For the first readers of Luke’s Gospel, the parallels between the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ and the accounts of Moses and Elijah ascending the mountain were clear. Both prophets heard on the mountaintop the most important revelation, the foundation of the message they brought to Israel (Exodus 19; 1 Kings 19). Now the apostles take their place: together with the ancient prophets, 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 they are to proclaim to the whole world: “This is My beloved Son; I delight in Him!” As in ages past, the most important thing is revealed not in theological formulas or in the form of a secret doctrine, but in these words of Light about 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.

Paul begins his letter to the Christians of Galatia with a reproach that they, as we can see, easily and quickly abandoned what Paul had witnessed to them (vv. 6-7). And in his reproaches the apostle is extremely severe, excluding every possibility for a Christian to remain a Christian if he accepts the distorted gospel brought to the Galatians by certain preachers not named in the letter (vv. 8-10). At first glance, Paul's attitude toward a "different gospel" may appear overly harsh. Indeed, why not allow different points of view in the church on foundational matters?

But Paul, as we can see, looks at the matter differently, and not because he is worried about a lack of formal unanimity in the Galatian church. For him Christianity is not a search for truth, but truth itself; not a question, but the answer. In the search for truth, one can put forward various suppositions and different possible answers to foundational questions. But once it has been found, there is nothing more to search for and nothing more to suppose, because the true answer is always unambiguous and never hypothetical.

Of course, in our world, which is not yet fully transformed, and by means of our mind, which is not yet fully transformed, we are unable to see the truth in all its fullness, because both Christ and the Kingdom can be seen only with spiritual sight. But Paul speaks and acts as an inhabitant of the Kingdom and a witness of Christ. He bears witness to the One who is the answer, not to his own spiritual and intellectual searches. The point is not that the capacity for spiritual or intellectual search is bad in itself. The point is that it is out of place to ask questions when the living answer stands before you. Such a position can testify only to the insincerity of the search, or to delusion, to an unreadiness to see the truth that is revealed in such a way that, if the seeker received this revelation rightly, he would no longer have to search for anything. And the apostle does not want his Galatian brothers, having departed from Christ and the Kingdom that had opened to them as genuine reality, to find themselves again in the position of seekers, as if nothing had ever been revealed to them. Such a rollback would be a real spiritual catastrophe. It would mean the loss of the Kingdom, with completely unclear prospects for returning there later. Paul, of course, could not allow this, because the building up of the Kingdom was the meaning of the apostle's life and ministry.