The Transfiguration is a strange event. That’s obvious at the superficial level, but it remains strange when we dig a bit further. Jesus takes just a select three of his disciples and they have an experience which is literally out of this world. It’s much more dramatic than the Resurrection, where there were no out of the world experiences at all.
So why doesn’t this feature as one of the most important events of the gospel? In fact, since Jesus’s status was clearly established here, why do we need anything more at all?
But somehow it seems to have missed its mark. The three chosen disciples initially fall asleep – clearly the impact of what was happening was limited. When they wake up to the fact that something is happening they are so befuddled that Peter talks a lot of nonsense on their behalf. Finally when God speaks directly they are reduced to silence and then don’t tell anyone anything about it.
So really the Transfiguration had no impact whatsoever. It might as well not have happened. So what’s Luke’s point in including it (Luke 9:28b-36)? Matthew and Mark also do so ( Mt 17:1–8, Mk 9:2–8.). At least they are somewhat kinder to the disciples in having Jesus tell them to stay quiet about it, rather than lay the lack of reporting on them. But either way the result is the same. There was this extraordinary event which went unknown to everyone except three privileged individuals who didn’t say anything about it.
Maybe the challenge for us lies in the fact that we expect big events to have big consequences, to get noticed. Otherwise they are not big events – by definition! But that’s not the way God works. God’s way of getting noticed isn’t like ours, and the timescale on which he operates is nothing like ours. The Incarnation, God becoming human, wasn’t a big event in global history. Nobody in China knew anything about it. Even close by in Rome no one knew anything about it until later when some crazy people showed up talking about someone who had risen from the dead and told his followers to eat his body and drink his blood.
The gospel writers want us to know who Jesus was, that they believed God himself had spoken and vouched for him. That only became clear after he was gone. The chronology doesn’t matter. They want to show us the truth. They want us to believe.