Transfiguration

One of the twelve major feasts of our Church is the feast of the Transfiguration of Our Lord which is recounted in three of the four Gospels (Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 9:2-8; and Luke 9:28-36). Although the feast goes back to the fourth century, its solemn observance in the Eastern Church began in the sixth century when the liturgical calendar of the Eastern Church became more highly developed.

Originally the feast was observed in February, putting its celebration during the Great Fast. With the exception of the feast of the Annunciation, joyful feasts are not celebrated during a fast period. The Annunciation is only celebrated during March because it is exactly nine months before the feast of Christmas, the feast remembering Christ’s birth.

The Transfiguration was transferred to the 6th of August. This date was chosen because the historian Eusebius and St. John Damascene were of the opinion that the event took place forty days before Christ’s death. August 6th is forty days before the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, a feast that commemorates the passion and death of Christ (Hopefully by sharing this information my readers will begin to see how the Eastern Church thinks and acts).

It is a custom to bless fruit on this feast. This was namely due to the fact that this is a harvest time feast and it also offered the Church an opportunity to develop a spiritual meaning for the blessing of fruit. The Canons of the Holy Apostles at the end of the third century stipulate such a tradition and the Apostolic Constitutions of the fourth century actually have a blessing prayer articulated. The Synod of Carthage (318) gave prescriptions concerning the blessing of first fruits and the Sixth Ecumenical Council (691) spoke about the blessing of grapes and wheat.

In Rus the Church of Kiev developed the tradition of blessing any fruit that was ripe at the time. The most typical fruit blessed was apples since grapes were not abundant in that part of the world, stressing that it is not important what type of fruit is blessed.

The symbolism: There is always some sort of seed at the core of any piece of fruit. That seed gives the fruit life – the ability to grow and ripen. At the core of every human there is the seed of life, which is, in some mysterious way, a sharing in God’s own life-force. The fruit that we bless reminds us that the seed of life within us is God Himself, sharing His own life with us (Remember that the life-force in all living things is the same. It is only the external characteristics of any life form that individualizes it). Indeed, one of the Eastern Church’s greatest abilities has been to find true symbols to represent what we celebrate