Second Sunday of Lent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 24, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
February 24, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in the Gospel this Sunday, as we, with the apostles Peter, James and John, will behold Jesus transfigured among us. On the Second Sunday of Lent, the Church each year has us pray over the scene of the Lord’s transfiguration. Part of the reason is to give us, like God gave the three chosen apostles, a brief taste of the glory of Jesus, so that we may be strengthened for the journey of Lent just like Jesus intended to fortify these three friends before they would behold Jesus transfigured in blood on Mount Calvary. Knowing that the one who carried the Cross to Golgotha and the one who summons us in Lent to carry our Cross is in fact God provides the greatest possible confidence that the way of the Cross is in fact the divine way. And so it’s meant to inspire us to live Lent with great courage, focus and abandon. This year, as we continue to pray for all those in the Holy Land after the October 7 Hamas attacks and the ongoing war in Gaza, the remembrance of how the Lord became dazzlingly white is a powerful reminder that the bloodshed, hatred, and darkness do not have the last word, but that God himself entered not just the world but the Holy Land to lead us all on an exodus ultimately from death to life.
• The scene of the Transfiguration has three concrete lessons that are meant to influence the way that every Catholic lives Lent and life.
• The first lesson concerns the exertion, the effort, that a holy Lent entails. Jesus led Peter, James and John on what St. Mark calls a hike up a “high mountain apart by themselves.” Christian tradition normally associates the mountain 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 up narrow zig-zagging paths. It would take vigorous climbers at least a few hours to ascend on foot. But Scriptural scholars believe the more likely place where this glorification happened was Mount Hermon, now in southern Syria and close to Caesarea Philippi where the preceding scene in St. Matthew’s Gospel took place. Mount Hermon is 9,232 feet tall, approximately five times the height of Mt. Tabor (1886 feet). That would have been a whole day’s work to ascend. They would have needed to leave civilization behind, to leave their comfort zones behind, and to climb with Jesus, sweating, probably gasping for air, in order to pray with Jesus. The lesson for us this Lent is that the Lord is likewise asking of us to make an exertion. Lent is fundamentally dynamic. We’re called to be on the move. Jesus never says to us, “Stay where you are,” but always “Come!,” and “Go!” and “Follow me!” And the pilgrimage he seeks to have us make with him isn’t in a comfy golf cart. It’s not even in a mountain climbing zig-zagging van. He’s asking us to climb, to sweat, to work, and to leave our own comfort zones behind. Each of us needs to ask: What is the Lord asking me to leave behind in order to advance with him on the journey of faith?
• The second Lenten lesson is the help God gives us to make this exertion. In the Transfiguration, Saints Peter, James and John saw something extraordinary at the end of their spiritual and physical climb. Jesus was transfigured. He and his clothes became radiant. He was speaking with Moses and Elijah, the greatest figures in Jewish history, the personifications of the law and the prophets respectively, about the “exodus” he was to accomplish in Jerusalem. Like Moses led the Israelites from slavery through water and the desert to the promised land, Jesus was going to lead us to liberation, only this time the slavery is sin not Pharaoh, the water is baptismal not the Red Sea, the desert is not in the Middle East but in Lent, and the Promised Land is not flowing with milk and honey but the Living Water that wells up to eternal life. The experience of the various theophanies at the top of the mountain was so powerful that it left Peter, James and John speechless, but they wanted to keep the experience going for as long as possible, with Peter offering to build three tents one each for Jesus, Moses and Elijah. Why did this scene of the Transfiguration happen? As I alluded to before, the reason was ultimately to strengthen them to remain strong in faith even when they would descend the Mount of Transfiguration to ascend Mount 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.” It was to sustain their faith in trial. We know that it didn’t fully work. They fell asleep in the Garden. They fled in Gethsemane. Only John was present at the foot of the Cross. But while it for the most part failed them, it’s meant to sustain us. This vision of Jesus’ glory is what has sustained the faith of the martyrs in making the sacrifice of themselves for God, because they knew that once they breathed their last, they would see Jesus transfigured. This vision of Jesus’ glory, and how he wants us to share in it, is meant to give us the hope to persevere in faith no matter what trials come our way. It’s also what’s meant to help us live Lent boldly and make the sacrifices necessary in Lent to come into greater union with the Lord. If anything is keeping us from the Lord, the vision of the Lord’s glory will help us to excise them, or to use Jesus’ biblical image, to cut off those hands or feet and pluck out the eyes. The sacrifice is worth it! Whatever we have to give up makes sense compared to the glory of Jesus we await, the glory he wants to share with us.
• The final lesson is perhaps the most important. After all of the other aspects of Jesus’ transfiguration, God the Father finally speaks. He speaks only three times in the entire New Testament, at Jesus’ baptism, when he pronounces Jesus his beloved Son in whom he is well pleased; at the Last Supper when, in response to Jesus’ prayer to glorify his name replies that he has glorified it and will glorify it again; and here. But what he says is really quite strange when you think about it. After pronouncing Jesus once more as his Beloved Son — and answering the question Jesus asked in the previous scene when he surveyed who people and who the apostles were saying him to be — God the Father thundered, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!” It’s a peculiar imperative from God the Father. After all, 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 him say all his parables of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Sower and the Seed, the Lost Coin, the Lost Sheep, and so many others. They listened to the Sermon on the Mount, the Sermon on the Plain and the great Eucharistic discourse in the Capernaum synagogue. They listened to him teach them how to pray. They listened to him instruct them as they walked along the dusty streets of Palestine. They listened to him lambaste the hypocritical Scribes and Pharisees and console widows, sinners, and so many others. They had spent the last two years constantly listening to Jesus. 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. They didn’t want to hear it. Jesus ended up telling them what would occur three separate times, but they didn’t want to hear the message and when Good Friday came, most of them were not within earshot to hear Jesus’ seven last words. We see a glimpse of that at the end of this Sunday’s Gospel, when St. Mark tells us that Jesus charged Peter, James and John not to relate to anyone what they had seen until the Son of Man had risen from the dead, and they questioned what rising from the dead meant, because they were in such denial as to the fact that Jesus would die and need to rise. What they were even less willing to hear was what Jesus said after that, namely, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” To be Jesus’ disciple, to be able to follow him, they needed to say no to their earthly ambitions and be crucified with him. God the Father, who could see their hearts, knew that they were ignoring what Jesus was saying about his transfiguration in suffering and their metamorphosis by the Cross as well. And so that’s why he said, “Listen to him!” God the Father gives us the same imperative. On Ash Wednesday, for example, Jesus said, “Repent and Believe!” Have we? He likewise called us to prayer, fasting and almsgiving. Are we doing all three? Are we excelling in the self-denial, self-death through the Crosses God gives us and in following Jesus and heeding all of his words? God the Father who calls us to listen to his Son will listen to our prayers to have the trusting, obedient ears needed. That’s one of the most important parts of Lent.
• On Sunday we will leave our homes to climb not the Mount of Transfiguration but the altar of God. It’s there at Mass that Lent and everything else in our faith finds its source and summit. The Lord wants us to make the exertion to leave our comfort zones and come, even to come each day during Lent if we can. It’s at Mass that we see Jesus transfigured not in glory but in humility. We build not a tent for him but a tabernacle and a Church so that we can come into his presence and allow him to transfigure us. And it’s at Mass that we listen to his word, the words of eternal life, and seek to become living commentaries of it. Each time we go to Mass God the Father give us as a reward for our exertions, as a foretaste of forever, what he holds dearest but was willing to sacrifice for our salvation. As we behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, God the Father says to us, “This is my beloved Son. Do whatever he tells you! Take seriously his words throughout Lent, ‘Repent and Believe!’ and follow him, accompany him, on the pilgrimage on which he wants to lead you, up not Mt. Tabor, not Mt. Hermon, but the Celestial Jerusalem to my house where I’ve built a place not only for him, for Moses and for Elijah, but for you!”

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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