😇 Epiphany 6 (Transfiguration)

Readings: Exodus 24:12-18; Psalm 2; 2 Peter 1:16-21; Matthew 17:1-9.

From the TRNG Room:

• How to Read Scripture Like You’re Still in the Field

Central Thesis/Theme:

The Transfiguration is not a new event — it is the latest iteration of an ancient pattern in which insiders become outsiders and outsiders are invited in. I'm arguing that when we recognize Joshua (Jesus) as a continuation of the Moses-Joshua tradition rather than a break from it, the mountain scene in Matthew 17 becomes a deliberate theological recapitulation: the same names, the same mountain dynamic, the same divine voice. Transfiguration Sunday is an invitation to stop treating the New Testament as a clean departure from the Hebrew tradition and start reading it as the Hebrew tradition still working itself out.

Key Textual/Historical Insights:

The Greek word for Transfiguration is metamorphoō — a change of appearance, closely related to metanoia (repentance, a change of mind). In Exodus 24, the grammar of the Greek Septuagint is striking: God calls Moses to "enter" the mountain in an almost intimate sense, not merely approach it. Mount Sinai itself was a pre-Israelite site of worship for a moon goddess named Sina — Yahweh is absorbing and subordinating that sacred geography. Psalm 2's Hebrew/Greek textual difference at verse 12 matters: where the Masoretic text reads "kiss the son," the LXX phrase points toward a pais (child) reference — the same word used for "my child" in ordinary Greek speech, not royal protocol.

Theological Argument:

I read the Transfiguration through what I'm calling mimetic commentary — the biblical tradition takes existing power structures (kings, mountains, divine warriors) and repurposes them with a subversive twist, the way satire works. Psalm 2 doesn't invent kings; it takes inherited kingship and installs Yahweh's chosen one on the holy mountain as a corrective. Elijah's presence at the Transfiguration is theologically loaded: he alone among the Hebrew prophets never died, making him a symbolic carrier of divine continuity that Moses and Joshua — both mortal — cannot be. The insider/outsider polarity keeps flipping: Moses was the outsider invited in, then Joshua, now the disciples.

Contemporary Application:

I'm an outsider to the institutional church and to formal language training, and I think that's a feature, not a bug. My hermeneutic — what I'm calling Christian pragmatism — notices things I haven't been told whether to notice. That's the gift I'm offering here: not expert translation, but honest engagement from someone who has no economic incentive to protect a particular reading. The transfiguration asks all of us, especially those who feel outside the walls of organized religion, whether we are willing to enter the cloud even when we don't know what's inside it. The mountain is still open.

Questions Raised:

• If Jesus's name is Joshua and that name was given by Moses in Numbers 11 as a deliberate act of adoption, what does that lineage demand of how we read the Gospels?

• What changes theologically if we treat Elijah's presence at the Transfiguration as a symbol of the undying divine rather than as a historical cameo?

• The Septuagint's intimate grammar at Exodus 24 — God calling Moses to "enter" the mountain — is that an early warrant for mystical union theology, or is it being over-read?

• Psalm 2 satirizes earthly kingship by mimicking it — does that move undercut the authority of the installed king too, or only the kings being mocked?

• What does it mean for the church that the insider/outsider dynamic keeps cycling, and who currently occupies the "outside" position that gets invited in next?

Reflection

Hello and welcome to Fighting Words. This is Brother Logan Isaac, broadcasting from the Chapter House in Albany, Oregon.

This is a late recording — Transfiguration Sunday was last Sunday. It's also known as Epiphany Six, I believe. The readings today come from Exodus 24, Psalm 2, 2 Peter 1, and Matthew 17.

There are a couple of things that really need to be pointed out — things that get lost when you're trained to take translations as unquestionable. I say that carefully, because I have not been trained in Greek and Hebrew. I've had a keyword study Bible for going on two decades, and I reference Strong's Concordance numbers and dictionary entries. I disclose that because it's an important point — not only to what I'm doing exegetically, theologically, and hermeneutically, but also because I want to be transparent. If you think I'm an expert, I'm not. And I say that because it's both a gift and a problem — those two things go hand in hand.

I'll call it Christian pragmatism. I think it's a gift because I notice things I haven't been told whether or not to notice. And because I hold two research master's degrees in theology, I think I'm onto something — but I haven't been formed in a linguistic tradition that has told me "this is the way you're supposed to do it." I haven't been sipping the same Kool-Aid. I have Kool-Aid — everybody's sipping some Kool-Aid — but mine's a different flavor. That makes me see things differently from most interpreters. Take that with a grain of salt. We're supposed to be the salt of the earth anyway.

Exodus 24

In Greek, the Transfiguration is metamorphoō. That's why I render it "metamorphosed" — apparently "metamorphosized" smashes two conjugations together. Metamorphoō is closely related to metanoia — a changing of mind in repentance, and a changing of appearance. I believe metamorphoō has to do with appearance specifically.

But that's not the most important thing in Exodus. The most important thing is that Moses and Joshua go up together, and then Moses continues up alone. It appears that Moses and Joshua are on the mountain for six days together — and then on day seven the glory of the Lord appears, Moses enters the cloud for forty days, and Joshua remains on the mountain while Moses is gone.

Something worth noting: Mount Sinai was the old site of worship for a moon goddess named Sina. Yahweh is taking that sacred geography and subordinating it. And remember — Joshua is on that hill with Moses, on the hill of Sina. Yahweh is saying: Sina is somewhere below me in the pantheon, if there is one. And Joshua is there.

Psalm 2

We have a quote within the Psalm — the king installed by Yahweh speaking. I use scare quotes around "king" because the Psalm begins with the assumption that kings already exist. I believe the Bible practices something like mimetic commentary — and I say that knowing Girard and what he's done with mimesis and anthropology, which I think is great, but from a perspective I don't fully share.

Mimetic commentary is my way of naming what I'd otherwise call satire. When I was a kid in Southern California — bodyboarding, not surfing, which was the not-cool thing to do — I liked this surfing brand called Lost. In high school, after I got arrested for shoplifting and started going to youth group to get right, I used to take logos like Lost and flip them in the same font with an ellipsis: "…Found." That's what I'm calling satire — taking what already exists and inverting it.

That's what I think Genesis does in contrast to the Babylonian creation myth. That's what Psalm 2 does with kingship. Kings were inherited by Israel; they don't belong organically to the Hebrew imagination. Yahweh takes the institution and says: "I have a king, and I have set them on my holy mountain."

Also, at verse 12 in the Masoretic text, the Hebrew appears to say "heed the son" — bar or ben. In the Greek, it reads more like "be educated," from a word related to paideuō. But it carries the same pais root — a child reference. The same Greek word used when someone says "my child is sick." So I render it: "Take heed, lest ‘king’ Christ-Son be angry" — because the one speaking is the one who has been installed as king and is saying I have been established, and I will give you the nations. This sets up the Transfiguration and what Joshua does as the anointed Son of God — the political figurehead chosen by God.

2 Peter 1

Peter's narration of the Transfiguration. He says: we were there, and our logos — our words, our logic — are more reliable because we were eyewitnesses. But notice who was there in Matthew: it's Joshua. Not Jesus. There is no "Jesus." The -au ending is the same as the sixth book of the Bible. This is Joshua.

And Joshua is on the mountain with Moses and Elijah. Moses and Joshua were on the hill together for six days — same names. Elijah is critical because he is one of the only figures in the Hebrew tradition who clearly never died. Enoch may have walked with God and not died, but the language is ambiguous. Elijah is explicit — he went to heaven on a chariot. He never experienced death. Which means he might come back. Maybe we keep the empty chair at Passover for a reason.

So we have Moses as God's chosen leader; Joshua as Moses's adopted son (remember, in Numbers 11, Moses says: "I'm going to have you serve under me — I'll add the Yah to your birth name, and you'll become Yehoshua, Joshua" — that's where the name comes from); and Elijah as a symbolic carrier of Yahweh — the thing which never dies, was never born, exists beyond mortal categories.

You may think Jesus is some new thing. No — Joshua is the same old thing done again, still trying to get it right.

The Transfiguration

The Transfiguration is not just some new event. It may appear that way to Peter, John, and James. But stepping outside the story — if we accept that Matthew and Peter were real people who tried their best to remember what happened and put it into words for their community, while also accepting that God is an active actor in reality who inspires those very writers — then the Transfiguration is something that connects what we can almost call history to something prescribed. The Septuagint was not born from nothing. It was born from Hebrew stories, some of which we know were recorded early. Judges 4 and 5 contain incredibly archaic Hebrew. Some Psalms do too. These texts existed in writing before the Greek Septuagint, even if we don't have extant Hebrew manuscripts predating it.

Closing

If there's one thing I'm doing comprehensively — theologically, exegetically — it's that I come to these texts as an outsider to an insider community. I'm not a Jew. I'm not sure I'm a Christian in any institutional sense. I'm confirmed in the Episcopal Church, but the Episcopal Church does not seem to know what to do with people like me — namely, veterans.

This brings me back to Exodus. In the Greek, the grammar is striking: God calls Moses to enter the mountain — it's almost like "enter me at the mountain." The mountain is an envelope within which God ceases being public and becomes an intimate partner with Moses — and by extension, Joshua. But Joshua stays outside the cloud. Moses is the insider; Joshua remains outside. Then it flips: Joshua enters the Promised Land because he was brave alongside Caleb, while Moses — who sided with fear over courage and curiosity — never enters. He's always an outsider.

This is what I think Hebrew theology, Christian theology — really all the theology in this tradition — keeps doing: it messes with the inward and the outward. It's a cycle. The poles switch, like a magnetic field. The outsider becomes the insider; the insider is pushed out. And eventually we'll just have to repaint the compass to make it feel like we're still pointing north.

That is the mystery and the beauty of Transfiguration Sunday. We are sinners — outsiders — and yet God has invited us in. We've made mistakes, and yet we are allowed to experience the eidos, the form of perfection. That's actually a Greek word in the text: the "shape of Yahweh's glory" in Exodus is eidos — the same root as Aristotle's forms. Perfect squares, perfect circles — they don't exist in reality, but they do exist in the mind. We can grasp perfection in theory even while inhabiting imperfect, corruptible bodies. We are spirit in flesh, and we cannot do one without the other.

As I continue Fighting Words, I'm not just doing the Bible — I'm trying to unfold, for myself and anyone who cares to listen, what my theology actually is after three years of formal theological training, decades of experience, seeking, and wondering. I think I've found a way to appreciate the nuance rather than planting a flag in a camp.

I don't know if I have a home. I don't know if Joshua did either — because that's not his anglicized name, and if we keep calling him Jesus and pretending the Old and New Testaments are separate, we'll miss the Hebraic impulses inherent in the Greek text. If you want to know God, I think you have to go through this figure named Jesus and wrestle with the fact that his name is Joshua. When you do that, it forces questions that a lot of theologians either haven't asked or haven't wanted to ask.

I'm in a position to ask those questions without depending on predetermined answers tied to my economic security. I've been given the freedom — the politeia, the citizenship, the republic — to ask them honestly and without fear of what the answer might be. That's both a blessing and a curse. Every privilege I have comes with a duty.

I've been through a lot, and the fact that I'm still alive is statistically an anomaly. Most people who have experienced what I have are no longer here. And I don't think that's what people like me want. I don't think that's what believers want. I'm not dead, and so I'm going to keep asking these questions as pointedly as I can.

Thank you to everyone listening. I invite you to respond — find me on Bluesky or Ghost. I'm going to keep doing this for at least three years, and by the end I'll have covered roughly half a Bible. Maybe all of it. Time will tell.