Mk 9:2-10
Dear Friends, Our task for Lent is clear. This is a time to free our hearts and to enter more deeply into to the great mystery of our faith, the boundless act of God’s love in or crucified Savior.The somber message of Lent and the glory of the Transfiguration offer us a challenge similar to the challenge of the total message of Jesus. We are trying to grasp how death opens up to life.
When Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” (Mk 8:29), Peter answered, “The Messiah.” (Mk 8:29) No doubt, Peter thought he had arrived safely at the conclusion of his search. Then Jesus lays the Jerusalem journey with the Cross and death on poor Peter. He felt confused and bewildered. Suffering and God, Messiah and failure were opposites he was ready to unite.
We share Peter’s confusion when we try to equate our belief in an all- loving and an all-powerful God and the horrors we hear and see daily in the news and the experience in our lives. If we are honest and open to the uttlerly harsh depth of violence and hatred, the insanity of war and ambiguity of nature’s horrors, we have to ask, How can this be?
This is the ultimate question about the broken and sinful condition of humankind. It seems history is an endless display of human evil and savagery. This happens with full-blown consistency on a personal level and, in the case of climate change, it involves the whole world. How can this be? The hunger and thirst of millions is right in front of us while we continually look for new places to store our grain? The picture of the children of Gaza stretching out their little pans for a spoonful of food leads us to the question, How can this be? In a few months it will be similar story in new place coming to us on the nightly news.
God has only one answer to this repeating and universal horror. His beloved Son has entered into the consequences of sin from our first parents that unleased this persistent evil. The result was not an explanation we can put into our textbooks. It was the reality of the Crucified Christ so that we can ask in a new way and with new wonder, How can this be? How can our God suffer and die for all of us, both good and bad?
The Cross was the way God has responded to the curse of theall-pervading evil of human experience. In the Crucified Christ, God has given the answer to the ruthless destruction and waste of war, the ravages of climate change, the persistence of racism and sexism, the constant presence of the majority of humankind living in poverty and our enduring ability to discover new ways to degrade our brothers and sisters.
It is through that Crucified Christ that we must confront these expressions of evil whether that be personal like the death of a child or communal like the repeating gun violence in our nation. Christ assumed them all in his death and passage to the new reality of the Resurrection. This is God’s final word. This is the victory of love over hatred. This is the conquests of death by life eternal that begins now when we walk in love in the footsteps of Jesus. This is not information that we try to understand but a mystery we live by in the surrender of faith. Lent tells us our footsteps of faith must direct us first to Jeruslam and the Cross and then to new life in love in the Resurrection.
In the Transfiguration, Jesus reaffirms his divinity just as He does on the road to Jerusalem where He will be rejected, suffer and die. So, when the Father says, “This is my Beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. Listen to him.” (Mt 9:7) we are being called into the Pascal Mystery. This is the key to the placement of the Transfiguration story on this second Sunday of our Lenten journey.
Lent is a time to prepare to celebrate with new joy and hope, stronger faith and growing love, the great mystery of our faith and our life, the Death and Resurrection of Jesus the Christ.
“Listen to Him!” (Mk 9:7) ‘is the task our Lenten journey. It will draw us in freedom into the mystery that is Christ Crucified and Christ Risen.
