On August 6, the Church marks the moment when, as Luke recounts, Jesus took Peter, James, and John up a high mountain "to pray," and there his face shone like the sun while Moses and Elijah appeared speaking with him of his "exodus" at Jerusalem (Luke 9:28-36). A voice from the bright cloud declared, "This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him." The feast was extended to the universal Latin Church in 1457 by Pope Callistus III, in thanksgiving for the Christian victory at Belgrade that broke the Ottoman advance.
Christian tradition from at least the fourth century identifies the mountain as Mount Tabor in Lower Galilee — a distinctive dome rising above the Jezreel Plain, a short journey from Nazareth where the Franciscans have kept the sanctuary since the 1630s. The present Church of the Transfiguration, built in 1924 over the ruins of Crusader and Byzantine churches, stands where the Pilgrim of Bordeaux (333 AD) already noted a "church of the Mount of the Christ."
From Tabor's summit, pilgrims look south across the Galilee toward Jerusalem, where the Transfigured Christ's face is venerated in the Holy Sepulchre, and east across the mosaic of shrines of the Galilee ministry. The 1457 victory that gave the feast to the whole Church was itself a kind of transfiguration of fear into hope — fittingly, the feast's liturgy holds the mountain's light and the coming Passion as one.
