2nd Sunday of Lent 2021 Year B

 

Second Sunday of Lent (B)

(Genesis 22:1-2; 9-13, 15-18; Romans 8:31-34; St. Mark’s Gospel 9:2-10)

 

Jesus was well aware that His disciples were, at present, rejoicing in the presence of their Lord: He was the Bridegroom and they were the Bridegroom’s most privileged friends.  However, such present, earthly, joy, though holy, would not be enough to sustain them through the trials that lay ahead of them.  And that, People of God, is something we should notice. Joy in the Lord, based largely on emotional experiences would, most certainly, not be enough for Jesus‘ disciples: their joy, their love, had to be firmly established, as must ours also, on Faith, shot-through and made incandescent, with Hope, and aspiring to a self-less culmination of love for the Person of JESUS.  Therefore:

Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and led them up on a high mountain apart by themselves; and He was transfigured before them.

Why did Jesus take these three particular disciples with Him on that momentous occasion?

The case for Peter is clear enough since he had just -- in the presence, and in the name, of all the disciples – confessed Jesus as the Christ:

            ‘Who do you say that I am?’   ‘You are the Christ!’  (Mark 8:29)

Moreover, Jesus recognized that Peter had been personally chosen and blessed by His Father in order to make that confession; therefore, as we learn from St. Matthew (16:17), following His Father’s lead, He named Peter as the Rock upon which He would subsequently build His Church.  Peter – spokesman of the disciples, individually blessed by the Father, and chosen as the rock on which Jesus would build His Church – was indeed pre-eminently suited to accompany Jesus to the mountain top.

James the Greater, son Zebedee, would become leader of the earliest group of Jewish believers in Jesus to form the original Christian Church in Jerusalem; and for so prominent a position, and destined to become the first of the Apostles to suffer martyrdom for Jesus’ sake about the year 44 AD, he had to be extremely well prepared for a calling so demanding and controversial, and a destiny so pressing;  he became Jesus’ second choice to follow Himself along with Simon Peter.

Perhaps the reason for John’s being taken by Jesus to the Mount of Transfiguration is to be sought in the mysterious nature of his authorship of the Gospel now bearing his name.  For, strangely enough, all three Synoptic Gospels tell of Jesus’ Transfiguration though none of the named authors was present on the Mount, whereas John, on the other hand, though actually present on that unique occasion does not give us any explicit details of it!

He was quite a young man at the time, a very committed and observant, sensitive and impressionable, disciple of the Lord.  He was so deeply affected by what he experienced on the Mount of Transfiguration – an event second only to the unseen moment of Jesus’ Resurrection as testimony to His divinity – that whereas Peter (the source for St. Mark’s Gospel), a mature man of the world, would give clear and factual reminiscences of the event, John would, just as Jesus envisaged, remain (cf. John 21:22): recalling, considering and reconsidering, lovingly praying-over and contemplating, what had taken place and what had been said on those heights of Tabor, as he unremittingly sought to appreciate their purest truth and assimilate their deepest significance for his apostolic understanding of Jesus.  When he ultimately felt able/compelled to write down or hand on what had by then, for so long filled his mind, heart, and soul, His resultant Gospel would be replete, not so much with factual details of that wondrous occasion, but rather with the all-enveloping atmosphere of divine authority and saving truth engendered by Jesus’ communion with His Father in the unity of the overshadowing Spirit … a presence and communion which John knew full well was not a passing, occasional occurrence for Jesus, but rather a passing manifestation of what was the enduring character His whole life on earth: for He always lived for and in the presence of His Father: doing His will, proclaiming His truth, and promoting His glory to the utmost of His being in the power of the Spirit of Them both.

Therefore, as I have said, the faith of these individuals so very distinct and yet, as pillars of the nascent Church so mutually complementary in their endowments, needed to be made enduringly sure on the basis of the divine authority of the words and teaching of Jesus, the unquenchable hope given by the abiding presence and power of the Holy Spirit, and a sacramentally- incandescent love for the Person of Jesus in His Church.  To that end, these three men were afforded an experience that would allow them to glimpse briefly something of the teaching authority, the hidden majesty, and indeed the heavenly glory of the Lord.

First of all:

Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, and they were conversing with Jesus.

This united witness of the Scriptures – Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets – solemnly confirmed Jesus as Lord of heaven, the long proclaimed and eagerly awaited Seed of God’s promise to Abraham, of which we heard in the first reading and as Jesus Himself said (John 5: 39, 46):

You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me.

If you believed Moses you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.

Dear People of God, we must most sincerely try to love and appreciate the Scriptures aright if we would know and love Jesus in spirit and in truth, if we would remain firm and, indeed, grow even stronger in our faith through times of trial and temptation.

Then, to the yet greater awe and fear-of-the-Lord (a truly sublime virtue!) of the disciples:

A cloud came, casting a shadow over them, and from the cloud came a voice: ‘This is My beloved Son.  Listen to Him!

The heavenly Father Himself – they had no doubt of that – was impressing upon them again the authority of Jesus’ words and teaching.  But surely, there is something more, something far more intimate and personal than ‘listening’ being advised, even commanded, here; for why did the Father speak, as it were publicly, of what was most intimately Personal between Himself and His Son … that is His love for His Son: This is My Beloved?  Surely, the Father is there, not commanding, not even so much as urging, but most delicately drawing those who are initially committed to His Son, to learn from Him, the Father Himself, how rightly and fully to love their Lord:

            This is My beloved Son!

This approach is far more compelling and inviting than any command could be; it is a divine inspiration and heartfelt Personal invitation and call from the Father; it is the sublime source of those subsequent words of Jesus (Jn. 6: 44):

            No one can come to Me unless the Father Who sent Me draw him.

Now we too should turn to and prayerfully learn something from the Father drawing us to Jesus, His beloved Son, when, at Holy Mass, we prepare to welcome Him into our midst as the Father’s sacramental pledge of love for mankind; and most especially, as we receive Him into our individual hearts as the Father’s Personal Gift of Love to each one of us.  For we should recall, first of all, that Jesus is being given to us by the Father that we might love Him in the power of His accompanying Spirit of Love, and secondly that the Beloved Son we are receiving wills to live in us, and love as One of us, that He might become – in the sacrifice of Holy Mass -- our gift of love for the Father,  seeking to draw us with Himself as His gift to the Father.

Holy Communion is that doubly divine and momentous occasion when we are able and called to learn from the gifting Father how to love, better and ever more personally, His beloved Son; and also how best to allow His Son to lovingly respond to and live for the Father in and through us by the Holy Spirit abiding in and with us as Jesus’ Gift.

The disciples descended with Jesus from those heights so beautiful seen from earth and so open to heaven, with a faith now transfigured into an anticipation of Christian and Apostolic Faith.  Despite Jesus’ warning of His approaching suffering -- His rejection by the religious authorities, and resultant death lurking at the back of their minds -- they had received a faith-vision of Jesus’ heavenly glory, hidden as yet from earthly scrutiny, but something nevertheless, both beautiful and sure, that would enable them to relate aright to the Resurrection Jesus promised would follow His Death in three days. Because they would be most sorely tried by their Lord’s suffering and death, this ‘dry-dock’ work of preparation and confirmation undertaken on the Mount of Transfiguration would be sedulously pursued by the Lord as, again and again, for a second and then a third time, He clearly warned and lovingly prepared them for their time of trial and temptation.

People of God, we Catholics and Christians of today are, like the original fathers of our Faith, subject to trial and temptation throughout the world; we must, therefore, learn how to protect our Faith, our Christian civilization, and indeed our own selves.  We must ‘listen to Him’ if we would be strong in faith and love for eternal life, for our adversaries subject the Faith to great stress and savage attacks all over the world.  Our own governments, rejecting their Christian heritage, are solicitous only for their own permanence in popularity and power.  As Catholics and Christians, we are not – like many militant, pseudo-religious groups – allowed to hate and lust, be it for pleasure or for power!  How such connivance with native passions stirs up ‘religious zeal’ in all sorts of people but most especially in the young, short of understanding and emotional stability, and most eager to make their mark by doing what comes so easily and naturally if encouraged and praised by evil masters!

Our Christian strength – for we are not allowed to become ‘wimps’ ever shivering between humanism and emotionalism – our strength has to come, as Jesus taught, from our faith in Himself, and has to express itself through the power of His Spirit: faith must not be explained away by rational expediency, nor spiritual power subverted by trite and emotional platitudes meant above all to avoid trouble or emolliate opposition.

Moreover, as Jesus was so solicitous for His disciples and His future Church, we too must look to our children who need help as they try to understand their humanity and adapt to the society around them.  To those ends they should be taught morals and guided towards love of what is truly beautiful.  Of themselves, they are not ‘positively’ innocent; in infancy their relative helplessness demands that they instinctively wail and grab to satisfy their most basic needs, and they need to be loved and guided lest, as they grow stronger in body, they continue to seek and grab, no longer for what they need, but for what they fancy.  Of course, their greatest need as they are growing up is for faith and spiritual strength to withstand peer-pressure which would force them into compliance with group excitement and amusement without reference to any personal thinking or religious morals.  Of one thing we can be certain, children left to ‘find out for themselves’ will rarely find out what is good and true for themselves; they will be led, drawn along, by the examples and solicitations of others in their group, responding to nothing better than the shared exuberance of youth under the domination of passions and pride.  Because of such sharing in emotional awareness and excitement too few members of a group of friends or ‘mates’ dare to ‘go it alone’ and, following their personal conscience, to resist, or seek to control, that of which they cannot actually approve, but dare not openly disapprove.

Good Catholic and Christian parenthood is indeed demanding, but it is a most beautiful art and school of prayer with lifelong and indeed eternal rewards.

People of God, delight in the Lord Jesus; try ever to follow confidently His example; trust humbly in the teaching of His Church and her Scriptures; and never give up hoping that the goodness of God Who gives His own Son for and to us all, will lead you to share in the eternal glory of Jesus before the Father if you persevere faithfully walking with Him along life’s way to heaven’s reward.