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.
