A Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent

+ As we strive to persevere in our daily Lenten disciplines of prayer, fasting and almsgiving in order further to tackle vice and to grow in virtue, this morning the Sacred Liturgy of our Holy Mother the Church takes us up a high mountain to experience the transfiguration of the Lord—almost by way of encouragement, by way of reminding us that our penances are not the goal of Christian life, but are simply a means to the end of sharing in that divine life glimpsed by Peter, James and John (and also by us) on the mountain. We are not created in order to do penance: we do penance in order to be able to share in the gift of that transfigured life for which we were created by God.
 
And, to borrow St Peter’s words, it is good for us to have been taken up the mountain. For much of our lives below are less than transfigured, as it were. We become entangled and even trapped in situations and behaviours that are not of God and can easily despair of our ability to escape them. We need to remember that there is a mountain wherein God dwells. We need to know that the Lord wishes us to lead us up to its very summit to participate in the very life of God Himself.
 
This, of course, is the very purpose of the Sacred Liturgy. It is why we invest so much in its celebration—from the very arrangement of the stones that constitute the church building, its worthy furnishing, the singing of the precious riches of the Church’s traditional chant, the use of precious materials for the vessels of the altar, to the vesture and comportment of those called to celebrate and assist in the sacred rites. Even in the most basic of circumstances the Sacred Liturgy, if it is truly to be the Work of God, must include that simple nobility that leads us up the mountain where we can glimpse the very glory of Almighty God anew.
 
But we are not tourists on the mountain. We are not aesthetes at the Sacred Liturgy. The Lord does not lead us to the place of His Presence in order to anaesthetise us from worries and worldly woes or ultimately even to console us with the reality of God. No. He led Peter, James and John up the mountain, just as He has brought each of us here this morning, in order to speak to us. He has brought us here so that God the Father can say: Hic est Filius meus dilectus…ipsum audite. “This is my beloved Son…listen to Him.”
 
Certainly, He does this amidst the glory that is rightly attends divinity—on the mountain than as in the Sacred Rites of His Church today. But the Transfiguration, be it that on the mountain or be it that which is daily renewed in our churches, is not a spectacle to be observed. It is an encounter that can never leave us the same again. It changes us.
 
And yes, this encounter is consoling, for as a result of it we know in faith that God is, that His Son Jesus Christ is the unique revelation of God in human history, and that by listening to Him we can ourselves share in that divine life which our first parents, Adam and Eve, lost for us at the Fall. The mundane burdens we must daily carry are lifted—even as they seek to press us down—by the realities into which we have been drawn. They sustain us and give us light even as we must endure the darkness and suffering of the Cross in its many forms.
 
Yet there is more than consolation in this encounter. There is the requirement that we listen to Him. We are to be attendantly docile to Him, to His teaching. That is a polite way of saying that we are to convert our lives to Christ’s teaching, to the teaching that His Church faithfully hands on to us today. And of course, this brings us to the very heart of the demands of Lent: the conversion of our lives to He who is nothing other than the Way, the Truth and the Life. (cf. Jn 14:6) This Lent we must each take the time and make the space to listen to Him in the very depths of our hearts, minds and souls. Whatever it takes we must enable ourselves to hear what it is that He has to say, and we must be prepared to take the advice of our Blessed Mother and do whatever He tells us. (cf. Jn 2:5)
 
In seeking so to do, some do build tents on the mountain. This is precisely what St Benedict did in establishing those ‘schools of the Lord’s service’ that we call monasteries—privileged places where we daily glimpse the transfigured face of Christ so as all the more deeply to attend to His voice for the conversion of our lives. Bonum est nos hic esse, we say again with St Peter—it is good for us, for the Church and for those who come to us to share in our life, howsoever briefly, that we are here, and for the grace of that vocation we thank Almighty God from the depths of our hearts.
 
Yet even if we are not called to remain on the mountain, we must all nevertheless listen to the sweet, saving voice of Christ. As we go now to the altar and renew His loving Sacrifice let us as beg the grace necessary to do so ever more attentively and efficaciously this Lent. +