Then Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain. Now the glory of the Lord rested on Mount Sinai, and the cloud covered it six days. And on the seventh day He called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. The sight of the glory of the Lord was like a consuming fire on the top of the mountain in the eyes of the children of Israel. So Moses went into the midst of the cloud and went up into the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights. (Exodus 24:15-18)
The above text is an excerpt from one of the Old Testament lessons for the Feast of the Transfiguration. Moses climbs the Mount Sinai to meet the Lord which prefigures his encounter with Christ on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration. St Gregory Palamas writes:
The light of the Lord’s Transfiguration does not come and go, after all, nor is it circumscribed, nor is it subject to our power of perception, even if it is seen by bodily eyes and for a short period of time, and within the narrow space of the mountaintop. But ‘the Lords initiates were transferred,’ as one writer puts it, ‘from flesh to spirit in that moment, by a change in their sensory powers’ [St Maximus the Confessor], which the spirit brought about in them. So they saw – in whatever place and degree the power of the divine Spirit bestowed on them – that ineffable light. (LIGHT ON THE MOUNTAIN, p 360)
Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev comments:
And so we have the prophetic word confirmed, which you do well to heed as a light that shines in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts; (2 Peter 1:19)
According to Saint Gregory Palamas the light of the Transfiguration ‘is not something that comes to be and then vanishes’. Rather, Christ’s disciples experienced a transformation of their senses so that ‘they beheld the ineffable light where and to the extent that the spirit granted it to them’. This was, therefore, not only a prefiguration of the eternal blessedness to which all Christians look forward, but also the Kingdom of God already revealed, realized and come. (THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY, p 108)