2nd Sunday of Lent

Each year on this Sunday the readings connect the covenant between God and Abram (Abraham) with the transfiguration of Jesus. The Gospel shows us one of the most important moments in the life of Jesus, when he came to understand his mission. And he realizes he will carry it out through humiliation and defeat. Jesus wants his disciples to accept the plan of the Father for him but they do not do so. Only after his death will they understand that the way of the Cross was the way to life.

           As our lives move along, there are disappointments but there are also hopes and promises that we look forward to. The first reading completes the message of the liturgy of today by presenting Abraham to us, the man who placed his trust in God and, looked forward to the promise of land, many descendants and numerous blessings. In an ecstatic experience God assured him his hopes would be fulfilled. Christians who have the courage to place their trust in God, though in human eyes may appear to be failures, will in reality be blessed by God.

If the transfiguration is a promise of future glory for Jesus and the Apostles, St. Paul in the second reading gives us a promise of future glory for us when he tells us today “our citizenship is in heaven”, and he invites all of us to die with Christ. The death we speak of here is the destruction of our selfishness. Lent helps us remember to be ready to move on and th make any changes in our lives we need to make, so we will be ready to meet our God in eternal glory. When we come to that stage, like the three Apostles at the transfiguration, we won’t ever want to leave. St. Mother Teresa said: “Jesus wanted to help us by sharing our life, our loneliness, our agony and death. …We suffer nothing that he has not already suffered, endure no agony that he has not first endured. By entering into the blackness of our mortal anguish, Jesus has transfigured human suffering.”