The parallels between the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ and the accounts of Moses and Elijah going up the mountain were clear to the first readers of Luke's Gospel. On the mountaintop, both prophets heard the supreme revelation—the foundation of the message they brought to Israel (Exodus 19; 1 Kings 19). Now the apostles find themselves in their place: together with the prophets of old, they stand before the Source of revelation and, like them, hear the Father's voice from the cloud of light. This testimony is the foundation of the Gospel that they are to proclaim to the whole world: “This is My beloved Son; I delight in Him!” As in centuries past, what matters most is revealed not in theological formulas or as a secret doctrine, but in these words of Light concerning Light.

Today's reading includes two events that, at first glance, are connected only chronologically: the Transfiguration (vv. 28-36) and the healing of the possessed son of an unnamed man (vv. 38-45). And yet the Evangelist does not connect these two stories by accident. It would seem that, against the background of what had just happened, another healing, even one unsuccessful for the apostles, was an ordinary enough event that one might not even mention it.

Meanwhile Jesus' reaction to it was unusually harsh (v. 41). Commentators, of course, have still not come to a single opinion about whom Jesus' words primarily concern: the man who brought his son to Him, or the apostles. But against this background an important detail is the mention that, precisely after the unsuccessful healing, Jesus again and again reminds His disciples of His suffering and death (vv. 43-44), while they cannot understand Him at all: something hides from the apostles the meaning of what the Savior has said (v. 45). It is especially noteworthy that they were even afraid to ask the Teacher again. Until then He had never left their questions unanswered, and not once had He become angry at any question; what, then, could the disciples have been afraid of?

Of course, it was frightening to hear about the Teacher's death from His own lips, but the apostles were not children or cowards ready to hide their heads in the sand at the sight of danger. Apparently they did not simply fail to understand; rather, they did not accept Jesus' words, hoping that they were only a slip, a misunderstanding, or some image, a parable whose meaning would in time be explained. For on the day of the Transfiguration the apostles saw the Kingdom already in all its fullness; one could say that they came home to their Teacher, who had invited them to Himself in order to show them His true home. And there, on that day of triumph, He suddenly begins to speak to them about His death, which for them could only be defeat and catastrophe.

Such a thing, of course, could not fit into their consciousness: for the resurrection, in which the apostles of course believed, was still something too distant for them to become real within their own lives. And so they still did not trust Jesus to the end. But distrust destroys relationships, and when the moment of healing came, the moment of witness to the Kingdom, the apostles failed. Seeing this distrust, which had gone so far, Jesus may well have judged the situation with utmost severity. And no wonder: for the unreadiness mentioned here by the Evangelist to accept Jesus' words about His death and resurrection would later become the cause both of Peter's denial and of Judas' betrayal.

For Paul, Christianity is first of all witness, if we are speaking about words; and when words are used just like that, in argument for argument's sake or in argument for self-assertion, then for the apostle such disputes are equivalent to false witness.

Apparently, the recipients of his letter in Corinth did not perceive the situation so unequivocally. It seemed to them that Christianity was not only Christ and the Kingdom, but also something else, whether some new theology, or new morality, or some other new thing that could be argued and debated. And the discussions were conducted with complete seriousness and at times quite heatedly, because it was assumed that fundamental questions of spiritual life were being settled there, questions without whose answer Christianity was unthinkable. In reality, however, they were arguing about secondary things, and during the argument they gradually forgot its subject, trying more and more to affirm themselves and their own point of view.

The apostle, however, tries to bring the disputants back to reality. Indeed, did any one of them, when accepting Christ and experiencing the presence of the breath of the Kingdom in his life, need anything else? Did they then need any further doctrines, any theology, anything at all besides Christ and the Kingdom? And if not, why has all this now become so "relevant" to them that, for the sake of arguments about things secondary in essence, they forget what is most important? Or did they hear some other, new gospel besides the one they heard from Paul and from the other apostles?

The point, Paul says, is not that he does not know how to argue, or that he could not take part in the arguments and debates that had become so popular in the Corinthian church. But to do so would mean acknowledging the importance and value of something that is not at all important and has little value. It would mean recognizing as apostles those who lay claim to apostleship while not being apostles in essence, but only trying to present themselves as God's servants while being merely lovers of argument about topics that have no direct relation to spiritual life. To begin arguing with such disputants on their own level would mean testifying to them and to everyone around that their disputes deserve attention and are important for spiritual life, and recognizing in them a ministry equal to the apostolic ministry - a ministry of which they have no understanding at all. Of course, Paul could not go along with this and had no intention of entering into arguments with people who simply liked to argue.