Going Up and Coming Down Tabor with Faith, Second Sunday of Lent (A), March 4, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Immaculate Conception Parish, Washington, DC
Second Sunday of Lent, Year A
Parish Day of Recollection: “Extraordinary Help for a Holy Lent:
The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”
March 4, 2023
Gen 12:1-4, Ps 33, 2 Tim 1:8-10, Mt 17:1-9

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• The Second Sunday of Lent is called the Sunday of Abraham and the Transfiguration because every year in the first reading we focus on part of the story of the calling of Abraham and in the Gospel one of the evangelist’s accounts of Jesus’ transfiguration at the top of the very high mountain. The lessons we learn in these scenes are important not only for us to live Lent well but, especially for those who are now finishing up today’s parish retreat, for us to make well the transition that God wants us to help us make.
• Lent, and every retreat, is about growth in faith and Abraham shows us very clearly what real faith is, the type of faith to which God calls each of us and wants to renew in us. When Abraham was 75 years old — well past retirement age for people today — the Lord called him in Ur of the Chaldeans and told him to leave the land of his kinfolk and go to a land He would show him. God asked him to pack his bags, get his extended family and animals and leave behind everything, his language, his land, his friends. Abraham trusted in God and departed his comfortable, familiar surroundings, not knowing where his destination would be. That was only the beginning of the ways God challenged Abraham to trust in Him. God gave him a promise, one that would have sounded crazy to Abraham and his wife, fellow septuagenarian Sara, who were childless at the time. “I will make of you a great nation.” How could Abraham become a great nation if he and his wife had been unable to have children during what was likely fifty or sixty years of marriage? Yet Abraham believed again. When they arrived in Canaan, Abraham found that the land God was intending to give him and his eventual descendants was not going to come to him with a golden key. He He and his family were going to have to fight for the land, against several tribes consecutively. Abraham again consented. After they were settled, Abraham and Sara tried for 24 years to have a child, to no avail. But he continued to believe in the Lord’s promise, despite the excruciatingly long wait. Eventually when Abraham was 100, Sarah gave birth to Isaac, who was destined, Abraham thought, to be the one through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. Thirteen years later, however, God decided to test Abraham’s faith to the utmost. He asked Abraham to go to Mt. Moriah, a hill in Jerusalem, and there sacrifice his son, the son for whom he had waited for so long and in whom he had put so much hope. Abraham did what the Lord wanted, even though it would have seemed so contradictory to God’s previous plans. He did so hoping that God himself would provide the lamb for the Holocaust. Isaac his son carried the wood. Abraham built the altar and then was prepared to sacrifice his own son to the Lord, something that the Canaanite pagans were accustomed to do. He did so, as the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, fully believing that even if he should kill his son, God would raise his son from the dead (Heb 11:19), because Isaac was the son of the promise through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. But as Abraham’s hand was coming down with the knife, the angel of the Lord stopped him.
• The Church gives us the story of Abraham each year at the beginning of Lent first because we’re called to have faith similar to Abraham’s. While God might or might not ask us to leave behind everything and go to fight to win a faraway land, He does call us to leave our own comfort zones each Lent, trusting in Him completely. He calls us to believe in His Word, above all things, even if that word means going against what we know of biology and common sense and believing that a couple in their 90s can conceive their first child. God also calls us to be willing to sacrifice everything — even people or things we love most — for him, if he asks us. “You cannot be my disciple,” Jesus said once, “unless you prefer me to your family… to your possessions… to your very life” (Lk 14:26 ff). This is what St. Paul means in today’s second reading when he calls St. Timothy and us to a “holy life … according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus.” Lent and every retreat are meant to help us to trust in Jesus like that, to depart from the secure places we have constructed to be led by God on the journey of faith.
• In the Transfiguration we see several aspects of that journey. The Church gives us the Gospel of the Transfiguration every year on this second Sunday for the same reason why God the Father conceded to Peter, James and John the experience of the Transfiguration on the mountain in the first place: to give us a foretaste of Jesus Christ’s glory to sustain us when we will see Jesus transfigured in blood, pain and suffering on Good Friday. There is an intrinsic connection between Mt. Tabor and the hill of Calvary, between the glory of the Transfiguration and the glorification of Christ on the throne of the Cross.
• We see it in what the subject matter of the conversation between Jesus and the two great heroes of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah. Moses and Elijah are both precursors of Lent. Elijah had lived a Lent of 40 days crossing the desert to the mountain of God, Horeb, being hunted by King Ahab. Moses had spent 40 days in prayer at the tomb of Mt. Sinai and then 40 years with the Jews in the desert. They came specifically to speak with Jesus not about the glory that was to come, not about Heaven, but about the culmination of the Lenten Season: Jesus’ suffering, Cross and death. We see this in the word St. Luke uses in his account of the Transfiguration: they spoke about the “exodus” that Jesus was to accomplish in Jerusalem. This exodus meant the passage Jesus would make from the slavery of death to the Promised Land of eternal life, just as Moses had led the Israelites in the exodus from slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land of Israel. Moses and Elijah had come to speak about that new Passover that Jesus was going to accomplish during the rite of the Old Passover to begin on the 14th of the month of Nisan, on Holy Thursday. Jesus, however, was speaking about this exodus while he was gloriously transfigured, not cowering in fear. God the Father wanted Peter, James and John — and all of us here — to see this scene, so that it would sustain our faith when the suffering comes.
• The second intrinsic connection between Tabor and Calvary is what God the Father says to the three apostles. God the Father is rather reticent in the New Testament. He speaks only three times. The first time is at Jesus’ baptism, when he said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.” The last time is during the Last Supper when he stated that he had glorified his Son and would glorify him again. This time at the top of Mt. Tabor, however, when he spoke from the cloud, he went further. The first thing he said reiterated his Son’s true identity. Just before this scene in St. Matthew’s Gospel were the questions Jesus had asked the apostles in Caesarea Philippi: Who do people say that the Son of Man is? And who do you say that I am? Jesus wasn’t John the Baptist, or Elijah, or one of the prophets, as many of the people believed. He wasn’t even just the long-awaited Messiah. God the Father thundered from heaven, “This is my beloved Son!” How could Peter, James and John ever forget that? Then this Father of so few words gave a command to the three apostles that on the surface makes little sense: “Listen to Him!”  We can ask: What had the apostles been doing for the past two plus years but listening to Jesus? They listened to him call them from their boats to be fishers of men. They heard all his parables, the Sermon on the Mount and his great Eucharistic discourse. They listened to him teach them how to pray and instruct them as they walked along the dusty way. They listened to him console widows and sinners and lambaste the hypocritical Scribes and Pharisees. They had been listening to him almost constantly since they first met him. But God the Father noticed something that they themselves hadn’t grasped. They had been selectively listening to Jesus and they had been particularly tone deaf to what Jesus had been saying about how he was going to be betrayed, suffer greatly in Jerusalem, be tortured, crucified, killed and on the third day be raised. Even though Jesus told them this at least three times, they didn’t want to hear it, and when Good Friday came, most of them were not within earshot to hear him say his seven last words on Calvary. Even after the foretold crucifixion, which would have been a confirmation of what Jesus had prophesied, they still really didn’t grasp what he said about being raised on the third day and were stunned when he walked through the closed doors of the upper room. St. Thomas didn’t even believe when the others told him, but only when he saw Jesus’ gloriously transfigured resurrected body with its unbloody wounds. So these words of the celestial Father were very appropriate. They needed to know of Jesus’ divinity and to believe in his words. They needed to keep the connection between Jesus’ glory and his suffering. They needed to have faith that Jesus’ exodus, as painful as it would be, would lead them all to the promised land. So that’s why God the Father said, “Listen to him!” This Sunday, the same Father gives us the same command. He wants us to listen to everything Jesus his beloved Son teaches, about the glories of the kingdom of heaven, but also about the suffering we may experience on earth, so that we might follow him along the spiritual exodus into eternal life, where not only will he be transfigured, but God willing, we will be glorified.
• The three apostles on the Mountain needed to have the type of faith of Abraham, to listen to God’s words and trust in what Jesus had said, to trust in his promises, even though it was going to be a very difficult journey ahead. They needed, in fact, to go beyond the faith of Abraham when God’s angel didn’t stop the Roman soldiers from hammering Christ to the Cross and piercing his side with a lance. We, too, need that same faith in God as we traverse the desert of human life.
• Our Lenten journey, and the journey of our life, involves both climbing Tabor with Jesus and descending. It involves the exertion of the hike, which points to the effort that a holy Lent and true Christian life entails. Mount Tabor towers over Galilee and the Plains of Megiddo and takes over ten minutes to climb in vans zig-zagging up narrow paths. It would require vigorous climbers at least a couple of hours to ascend on foot. Jesus and the three apostles needed to leave civilization behind, to leave their comfort zones behind, and climb with Jesus, sweating, probably gasping for air, to pray with Jesus. This Lent the Lord is likewise asking of us to make an exertion. He’s calling us to hard work. He’s calling us to be on the move. This annual spiritual altitude training, however, is meant to strengthen us for the uphill marathon of life and the inevitable vicissitudes that arise.
• But we can’t stay there at the top of the mountain. St. Peter volunteered to build three booths, one for Jesus, another for Moses and a third for Elijah, to keep the experience going. The experience of a retreat has often by referred to by the saints as a “Tabor” experience. We, like St. Peter, after the exertion of climbing up the hill and getting to the summit where we get glimpses of God’s glory, where God speaks to us, want the experience to continue. But that wasn’t Jesus’ intention for them or for us. Jesus led them up to give them a glimpse of his glory, but then he was going to lead them down Tabor in order to climb Calvary.” It’s necessary to leave the mountaintop with Christ, to go back into the world, and then climb with him Calvary. But just like the three apostles, we’re not supposed to be going back into the world the way we arrived. We’re meant to go transformed, yes, even transfigured by the graces and the blessings God has given us here. On this retreat we will four times behold Jesus transfigured not in dazzling white garments but under the appearances of bread and wine. We have heard the Father’s voice in private prayer, in the readings of His Word, even, possibly, with a New England accent in the conferences and homilies. We know that various Crosses await, but we also know the power and the wisdom of those Crosses and how they’re gifts of the Lord to try to bring us, with the Crucified Christ, to eternal glory.
• Today we have left our homes not to climb the Mount of Transfiguration but to ascend the altar of God. It’s at Mass that Lent, that a retreat, and everything else in our faith finds its source and summit. The Lord is doubtless grateful that we’ve made the exertion to leave our comfort zones and come to be with him. It’s here that he seeks to strengthen our faith so that it might be like Abraham’s and ultimately like Peter’s, James’ and John’s. It’s here that we see Jesus transfigured not in glory but in humility. It’s here that we listen to his word, the words of eternal life, and seek to become living commentaries of it. It’s here that we build a booth for Christ within us. And each time we go to Mass, God give us as a reward for our exertions, as a foretaste of forever, his Beloved Son. As we prepare to behold that Son, the Lamb of God, God the Father says to us, “Listen to him! Do whatever he tells you! Take seriously his words throughout Lent. Accompany him, on the pilgrimage on which he wants to lead you up the exceedingly high mountain of the Celestial Jerusalem, to my house where I’ve built a booth not only for him, for Moses and for Elijah, but for you!”

The readings for Mass were: 

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