2nd Sunday Lent A - Homily 7

Homily 7 - 2023 

There they were: “Up a high mountain”; “alone”. What does that suggest for you? To me it says something like undistracted, alert, even super-alert, perhaps expectant, hopeful. And Matthew does not disappoint. He wrote: “There, in their presence, he was transfigured”. Did it happen to them? or happen to him”? Did Jesus change somehow? Or did the apostles have a mystical experience of him? or both?

Whatever it was, it was highly symbolic: “In their presence… his face shone like the sun… his clothes became as white as the light”. The three apostles did not have to wait for long. Matthew added: “…suddenly a bright cloud covered them with shadow”. Both Moses and Elijah before the three apostles had experienced God close up, both while up a high mountain, both hearing God’s voice coming from within the shadow cast by “a bright cloud”. What the apostles heard was precisely what Jesus had heard as he came up from the water of the Jordan after his baptism by John some months before: “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour…”.

How could they come to terms with that? As Jesus himself noted, they would need the later experience of his resurrection before they would have any chance of making meaning of the whole experience. Then they would gradually realise that Jesus had been God’s Son, God’s Beloved, the Christ, all along — and they never knew, never suspected.

What struck me recently was what the Voice of God also said about Jesus, “He enjoys my favour”. Jesus enjoyed the fact that God also enjoyed him and loved him deeply. That was why he could proclaim right from the beginning of his ministry that God’s being near to everyone, God’s reign, was “Good News”. Jesus knew it, and enjoyed it — and it showed in his approach to everything. Jesus’ approach to everyone became highly attractive; and even the simplest people noticed how it gave him what they called a unique “authority”.

Something wonderful happened to us all in our baptism. Baptism celebrates our becoming children of God, deeply loved by God as was Jesus. We are highly favoured also by God. God enjoys favouring us just as God enjoyed favouring Jesus.

The trouble with most of us is that we don’t really believe that God loves us, that God favours us, and that God enjoys favouring us. The difference between us and Jesus is that we, unlike Jesus, do not enjoy being enjoyed by God. We tell ourselves that there must be a mistake somewhere — how could God enjoy me?? And yet — God does. God’s love of me, God’s tenderness, God’s joy in loving me, must then be unconditional. No problem for God! 

Perhaps each of us needs something equivalent to a high mountain, alone — somewhere where we can be undistracted, alert, expectant, hopeful — where we can quieten ourselves and our ceaseless protestations, and listen at last to God.

Adding to the sadness of our reluctance to accept God’s love for us is the consequence that we will not accept either that God loves everyone else. Perhaps we shall not even want God to love everyone. No wonder that our world is a sad world, a hostile, violent world if the ones God has commissioned to spread his message of divine love to the whole world do not even accept it themselves. 

The “voice from the cloud” in today’s Gospel concluded its brief message to the three apostles by pleading: “Listen to him.” Do we need another Transfiguration on his part before we will listen? before we begin to see ourselves, and everyone else, through the eyes of God who loves to forgive everyone?— everything?