Year A: Homily for 2^nd Sunday in Lent

Last Sunday, beginning our Lent, we looked at an overview of our religion and saw that God created man and woman and put them in a perfect world.  But man and woman through their need to be self-sufficient, were tempted and disobeyed God, plunging them into a world that was discordant, disordered, and mortal.  But God was not content to leave us like that, and he sent his son, Jesus Christ, the new Adam, to give us back what we had lost.  This Jesus, too was tempted, but did not succumb to temptation as did Adam and Eve.

 This week we begin by looking at the beginning of the promise, the agreement, the covenant – that God made with Abraham, a call and a promise that is fulfilled in Jesus Christ. God is entering again into human history to recreate it, to make something new happen, to bring creation back to its original beauty and goodness and love. This begins with Abraham, and goes on down through human history until we come to Jesus.

 Let’s begin by looking at the call to Abraham.

If you’re 66, as I am, you might well expect that there are not too many more journeys in life to take. What was going to happen has pretty much happened. In my case, I , too, like Abraham, seemed to have experienced a call, though – and so just a few years ago, even at my age, I began my journey to the priesthood. But i suppose that is unusual to be called so late. In fact, some of us who are only thirty or forty might be inclined to believe that we have finally “arrived” at the person we were becoming.

Abraham was 75. At 75 you’ve pretty well seen the landscape. Not much more is to be expected. But for Abraham it was the beginning. He got called: “Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk, go away from your parents’ house. I will show you. You’ll know the place when you get there. I’ll make a great nation of you out of nothing.” Fat chance. A great nation? Blessings and high achievement? From a childless old man! Get real.

Yet this great old man stirred to the voice of God. He gathered his family and things and hit the road. At seventy-five!

The Old Testament has such great heroes. When Abraham heard a new call in his eighth decade, it was before the famine and the tragedy of Lot, before he shared the bread and wine of Melchizedek, before he ever reached Egypt or Canaan. Before the birth of Ishmael, before he would plead on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah.

It would take 25 years more for God’s promise  even to take shape, and he would be one hundred.  This was all before Isaac, his prize child, long before Sarah’s death and his 2nd marriage. It was, in fact, 100 years before he would die. Good thing he hadn’t settled down permanently in his 70s.

Abraham and Sarah, our parents in faith, remind us that it is not so much a matter of when this life’s journey ends, as it is a matter of where the great journey of hope takes us.

So this story is the first time in the scriptures when God calls someone to follow Him in a very specific and clear way. It is a very important passage, because this call of Abraham is a model for any call that we might receive from God. There are a couple of things that we should note about this call.

First of all, Abraham is called to move. God’s call always asks us to move. Sometimes it is a physical move, from one place to another, but more often the move is psychological or spiritual. God is always asking us to move on, to go forward. Yet, as we notice with Abraham’s call, God is not clear about where Abraham is to go or what’s to happen.

God wants us to leave our places of security, to move out in a spirit of total trust in God. It is a very demanding thing when God calls us to let go of what we’ve been used to, what has given us comfort and security, and go wherever God leads, trusting that God is always leading us because of his love. But wherever God leads us, it will be, as God promised Abraham, “a blessing.”

Sometimes we might think, “God would only call someone who was very holy. Why would God call me if I’m a sinner or if I’m weak or not very faithful to God’s ways?” But that’s not so. Look at the 2nd reading. St. Paul tells us, “God saved us and called us, a calling which proceeds from God’s holiness. This did not depend on our merits, but on God’s generosity and God’s own initiative.”

So we can’t say, “Well, I’m not holy enough. God’s isn’t going to call me.” God does call us, and God calls us even in our lack of holiness. God calls us, and then God will make us holy. When we look at the call of Abraham and put it in this context, we see that the call is the beginning of something that is very, very important.

Therefore, our second reading today from Paul’s letter to Timothy has picked up the theme of calling  – the call to be a Christian – and not on our own merits, but on God’s purpose. God’s long established purpose has now been made real in Jesus Christ, who has brought back the life and immortality we had lost in Eden.

God acts by calling key individuals like Abraham, and it is by our human responses that allows God’s will to be carved out in the world. It is because Abraham left his country that God was able to create of him a great nation, a blessing to all the nations of the world.

Christian faith since the time of Paul has seen that promise fulfilled in the Old Testament, but still more in the coming of Christ and in the history of the Christian Church. Our whole history can be understood as a response to the call of God, a call going out to a whole series of key persons, beginning with Abraham and culminating with Jesus Christ and his apostles and St. Paul and the saints.

That is why Paul can use Abraham as the example of faith, even of Christian faith. Faith is obedient response to the call of God, allowing God to act in history and in the world.

Now let’s look at the Gospel – the story of the transfiguration.

Paul’s last point then serves to introduce the theme of the transfiguration, in which Jesus is manifested as the Savior who brings Eden’s life and immortality back to us.

Jesus and the three apostles go up the mountain where Jesus is transformed – in a vision – Matthew says, and the apostles see Jesus with Moses and Elijah.

Moses is the one who symbolizes the scriptures and the law of God. Elijah is the symbol for all of the prophets. Jesus is there  showing that he continues what has gone before, but now he sums up all of the past. And God says, “Listen to him.” Drawing on the past — Moses, Elijah, the law, all of the prophets — gathered together, Jesus now is the one of whom God says, “Listen to him.”

As we reflect on Abraham’s call, we should recognize that God continues to call people even as God called Timothy and God called Paul, and God is calling us.

The main point of today’s scripture is to make us recognize how God calls each one of us — not because we’re especially holy. God will make us holy. God calls us because God chooses to call us to continue the work that God began with Abraham. And when God calls us….we must listen to him!

God established a covenant with Abraham and He became their God and they became God’s people — in order to heal creation, to change creation once more, bring it back to the goodness and the love that God originally intended.  And when we are called, as God calls each of us now, the heart of that call is to listen to Jesus, to try in our own lives to make the values of Jesus our values, to follow his way and only his way. This is my beloved Son! Listen to him! Our call, our task — understanding that we’re not necessarily holy but God will be still be with us — our task is to try to listen to Jesus, follow his way and make his values our values.

There is a mysterious story in 2 Kings that can help us understand what is happening in the transfiguration. Israel is at war with Aram, and Elisha the man of God is using his prophetic powers to reveal the strategic plans of the Aramean army to the Israelites. At first the King of Aram thinks that one of his officers is playing the spy but when he learns the truth he despatches troops to go and capture Elisha who is residing in Dothan. The Aramean troops move in under cover of darkness and surround the city. In the morning Elisha’s servant is the first to discover that they are surrounded and fears for his master’s safety. He runs to Elisha and says, “Oh, my lord, what shall we do?” The prophet answers, “Don't be afraid. Those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” But who would believe that when the surrounding mountainside is covered with advancing enemy troops? So Elisha prays, “O Lord, open his eyes so he may see.” Then the Lord opens the servant's eyes, and he looks and sees the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha (2 Kings 6:8-23). This vision was all that Elisha’s disciple needed to reassure him. At the end of the story, not only was the prophet of God safe but the invading army was totally humiliated.

This story can help us understand what is going on in the transfiguration because at this stage in his public ministry Jesus is very much like Elisha, hemmed in on every side by his foes. His disciples, and Peter in particular, feel very much like the servant of Elisha, afraid and anxious for their master’s safety. Remember that just before the transfiguration Jesus asked his disciples whom the people and they themselves think he is. When Peter gives the correct answer that he is the Christ, Jesus congratulates him and then proceeds to warn them and prepare them for his unavoidable suffering, death and resurrection. But Peter is so unprepared for this that he protests visibly. He takes Jesus aside and begins to rebuke him. “Never, Lord!” he says. “This shall never happen to you!” Jesus sharply corrects him, telling him that he is seeing things from a purely human point of view (Matthew 16:13-23). Like Elisha’s servant, Peter needed a vision from God’s point of view, to see that in spite of the death sentence hanging over the head of Jesus, God is still with him, God is still in control of events, God will see to it that in the end he triumphs over his foes as Elisha did. What Peter and his fellow disciples needed was for God to open their eyes and them give them a glimpse of God’s abiding presence with their master Jesus. The transfiguration is that experience.

A certain missionary on a study trip to the Holy Land was visiting Jaffa (Joppa) where Peter was residing when he baptized Cornelius (Acts 10). The breath-taking beauty of this small seaside town was such that it inspired him to come up with this joke:

At the transfiguration Peter offered to build three tents, one for Jesus, one for Moses and one for Elijah. Jesus said, “And what about you, Peter?” And Peter replies, “Don’t worry about me Lord, I got a better place in Jaffa.”

We tend to think that when Peter said, “It is good for us to be here” he was thinking about the beauty of the place. But Peter was probably thinking not of the beauty of the mountain top but its safety for his master. He was preoccupied for the safety of his master just as the servant of Elisha was. But when his eyes were opened at the transfiguration and he saw his master Jesus bathed in the glory of the divine presence his fear evaporated. And Jesus turns to him [them] and says “Get up now, stop being afraid.” This is a more exact rendering of the Greek present tense imperative of prohibition.

Every time we gather for the Eucharist we experience a moment of transfiguration where our divine Lord is transfigured before our eyes in the forms of bread and wine. May the reassurance of God’s loving presence with us at communion take away all fear and doubt from our hearts and strengthen us to get up and face with courage the challenges and trials, sufferings and, yes, death, that we must pass through before we can share in the divine glory.

The pages of our newspapers are full of advertisements inviting readers to buy a product, subscribe to a service or enrol in a membership programme. Such ads try to present their products and services in such attractive ways that readers will find it hard to ignore or turn down. Imagine an ad for membership in your community church with the heading, "Join with Me in Suffering for the Gospel." What impression will such an ad make on the average reader? How many readers are likely to enrol as members in such a church? Yet those are the words of the invitation that Paul extends to Timothy in today's second reading. Why did Timothy accept such an invitation? More importantly, why should we accept it today? The simple answer is: because there is no other way to human fulfilment, which the Bible calls eternal life or salvation.

The Bible often describes human life as a choice between two ways. The two ways are described in Psalm as the way of sinners and the way of the righteous. But perhaps the most graphic description of the two ways of life is found in Matthew 7:13-14: "Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. 14 For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it." Jesus spoke of himself as the only way: "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). By this he did not mean that there was absolutely no other way. What he meant was that for those who want to come to God, for those who seek eternal life and happiness, there was no other way. Obviously, for those whose destination in life was anything other than God, eternal life and happiness, there was a way, but that way only leads to eternal disappointment and death.

Jesus walked in the unpopular and unattractive narrow way of saying yes to God and no to self. He invited Paul, and Paul accepted the invitation to walk in the way of self-denial and suffering. Paul, in turn, invited Timothy, as we see in today's reading. Timothy accepted and walked in the narrow way. All these holy men testify that the way that leads to life is not easy but in the end it was worthwhile.

Today the Church extends the same invitation to us. This invitation to evangelical suffering is certainly counter-cultural, given the growing materialism and secularism that characterise our culture today. This voice of Christ through the Church is often drowned in the cacophony of other voices, including those of other churches and Christian ministries that promise a life of pleasure, possessions and power rather than suffering. Some call it prosperity gospel, but that is a contradiction in terms since accepting the gospel means accepting that "he (God) must increase and I must decrease" (John 3:30).

The fact that we may not be able to bear the cross of suffering may hinder us from answering yes to the invitation. But this fear is based on the mistaken notion that we bear the cross by dint of our own human ability alone. That is not correct. We are called to bear the cross of God by the strength that comes from God. This divine empowerment in us is what we call grace. As Paul tells us in the reading, "Join with me in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God, who saved us and called us with a holy calling, not according to our works but according to his own purpose and grace" (2 Timothy 1:8-9).

With the assurance of divine grace to help us, let us throw all hesitation aside. Let us resolve today to walk in the narrow way, the way of the cross, the way that leads to life. As we devotionally walk the Way of the Cross every Friday of Lent, let us resolve to practically walk the same way of the cross every day during this Lenten season and, indeed, every day of our lives.

 By Rt.Rev.Prof. Kasomo Daniel

Bishop Kasomo is the Bishop of The Society of St. Peter and Paul (SSPP)