Something is wrong! We are not where we’re meant to be! We were designed and made by God to be perfectly happy. But we aren’t! We were made to be entirely free from sin and from death. But we’re not! We were made to enjoy perfect and unimpeded communion with God. But we don’t! The season of lent confronts us in a special way with the reality of our condition: our sinfulness, our mortality, our distance from God, our state of exile from our heavenly home. In lent also we fix our gaze on Jesus in his suffering and death. In St. John’s account of the Passion, Pontius Pilate leads Jesus out before the mob. “Behold the man!” he cries. Behold Jesus betrayed, bound, lacerated, humiliated: Jesus engulfed in unimaginable pain. In Him, behold also yourselves. Behold here an image of wretched humanity. Behold that from which we all long to be set free!
Today on the Second Sunday of Lent, for a moment, our eyes are drawn away from bitter grief, from tragedy, from the edge of despair. For this moment we glimpse something of the Comedy of Revelation: the Good News of our Faith; the happy ending - no, the transcendently glorious ending - that will follow the final crisis.
As if in anticipation of the Resurrection, Jesus appears to us today on the Mountain of Transfiguration. He shines with heavenly glory. Moses and Elijah are with him. And, for this moment, we are to be there, with him, too. Here - all too briefly! - we see where we are heading; what our life is directed towards; what Jesus came to give us. In the light of this vision, we find the courage to endure lent; to endure whatever life throws at us; never to lose hope, to remain always firm in faith, and in love.
For the three privileged disciples, the Transfiguration of Jesus is a moment of ecstasy; a foretaste of heaven itself. But then, according to St. Matthew, when the bright cloud of God’s presence descends, they are cast down in fear. The tradition of Eastern Icons will depict them at that moment sprawled at the feet of Jesus, even upside down, overwhelmed in dismay. Why? Because we sinful, mortal creatures are not able to endure the direct vision of God, any more than we can gaze directly into the sun. Yet we are made for this vision. So it’s good for us to be purified, to be prepared, to be unmade, and remade, so as to come to this vision at last.
The mystical tradition of the Church has often used the image of the Mountain as a parable for the Christian’s journey through life. God, in his mercy and love, invites us to ascend the Mountain of Calvary, of Golgotha, with Jesus, in order to dwell with him at last on the heights of Thabor. With the disciples of Jesus we are to ascend also the Mountain of the Beatitudes, in order to be made fit for the Kingdom. With Moses also we climb Mount Sinai, or with Elijah Mount Horeb, in order there to meet God.
In literature, the poet Dante imagined Purgatory as an enormous Mountain, on which each of the seven deadly sins is purged away in turn. Similarly, St. John of the Cross invites us to scale Mount Carmel with him: not only to purge away all sins, but also to lose all attachments to the good things of this life that are not themselves God. The process must be hard, and painful, even to a terrifying degree. St. John of the Cross can even speak, reversing the image somewhat, of a sense of descending alive into hell. But he insists: all the time on this journey, in this darkness, God is with us; we are being healed here of our deepest wounds, and liberated from whatever separates us from him. Tolkein has the hobbits Frodo and Sam make the agonising ascent of Mount Doom. Their mission is to destroy the Ring of Power. This Ring, image of sin, corrupts and enslaves. Forged by the Dark Lord, it fascinates and tempts, but once anyone is caught by it, his soul will be hollowed out, until at last he is entirely possessed by evil.
All these writers show that, in order to come to God - in order to live forever with Jesus - we have to get rid of sin entirely. Each of us must climb his own Mountain: by repentance and conversion, by suffering and tears, by acts of charity, and by ascetical effort: assisted always by the divine presence, by divine grace, and if necessary by miraculous divine interventions on our behalf.
Surely all of us are tempted at times to cry out: Why must this life be so full of suffering of every sort, of grief and misery, of pain and affliction, of loss and of death? Why must its best symbol be lent, the desert, fasting, temptation, affliction, the deprivation of all natural consolation? Today we are reminded that lent is strictly temporary, and only in function of Easter. We readily share the sufferings of Jesus now, in order to share finally in his victory. Out of love for us, Jesus himself shares in every aspect of our humanity, in order that we might share in his divinity.
St. Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration has a beautiful detail not mentioned by the other Evangelists. After the divine voice has spoken, Jesus comes up to the prostrate disciples, and touches them. How blessed we are when we experience such a consoling touch in our lives! Of course Jesus is always present to us, through his unceasing presence and grace and power. But often his special touch will be mediated through persons or events in our life that lift us up. And we receive this touch of Jesus always in the Sacraments of the Church.
It’s customary during lent for preachers to exhort people to go to confession. That’s a brilliant idea, which I would promote as strongly as I possibly can. But maybe let me say even more: there’s no substitute for being present in person at the celebration of Holy Mass. In principle at Mass we stand with Jesus in glory on the Holy Mountain. In a way that surpasses any other, we here offer him our worship. Here we are reminded and helped to keep our eyes on the goal: on Jesus. And here we receive the encouragement and consolation we need, if we are to complete our own laborious journey towards heaven.