The Easter season aligns Seeing with turmoil, resistance, as it opens pathways.

The first Easter Seeing grappled with the doubt and trauma triggered by an “unbelievable” Passion to forge the faith and launch the Church at Pentecost.

One earlier Seeing, however, provides a prologue: the Transfiguration of Jesus.

The Transfiguration brought belief to the resistant apostle Peter—significantly Jesus’ chosen vicar—and moved him to broadcast his witnessing (seeing) this miracle to bring belief to others after Jesus rose from the dead (2Peter 1:16-18).

The Transfiguration is such an important Seeing that it appears in most Gospels (Matthew 17:1-8; Mark 9:2-8; Luke 9: 28-36).

A vital alternative means of Seeing the Transfiguration — images—emerged to complement scripture, adding new forms of Seeing.

Art representing the Transfiguration, which we make to interpret the miracle for an evolving world, provides new Seeings.

When we contemplate images of the Transfiguration today, we can apply them, as yet newer Seeings, to the dilemmas of our here and now.

Here are three famous public images of the Transfiguration that shape our seeing the miracle in different ways with these multiple sessions of Seeing,

Titian Transfiguration

Titian’s tumultuous scene (c. 1560) closely follows scripture. It makes us see a breathtaking apparition on the mountaintop where Jesus led Peter, John, and James.

We see the stunned apostles collapse practically in our space when they see Jesus and his robes suddenly light up, with Elias (Elijah) and Moses beside him. Scripture tells us that God’s voice emanates from that enfolding cloud to claim Jesus as his beloved son and spokesman.

This Seeing reveals Jesus—just this once—as simultaneously human and divine while alive and in his familiar body, “transfigured” by light and endorsed by his unseen divine father’s voice. Elias and Moses flank Jesus to insert him within the powerful arc of the prophecies and laws handed down by God, a foundation of the Church.

Seeing, on this mountaintop platform between heaven and earth, enabled the apostles’ belief in the Word and Christ’s place in the True Path as they wrestled with doubt and mystery.

For us, seeing Titian’s compelling scene over the high altar of Venice’s San Salvador brings his vision of the apostles’ cataclysmic Seeing into the evolved Church, to apply to our own lives.

Raphael Transfiguration

Raphael’s version of about 1520, originally for the cathedral of Narbonne (France), proposes Jesus’ purpose for this private Seeing. The painting combines the Transfiguration with Jesus’ subsequent healing of a “lunatic” child, which his apostles hadn’t managed earlier.

Their failure, Jesus explained, stemmed from their “unbelief:” If they had faith even as small “as a grain of mustard,” he argued, they could move mountains (Matthew 17: 20). Spurred perhaps by Peter’s challenges to Jesus’ claims (especially the announced Passion and Resurrection), the Transfiguration implicitly convinced, defined, and enabled.

Imagine seeing Raphael’s Transfiguration in its intended church setting (which never happened). We see that faith provides the power to help the needy, a mandate the Church pursued and conveyed in this altarpiece, commissioned by a cardinal (later Pope Clement VII) for the devout to see and follow across time.

Denny Transfiguration

This celebrated stained-glass window of 2010 in the Anglican Cathedral at Durham, U.K., a memorial to the Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey (d. 1988) who advocated the Transfiguration’s lessons for us, wraps the apostles’ miraculous Seeing in blinding light to instead define their earthly missions at the window’s base. Jesus’ healing of the lunatic boy (general view, lower right) blends with the evolved Church mission to heal human relations and nourish the needy—and earth in our time.

What timely Seeing through art to emerge in our own world! It echoes Sr. Joan Chittister’s call to apply faith gained from the Transfiguration to work a “few miracles of our own” in the suffering world below (National Catholic Reporter, March 2, 2001).

We need both now. How can such Seeings in art help us?

— Suzanne Glover Lindsay, St. Stephen’s historian and curator