Faith, for Peter, is not suspended in religious abstraction. It is tied to something that happened in time and space.
Most people in my experience are perfectly fine with Christianity as long as it behaves like a fairytale. We like the poetry, the symbolism, the vague encouragement to be kind. What makes us nervous is when the church insists on words like happened, seen, and witnessed.
Modern people are not opposed to meaning; we are opposed to claims. We’ll happily admire a story that lifts the heart, but we bristle when that story refuses to stay in the realm of metaphor and starts knocking on the door of history. The trouble is that the Christian faith—especially in moments like the Transfiguration—won’t let us keep it safely unreal.
Modern people are not opposed to meaning; we are opposed to claims.
That resistance isn’t new. Peter knew it would be there. Writing near the end of his life, with his execution looming, he addresses the suspicion head-on:
“For we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).
That sentence alone refuses to let Christianity retreat into the harmless category of “spiritual story.” Peter doesn’t say, This experience was meaningful to me. He doesn’t say, This is how I interpret reality. He says, in plain, almost stubborn language: I saw it. This is not the language of myth-making. It’s the language of testimony. Courtroom language. The kind of claim that can be challenged, mocked, or disproven.
And Peter knows exactly how implausible it sounds.
The Transfiguration itself feels almost embarrassingly over the top. Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain. His appearance changes. His clothes blaze with an unearthly whiteness. Moses and Elijah appear and speak with him about his exodus. A cloud descends. A voice declares, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” The disciples fall on their faces in terror.
If you were inventing a religion to make yourself look good—or to keep followers calm and collected—this would be a strange scene to fabricate. The disciples don’t look very insightful. Peter blurts out nonsense. Everyone panics. No one takes charge. Fairytales tend to smooth the edges; eyewitness accounts leave them jagged. And those rough edges matter.
The point was not to inspire the disciples to climb higher or try harder. It was to show them—just for a moment—who Jesus really is.
Peter does not recount the Transfiguration as a spiritual metaphor or a symbolic vision. This wasn’t some hippy camping trip up in the mountains where John and James brought some peyote or ayahuasca either. No. He insists it was a real moment in which God briefly pulled back the curtain. The point was not to inspire the disciples to climb higher or try harder. It was to show them—just for a moment—who Jesus really is.
Because most of the time, Jesus does not look glorious.
He looks ordinary. He gets tired. He’s misunderstood. He disappoints expectations. Eventually, he looks defeated, bleeding, and dead. The Transfiguration interrupts that pattern with a flash of reality: this carpenter from Nazareth is also the Lord of glory. The one who will soon hang on a cross is the same one before whom Moses and Elijah stand.
We live in our culture that wants glory without suffering and power without vulnerability. But the Transfiguration doesn’t cancel the cross; it interprets it. It tells us that the humiliation to come is not evidence that God has lost control. It is evidence of how God chooses to save.
God gives us just enough light to trust him, but never enough to manage him. That’s exactly what happens on the mountain. The disciples see glory—but only briefly. Then Jesus leads them back down, straight into confusion, failure, and eventually betrayal. The Transfiguration does not eliminate doubt. Peter himself will deny Jesus after seeing this very scene. Eyewitness testimony does not turn sinners into heroes, but instead anchors hope somewhere outside of them.
I believe this is why Peter returns to this moment at the end of his life. Facing death, he does not appeal to his feelings or his faithfulness. He appeals to a real event. “We were with him,” he says. “We heard the voice” (2 Peter 1:18). Faith, for Peter, is not suspended in religious abstraction. It is tied to something that happened in time and space.
This matters more than we might like to admit. If Christianity is only a fairytale—only a helpful story that gives meaning—then it will eventually collapse under the weight of real life. Suffering has a way of exposing thin comforts. Guilt has a way of mocking vague inspiration. Fairytales are lovely, but they crack when leaned on too hard.
Facts—especially grace-filled facts—can bear weight.
The Transfiguration tells us that the Jesus who meets us in our ordinary, unremarkable lives is the same Jesus who radiates uncreated light. It tells us that the weakness we see now is not the whole story. And it tells us that our faith is not grounded in a cleverly devised myth, but in eyewitness testimony handed down by people who had nothing to gain by lying.
In the end, Christianity doesn’t ask us to believe in fairytales. It asks us to trust a witness. And it invites us—not to stay on the mountain—but to listen to the One who came down from it, carrying glory quietly, all the way to the cross, for us.
