Learning and Living the Lenten Lessons of Tabor, Second Sunday of Lent (A), March 5, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Second Sunday of Lent, Year A
March 5, 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: 

• On the first Sunday of Lent, the Church always leads us out with Christ into the desert, so that we can get away from the distractions of day to day life and focus with Christ on our prayer, almsgiving and fasting as respective antidotes to the way that the devil tries to tempt us to distort our relationships with God, others and within ourselves. On the Second Sunday of Lent each year, the Church always has us make a different pilgrimage, this time with Jesus, Peter, James and John up the Mount of Transfiguration, where Christ seeks to teach us three valuable lessons necessary for a good Lent and a holy life.
• The first lesson is about exertion, about the effort, that a holy Lent and true Christian life entails. Jesus leads Peter, James and John on a hike up what St. Matthew calls an “exceedingly high mountain.” Christian tradition associates the place where Jesus was transfigured as Mount Tabor, which towers over Galilee and the Plains of Megiddo, and takes over ten minutes to climb in vans zig-zagging up narrow paths. It would take vigorous climbers at least a few hours to ascend on foot. The three apostles needed to leave civilization behind, they needed to leave their comfort zones behind, and climb with Jesus, sweating, probably gasping for air, to pray. This Lent the Lord Jesus 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. And the pilgrimage he seeks to have us make with him isn’t in a high-speed van. This annual spiritual altitude training, however, is meant to strengthen us for the uphill marathon of life and the inevitable vicissitudes that arise. The first test is whether we will put in the effort to live a good and holy Lent, whether we will make bold resolutions with regard to prayer, fasting and charity, or whether we will try to live a watered down one.
• The second Lenten lesson is the help God wants to give us as we make that spiritual and often physical ascent. When they reach the top of the mountain, Saints Peter, James and John see something extraordinary. Jesus is transfigured. He and his clothes become radiant. St. Luke tells us that he speaks with Moses and Elijah, the greatest figures in Jewish history who symbolize the law and the prophets, about the “exodus” he was to accomplish in Jerusalem, when Jesus would seek to lead us, not from slavery in Egypt through the Red Sea and the desert to the promised land, but through slavery to sin through baptism into his kingdom and ultimately from death to eternal life. The experience of the various theophanies at the top of the mountain are so powerful that the apostles don’t know what to say, but it leads Peter immediately to want to get into real estate, building booths for Jesus, Moses and Elijah, to keep the experience going for as long as possible. Why did Jesus want them to have this experience? The reason was ultimately to strengthen them to remain strong in faith even when they would descend the Mount of Transfiguration to ascend the hill of Calvary. When they would see Jesus transfigured in blood, they would be able to remember Jesus in glory. The Church helps us to capture the reason for Jesus’ transfiguration in the Eucharistic Preface for Mass, in which the priest prays, “For after [Jesus] had told the disciples of his coming death, on the holy mountain he manifested to them his glory, to show, even by the testimony of the law and the prophets, that the Passion leads to the glory of the Resurrection.” The Transfiguration was to sustain their faith in trial. The vision of Jesus’ glory has sustained the faith of so many martyrs in making the sacrifice of themselves for God, because they knew that once they breathed their last, they would see Jesus in glory. It’s meant similarly to sustain our faith.
• The final lesson might be the most important. God the Father speaks. He begins by affirming his Beloved Son’s identity but then gives a curious imperative: “This is my beloved Son,” he thunders, “Listen to him!” We might ask: What had Peter, James and John been doing for the previous two 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 that they had been selectively listening to Jesus. 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 took place, which would have been a confirmation of everything Jesus had prophesied, they still really didn’t grasp what he indicated about being raised on the third day and were stunned when he walked through the closed doors of the upper room. St. Thomas still didn’t believe after 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. God the Father knew that they were ignoring what Jesus was foretelling about his transfiguration in suffering, when instead of dazzling white they would see darkness on earth, and instead of radiant clothes he would be stripped and covered in blood. He knew they were also ignoring Jesus’ summons to follow him all the way, to deny themselves, pick up their cross daily and follow him along the Way of the Cross to glory. So that’s why he 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 Jesus along the spiritual exodus into eternal life, where not only will he be transfigured, but God willing, we, too, will be glorified.
• To help us learn how to follow him faithfully on that journey, the Church every year on the Second Sunday of Lent also gives us in the first reading part of the vocational story of Abraham, who shows us very clearly what real faith is. 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 red carpet and a golden key. Instead, he and his family were going to have to fight it, against several tribes consecutively. Abraham again consented. After they were settled, Abraham and Sara tried not just for a year or two, but for 24 years to have a child, to no avail. Sara lost her confidence, but Abraham 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 all of us to leave behind everything and go to fight to win a faraway land, He does call each of us to leave our own comfort zones each Lent, trusting in Him completely. He calls us to trust 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 would say elsewhere, “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 “bear [our] share of hardship for the sake of the Gospel,” to live a “holy life … according to [God’s] own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus.” Lent is meant to help us to trust in Jesus like Abraham, so that we will be willing to bear our hardship in faith, to leave the confomrtable places we have constructed, to live according to God’s design and grace and be led by him on the journey of faith.
• Today with faith we do not climb the Mount of Transfiguration but ascend the altar of God. It’s at Mass that Lent and everything else in our faith finds its source and summit. 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 today’s Mass were: 

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