2nd Sunday Lent A

See Commentary on Mathew 17:1-9 in Matthew 17:1-13

Homily 1-2003

Today’s Gospel passage situates us in the days immediately preceding Jesus’ public life. He had just experienced that mysterious moment down by the Jordan river where John the Baptist had been at work. As if in answer to the plea made centuries beforehand by Isaiah: “Oh that you would split open the heavens and come down..”, as Jesus had come up out of the water, the “heavens suddenly opened” and Jesus saw “the Spirit of God descending … and coming down on him”. More than that, through the opened heavens a voice declared: “This is my Son, the Beloved; my favour rests on him”.

What might it have been like for Jesus to hear that supernatural voice say of him: “You are my Son. I love you dearly. You delight my heart”?

He needed time — time and space and stillness — to allow the message to sink deeply into his heart and mind. He went out alone into the nearby Judean wilderness to be with “the Spirit of God” that he had seen “coming down on him” back at the river.

Today’s Gospel passage said that Jesus stayed there for about six weeks, after which “he was tempted by the devil”. Matthew creatively described three basic temptations that confronted Jesus: to focus on his own selfish interests; to manipulate people’s attention and admiration; and to adopt the familiar power politics of other popular leaders.

They are the temptations we all face in one shape or other as we go through life. We seek personal security — and wealth if possible. We seek acceptance and popularity — whatever the cost. We seek influence and control over others.

Jesus, however, had other priorities. His focus was God, expressed particularly in respect and care for others. He was especially sensitive to people pushed to the margins, excluded from the world’s fruitfulness and productivity.

Within days, Jesus would be proclaiming to all who would listen: “The reign of God is close at hand. Repent. Trust the Good News!”

Trust God! Take time to get to know God personally! Reverse your values! Trust God and God’s ways! Get to know God’s ways! Let go of control!

Jesus was convinced that there is one way to experience joy. Let go of our fruitless fixations on pleasure. Learn to love; but take the trouble to learn what loving really means. Loving is not what most people think it is. It is worth the effort.

We are into Lent. Its observance has been part of the Church’s experience for centuries. Our bishops recommend that we look once more at three priorities.

1. Focussing on those at society’s financial margins. Project Compassion is one very concrete and effective way of doing that — and there are so many other projects operating in similar fields: the local St Vincent de Paul Society, Rural Australians for Refugees, etc. However, it is important that we that we are quite conscious of why we support these projects. Our support needs to be the expression of our love for people and for our world.

2. Our prayer. We need to listen to Jesus’ recommendation: “When you pray, go to your private room … and pray to your Father who is in that secret place.” The purpose of prayer is to deepen our personal friendship with God — not to gain points.

3. Fasting, or other works of penance. Their purpose is not to test or to prove ourselves, but to develop self-control; thereby to strengthen those virtues that assist our practical love for others.

And the why of it all, the good news of the Gospel, is that, just as God loved his Son, the Beloved, the same God loves you with that same infinite love; and the God who loves you loves everyone else in the same way. In our case, God’s love inevitably takes the necessary shape also of unconditional forgiveness.

Homily 2 – 2005 

At Jesus’ baptism the voice had said: This is my son, the beloved, my favour rests on him.  This time, the same voice adds: Listen to him.

Listen to what?  Jesus had just previously revealed to his disciples his pending condemnation and death in Jerusalem at the hands of the religious authorities.  Peter had argued with him for his negative thinking, and Jesus had heard in Peter’s comment the temptation of the Satan whom he had encountered in the wilderness.  Get behind me, Satan had been his reaction to Peter.  Jesus had immediately gone on to say that his disciples needed to prepare themselves for the same fate as he, for death: Take up your cross and follow me.

Matthew says nothing about how the general disciples took that news, but it seems that they went into denial – they couldn’t hear it, because Jesus came back to the same point at least two more times; and still, when eventually he was arrested, they couldn’t cope with the shock, and fled.  How do we cope with that message? Do we really listen to what he was saying? to what he was effectively choosing?

Matthew, following Mark, feels it necessary to make the issues clear: he places the story of Peter, James and John’s mountain-top experience immediately after this talk of Jesus’ death, and theirs.  The story of the Transfiguration makes it clear that Jesus is unique.  He is obviously not a helpless victim, unable to help himself.  And God’s voice from the cloud commands them to Listen!

Let’s look again at what had Jesus told them: That he would be branded as evil: as destroyer of the nation, of the faith of the people.  He would be branded as such by the official leaders and representatives of the nation, the Sanhedrin, the official governing body of elders, chief priests and scribes.  They would eliminate him to save the nation, to save the faith.  They would kill him.  Their seething communal violence would focus on him and crush him.

Jesus would let it happen, not because he was unable to stop it or to escape it.  His chosen behaviour would indeed provoke it – not for the sake of provoking it – but as the consequence of his choosing to continue acting from his own integrity.  He would not buy their accusations that he was guilty.  He would continue to protest the truth of his message and of his mission.

Why did he choose to continue his journey to Jerusalem and to death?  Because he saw that his own response was the only way to save the world.  He would absorb in his own self the violence of the world, the sin, the untruth, the fear in the hearts of people, the resistance to change, to repentance and conversion.  He would absorb it by love, by integrity, by forgiveness.  And in the process, he would show it precisely, clearly, for what it was.

Wonderful!  The catch is that he directs his disciples to do the same: to meet the violence, untruth, fear and sin of the world with integrity and love – and by so doing to break, once and for all, the mindless cycle of interpersonal violence that is the essence of sin… and that has been the constant thread of history.  Most of us, however, are not likely to face any kangaroo court.  Our encounters with violence, untruth and the sin of the world often take place much less dramatically, simply in the myriad interactions of our day: at work, at home, in the local community and in the broader stage of national and international politics (where we are the voice of public opinion and occasional voters); perhaps even in our Church communities.

We listen to the voice from the cloud: He is God’s son whom God wants us to listen to carefully.  We take God’s word to heart.  We struggle with it; we’re frightened, we’re uncertain that it will work.  So were the original disciples.  But the words continue to echo in our heads: This is my son, the beloved.  My favour rests on him.  Listen to him! 

It is on the basis of this faith that the Church is different from so many of our contemporaries.  That is why the Church is necessary to our world; why we are necessary to our world.

Homily 3 – 2008 

The second reading today from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy is a great (and brief) summary of what is contained more graphically in today’s Gospel.  Paul exhorts his readers: to bear the hardships for the sake of the Good News – not under our own steam, but relying on the power of God.

He then talks about the way he sees the Good News:  God has saved us.  So we are not destined to stay caught up inexorably in the never-satisfying experiences of day-to-day life – always living from the fallout of those events that consciously or unconsciously we do to each other, or to our world, as individuals or as society.  God has saved us: things can be different!

And then Paul says that this saving action of God does not depend on us or on our worthiness, but simply on God’s sheer benevolence and delight in us: not because of anything we ourselves have done, but for his own purpose and by his own grace.  It was God’s idea … and it’s pure gift.  It always has been God’s intention in creating and sustaining the world: This grace has already been granted to us before the beginning of time.  Jesus’ role was to make that intention of God’s clear – to reveal it to us, precisely because we so easily miss the point.

It don’t think it is the way most of us see God – the creating God.  But: To create is to love: to love is to create.  They mean the same thing.  But somehow we get the messed-up idea that salvation is a factor, primarily, of how we behave… and that God is only on about reward or punishment: God is a judge.  But Paul is saying: “No! God is above all a lover! and we are the ones that God loves! That’s the Good News.  If we see reward or punishment as Good News, our hearts have become pretty cramped!

But the fact remains that many in this world of people whom God loves either aren’t interested or can’t believe it, or won’t let themselves be loved – even though the thirst for love is hard-wired into us.  So, instead of love colouring relationships, too often it is love-substitutes or even sheer self-interest (or national interest – which is simply its extension.)

Paul talked about bearing the hardships: those hardships that are either the practical fallout of a world that doesn’t love, or the more personal hardships of prizing ourselves away from our own ingrained self-interest or substitute loves.  It’s hard work!

The voice that came from the cloud in the Gospel description of the vision of Jesus-transfigured said simply: This is my Son, the beloved.  He enjoys my favour.  Listen to him.  The voice was the voice of a God who loved: My Son, the beloved.  He enjoys my favour (or more accurately: “I find joy in him!”).  The message was: Listen to him! What had he said! Remember? The Kingdom of God is close at hand.  Repent and believe the Good News. Wake up to yourselves! Shake yourselves out of your illusions! See reality: God, the ground of being and the source of life, loves us.

Homily 4 – 2011 

Jesus transfigured – face shining like the sun, even his clothes dazzling from the inner light radiating from him.  A voice from the cloud, that had the disciples falling to the ground overcome with fear.

In so many of the prayers that we use at Mass, the words Lord, almighty, everlasting, infinite, occur constantly.  Yet, later in the Gospel, the Lord, whose face shone like the sun on the mountaintop, would collapse on the ground in Gethsemani, broken, close to despair … and, then, not long afterwards, would be tortured, degraded, utterly dehumanized – dangling helplessly on a cross until he died.  And we believe that this Jesus is the revelation of God.  What does it say of God? How do we hold both truths together?

Some mornings I get out of bed and just feel, spontaneously, like thanking God.  I can drive out here on a morning like this morning, and the sheer beauty of the country has my heart singing in praise to God.  But, then, I can tune in to the TV and be confronted with the relentlessly destructive power of earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, or bushfires.  Sunday night I can sit comfortably in my chair and gaze enthralled by some of Richard Attenborough’s TV documentaries on the striking wonders of the natural world.  Yet the same Richard Attenborough, I think, cannot believe in God, a good God, precisely because of the brutality, the violence and the bloodshed so evident, indeed, so necessary, in that marvellous natural world.

If I sometimes can’t stop myself from spontaneously thanking and praising God, why do I not, at other times, if I am consistent, also shake my fist at God and curse God?

My feelings, of course, have their own life.  They come automatically.  What I think and how I choose are something different.  There, I am in some sort of control.  I am happy that the good things of this world invite me to raise my spirit to the God who is good.  They become sacraments of the presence of God, though I do not necessarily think that God has turned on a good day specifically for me – or for anyone else.  And, over time, the bad things of the world have become occasion for me to ask: How is God empowering me at this moment to respond in ways that help me to mature, to grow wiser and even to live more richly?  Jesus was never so fully human, after all, than when he hung on the cross.

In our world that obviously evolves, (and is still evolving), according to its own dynamics and laws, does God intervene, or not intervene?  To my mind, which stance would better highlight the infinite power of God? intervening, pulling the strings, as it were? or, not pulling any strings, letting things happen, but empowering us humans to grow and to mature in the midst of whatever happens to us?

We are so used to seeing the crucifix that sometimes we don’t see it.  Our faith leads us to hold that the one hanging degraded and helpless on the cross is the infinite God.  That surely challenges any instinctive, reflex, or simplistic sense of God.  The never-ending journey into Mystery continues.

Homily 5 - 2014

In his Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel,  Pope Francis wrote a lot of challenging things. One comment unsettled me. He said that we need to listen to the poor – because it is the poor and oppressed of our world who see reality as it is. I’m white; I’m Western; I’m wealthy; I’m powerful; I’m male. What do I see? The probability is that what I see is not reality as it is, but illusion. Inevitably I get it wrong … unless … unless I learn to stand in the shoes of the poor and oppressed and to see life from their vantage point – what Francis calls contemplative knowing. 

Indeed, maturing as human persons requires it - and enables it. Judging from what we see on our TV news programs or hear on talk-back radio, not many seem to learn the skill. What we hear and see so often is simply the fall-out from our failure. The need is to grow up. And we encounter strong resistance to that from within ourselves and from the culture around us. It is a lifelong task. To grow up we need to learn to love – because loving is also the only way really to know others. Contemplative knowing … Anything less is projection; is illusion.

Just before today’s Gospel episode, Jesus had said as much to his disciples. He said that growing up would require what he even described as dying to self – as losing life in order really to find it. He told them that if they wanted to grow up, and to experience life to the full, they too would have to face the paradox, take the punt, run the risk of learning to love, and facing the inevitable dying it always involves. Jesus had said he was prepared to go that way – and Peter had tried to talk him out of it, only to hear himself curtly called Satan!

Peter had been right when he had said earlier that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of the living God – [which Jesus’ transfiguration in its own way served to confirm]. But he was not the Messiah, Son of God, that Peter dreamed of. He would soon be crucified, dehumanised, and killed.

There was more to come. After Jesus’ transfiguration, the voice from the cloud said to the disciples, Listen to him! Listen to what he is saying! Make sense of that!

Jesus has shown us that learning to love is learning to see life through the eyes of the victim – by learning to stand in solidarity with them. Jesus spelt that out in practice. He listened to the sick and healed them.He frequently ate with society's outcasts, the tax-collectors and prostitutes. More than that, he let himself become victim in order himself to see reality as only victims can see it, as it really is.

I am not poor. I am not oppressed. But I can learn to stand in solidarity with the poor and oppressed – the dispossessed first inhabitants of our country, those fleeing persecution and seeking asylum on our shores, those abused sexually or physically or emotionally, those marginalised by an economic system that puts profits for shareholders above human persons. Contemplative knowing ...

There is more! Jesus was not just any victim. He was the forgiving victim – [as if being victim weren’t challenge enough!] Loving in a broken world translates ultimately into forgiving, into breaking the spiral of revenge or of getting even, into finding better ways to counter violence than simply more of the same.

To be fully alive, to live truly in love, I need to learn to respect and listen to those I see as the oppressors, those I disagree with - because they too are human persons, with a God-given human dignity. Disagree – by all means [Jesus did – clearly, courageously.] Resist. But with respect - to my own dignity, and to theirs. I need to learn to see them, too, contemplatively.

Today’s episode finished with the comment: Tell no one about the vision until the Son of Man has risen from the dead – because only with the Easter story of the crucified, risen and forgiving victim, can we really see consistent love and truly mature human life expressed in their fullness.

Homily 6 - 2020

“Six days later, Jesus took with him Peter and James and his brother John and led them up a high mountain where they could be alone.” Matthew was carefully setting the scene for something; something that would be connected, apparently, with what had happened six days earlier. Six days earlier Jesus and the disciples had been up north, over the border in Gentile territory, in Caesarea Philippi. It was there he had asked them his momentous question, “Who do you say I am?”; and Peter had jumped in and answered, according to Matthew’s account, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God!” It was not so much a theological statement about Jesus, as his way of saying something like, “You are the greatest! You are the answer to my dreams and hopes!”

 Matthew had then added, “From that time, Jesus began to make it clear to his disciples that he was destined to go to Jerusalem and suffer grievously at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes [that is, the leadership in charge down in the capital], to be put to death and to be raised up on the third day.” For Peter, the more he heard, the less he heard. For Peter, that sort of disastrous outcome was unthinkable. He said to Jesus, “Lord, this must not happen to you.” And Matthew then added Jesus’ sharp reply, “Get behind me Satan!… The way you think is not God’s way, but man’s.” Jesus said that to Peter, the Church’s first budding Pope.

 But there was more. Jesus continued, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, you must renounce yourself and take up your cross and follow me”. That was heavy stuff. Matthew made no mention of the mood within the band of disciples.

 Now, six days later, Jesus was on an unnamed mountain with three of his disciples, Peter, James and John when something happened to Jesus. Matthew said he was transfigured — and went on to describe what he meant, “His face shone like the sun; his clothes became as white as the light”. Matthew then said Moses and Elijah appeared to them, and began to talk to Jesus. Then, a bright cloud enveloped them; and from the cloud came a voice saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; he enjoys my favour.” Wonderful! Or was it? What was going on?

 There was more — the command, “Listen to him”. “Listen” to what? to what Jesus had said “six days earlier” — that he would suffer grievously, and be put to death, and be raised. “Listen” also to what else Jesus had said to them, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, you must renounce yourself and take up your cross and follow me”.

 Over the centuries, the Church has preferred to profess, “You are the Christ, the son of the living God”. We have hardly taken to heart, “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, you must renounce yourself and take up your cross and follow me”.. Over recent years, and still continuing, we feel surprised and indignant, even bewildered, when we are bitterly criticised and shamed for crimes committed by our Church.

The story of Jesus’ transfiguration challenges us to hold together somehow the reality of the divine mystery of Jesus, the equally real fact of his humiliating, dehumanising and tortured death, and the wonder of his quiet, compassionate but irrepressible resurrection to fullness of life on the third day.

The next five weeks of Lent give us the opportunity to reflect, to ask ourselves how truly we really yearn to enjoy with him the fullness of life. How ready are we to take up our inevitable cross, whatever be its shape, as the way to life and to joy, and to plan how in practice we shall follow him faithfully, thoughtfully, along the path of discipleship?

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?