jesus before them.
In the end, it is their own vision that is faulty. Their own experience that they will need to contend with — and will — for the rest of their lives.