The Hope That Inspires Our Lenten Journey of Faith, Second Sunday of Lent (C), March 16, 2025`

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Second Sunday of Lent, Year C
March 16, 2025
Gen 15:5-12.17-18, Ps 27, Philippians 3:17-4:1, Lk 9:28-36

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• There is a spirituality and psychology built into the Lenten season. The Church expects us at the beginning of Lent to make a big and serious commitment to increasing the quantity and quality of our prayer, fasting and almsgiving in communion with and imitation of Christ and figures, ten days in, as we struggle to form new habits, that we may be questioning whether we can make it through the rest of the 40-day season. That’s why on the Second Sunday of Lent each year, the Church gives us, in the Liturgy of the Word, scenes of inspiration to fill us with great hope. She always has us meditate, in the first reading, on the hope that inspired our father in faith, Abraham; in the second reading, the hope that St. Paul brought to the early Christians; and above all in the Gospel, the hope that the scene of the Jesus’ transfiguration gave Peter, James and John, and through them the apostles, as Jesus was preparing for his passion, death and burial. It’s important for all of us, as we seek to progress in this Jubilee of Hope, to learn these lessons of hope with which the Second Sunday of Lent is meant to fill us. Hope, as the Catechism reminds us, is “is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (1817). It focuses on three elements: the goal of all our efforts, eternal life with God; the trust we’re called to have in the promises God gives us about it; and the help God provides for us to get there. We see all of these elements on display in the readings today.
• We see them first with Abram. God makes to him an incredible promise. Even though he was 75 and his wife Sarah 71, even though they had tried to conceive a child by this point for likely 50 years or more, God tells him, “Look up at the sky and count the stars, if you can. Just so shall your descendants be.” God had already called Abraham to leave his native place, to pack up all his belongings and go to a place that the Lord would show him. And Abraham packed up everything he had and with his family and herds had set out, not even knowing the destination. Most of those in Ur of the Chaldeans must have thought he was out of his mind. But that external journey was just a sign of the interior pilgrimage of faith and hope that God was going to ask him to traverse. In today’s scene, God was bringing that pilgrimage to a new stage, asking him to trust that, despite their seeming sterility, despite their age, Abraham and Sara would not just conceive a child but that he would become the father of many nations, with descendants as numerous as the grains of sand on the beaches of the world and the stars in the heavens. After God asks him to look at the sky and count the stars, if he could, as a sign of how numerous his descendants would be, we read a few verses later, after Abraham had sacrificed the heifer, she-goat, ram, turtledove and pigeon. The text of Genesis says, “As the sun was about to set…” and then right afterward, “When the sun had set and it was dark….” This means that when Abraham looked up into the heavens to try to count the stars, he was looking, not at countless stars in the middle of the night but rather at a blue sky in broad daylight! He was enumerating stars he couldn’t see. God was asking him to have faith-filled hope in his promises, even though, by human eyes and reason, he couldn’t see them. He did trust in God and in his promises and relied not on human power and logic but on the gift of faith with which God was infusing him. Even though he couldn’t see his descendants, he trusted they were there, even if he would never have fathomed that God himself would become his 42^nd generation descendant according to the flesh! The Lord is asking of us a similar trust, a similar reliance on his grace, a similar inspiration for the fulfillment of his words that if we have left father, mother, children, and lands for his sake and the sake of the Gospel, we would receive 100-fold more in this life, with sufferings, and eternal life. That is the hope that inspires us at the beginning of Lent.
• In the Gospel, we see the journey of hope on which Jesus was leading Peter, James, John and the Church. Jesus had just told them in Caesarea Philippi that he would be a suffering Messiah, that he would be betrayed, arrested, mocked, tortured, crucified, killed and raised on the third day, and that if they wished to follow him, they would have to deny themselves and take of their own Cross on the road to crucifixion. Rather than heeding his word and denying themselves, they were in a state of denial, about what would happen to him and what he was expecting of them. So Jesus took the three apostles on a grueling hike up an exceedingly high mountain — an exertion of at least several hours — in order to pray with them. And it was there, in the midst of prayer at the top of the mountain, that the three apostles were able to see Jesus’ glory, to see him as he really is, to see that he is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets — represented respectively by Moses and Elijah — and to hear God the Father speaking, too, indicating to them who Jesus is and how we’re called to respond. St. Luke tells us that Moses and Elijah were speaking to Jesus about the “exodus” he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem, meaning his suffering, death and resurrection by which he would lead God’s chosen people not through the Red Sea and the desert to the promised land of Israel but through his baptism in blood and the desert of life to the eternal promised land of life with God in heaven. If the apostles were unable to fathom the seemingly dark words Jesus had said in Caesarea, they were able to see in blinding light that the exodus would lead to glory. And that’s why God the Father spoke, so that the three apostles would place hope in Jesus’ words, that after his passion, he would rise again, and lead them not up the Mount of Transfiguration but the heavenly Jerusalem. “This is my chosen Son. Listen to him!” He knew that they had been listening to Jesus for the previous two years, but that they were tone deaf to his words about that exodus and about their self-denial and cruciform summons if they wished to share in Jesus’ triumph. He was telling them not to ignore these crucial truths that Jesus was teaching them. He was giving them hope when the whole world would go dark because of an eclipse of the sun.
• Pope Francis, for whom we continue to pray with insistence as he marks more than a month in the hospital on high flow oxygen, commented three years ago about how Peter, James and John received these words initially and the temptation that faces all of us. He said, “The evangelist Luke notes that ‘Peter and those who were with him were heavy with sleep,’ and that ‘when they awakened’ they saw the glory of Jesus (cf. v. 32). The drowsiness of the three disciples appears to be a discordant note. The same apostles then fall asleep in Gethsemane too, during the anguished prayer of Jesus, who had asked them to keep watch (cf. Mk 14:37-41). This sleepiness in such important moments is surprising. … Does this ill-timed slumber perhaps resemble many of our own that come in moments we know to be important? … We would like to be more awake, attentive, participatory, not to miss precious opportunities, but we are unable to, or we manage it somehow, but poorly. The powerful time of Lent is an opportunity in this regard. It is a period in which God wants to awaken us from our inner lethargy, from this sleepiness that does not let the Spirit express itself. Because … keeping the heart awake does not depend on us alone: it is a grace and must be requested. The three disciples of the Gospel show us this: they were good, they had followed Jesus onto the mountain, but by their own strength they could not stay awake. … Like them, we too are in need of God’s light, that makes us see things in a different way. … We can overcome the tiredness of the body with the strength of the Spirit of God. And when we are unable to overcome this, we must say to the Holy Spirit: ‘Help us, come, come, Holy Spirit. Help me: I want to encounter Jesus, I want to be attentive, awake.’” So we see here that hope begins with our trust in God’s promises, helped by the grace of the Holy Spirit, so that we might build our life on what Jesus promises will happen at the end of the Lent of earthly life, as we celebrate forever the reality of the resurrection, his and our definitive triumph over sin and death. That’s what the Church teaches us in the preface for today’s Mass. We pray, “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,” for Jesus and for us.
• Saint Paul similarly seeks to strengthen our hope as we live this Lent. He urges us to imitate him and conduct ourselves according to the model he gave us, who knew and preached nothing else except Christ crucified, who gloried in the Cross of Jesus, by which the world was crucified to him and him to the world. He noted in tears that many in Philippi were conducting themselves “as enemies of the cross of Christ,” who were making their bellies and pleasures their God, who were occupying their minds and souls not with the things of God but with “earthly things.” That’s the temptation so many face going through a superficial Lent or no Lent at all. But he reminded the first Christians and us about the hope we have at the end of our Christian self-denial and union with Christ on the cross. “Our citizenship,” he says, “is in heaven, and from it we also await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body by the power that enables him to bring all things into subjection in him.” God’s intention is to transfigure “our lowly body to conform with [Jesus’] glorified body,” a metamorphosis that will happen precisely through entering into Jesus exodus through following him with faith along the way of the Cross. This is the way he urges them to “stand firm in the Lord.” That’s the rock solid basis of our hope, that we are citizens on our journey home, and that Christ has done everything he did to help us complete that journey. That’s the epic journey that each Lent we focus on anew and embrace.
• As we prepare to enter into Christ’s exodus — his passion, death, and resurrection — in this Mass, we ask God the Father for the grace of the Holy Spirit that we might have trust in Him like Abraham our Father in faith, like the apostles Peter, James and John, like St. Paul, to listen to this Beloved Son whom the Father, out of love for us, allowed to suffer so much, that we might be true friends of his Cross and of Him on the Cross. As we get ready to receive the same flesh and blood that was transfigured in dazzling light at the top of the mountain and later transfigured in blood as Jesus hung on the Cross, we ask God the Father to awaken in us and strengthen us for the journey of faithful hope in life so that, listening to the Son so attentively that we base our lives on every word, we may come to that place where Jesus has built a booth for us, and where he is conversing with Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Peter, James, John, Teresa of Calcutta and all the saints, and wants to converse with us forever!

The readings for this Mass were: 

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