Second Sunday of Lent
Bishop of Lake Charles
Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception
March 18, 2011
Second Sunday of Lent
“Jesus took Peter, James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves.” Matthew 17:1
Lent is an opportunity. It is an opportunity to encounter the Lord. Meeting the Lord personally does not mean necessarily that there is no one else around. A personal encounter with the Lord means one on one, meeting the Lord Jesus, who is always there but whose presence is not always apparent to us because of our sinfulness and selfishness.
This encounter with the Lord requires that we leave something behind. What is left behind is ourselves. We go off with the Lord, who is all too eager to lead us on paths where we have never traveled before.
This is what happens to the three apostles, Peter, James and John, in the Gospel today, the account of the Transfiguration. Jesus leads “… them up a high mountain by themselves” (Matthew 17:1). They are “by themselves” but not alone. Going up to a high mountain implies ascent. They climb up into the thinner air of a mountain where God is closer to earth and to them.
All of this is prefigured in the Old Testament. There we catch a glimpse of Sinai, Horeb, and Moriah—Sinai, the place of God’s encounter with Moses and the Hebrew People; Horeb, the place not only where God reveals His name to Moses (Exodus 3:1, 14) but also where Elijah receives his call from God (I Kings 19:8ff.); Moriah, the place of Isaac’s sacrifice (Genesis 22:2) and of Solomon’s Temple (II Chronicles 3:1). It is no accident that Jesus appears with Moses and Elijah at the Transfiguration.
Jesus too has His mountains—the mountain from which He preaches His famous Sermon, the mountain of His prayer, the mountain of His Transfiguration, the mountain of His agony called Olivet, the mountain of His cross, and the mountain of His Resurrection. At each of these Jesus is surrounded by His dearest followers. They ascend and God descends. The encounter takes place. Just as in the Old Testament a cloud descended to proclaim God’s presence—called the shekinah in Hebrew—so also here at the Transfiguration a bright cloud appears casting a shadow over them and “… from the cloud came a voice” that says, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him” (Matthew 17:5). God is in the midst of His People.
Where do we encounter God? We should encounter God first and foremost in His Church at worship, because, as the Second Vatican Council reminded us, the Church is the People of God. The Council using this expression was not calling us to democracy in the Church. The Council was reminding us of who we are as the recipients of an encounter with God in worship. In a beautiful expression, Pope Benedict XVI speaks of this encounter in which God reveals Himself to us on a mountain of Revelation through the liturgy—“…where Revelation becomes liturgy” (Jesus of Nazareth, page 309). The liturgy of the Church is meant to help us ascend. Just as in the Old Testament, the worshippers ascended to the Temple Mount and there were brought into God’s presence, for there God dwelt with His People, so we come to our New Testament liturgy, the worship of the new People of God. Our direction is fixed, our attention is gathered in. Like St. Peter, we wish to contain the uncontainable—“Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents…” (Matthew 17:4). God transcends any experience of Him. Ultimately nothing can contain Him. However, when He descends in the Person of His Divine Son, the sacrament of His presence has the power to transform us.
The liturgy of the Church God established to be the Sacrament of His Presence in the world is the primary place in which we should encounter the Lord Jesus. He feeds us with Word and Sacrament. He speaks to us with His words, instructing us as we listen to the Revelation of His Word. Then, He takes common bread and wine and lifts them up to where heaven meets earth and returns them to us as His Body and Blood, in a communion that is the foretaste of the heavenly banquet of heaven. This is no small matter.
We carry Jesus with us. In the Transfiguration described in the Gospel of St. Matthew today, when the vision disappears, Jesus remains with His apostles. “They saw no one else but Jesus alone” (Matthew 17:8). When we leave our heavenly encounter in the liturgy, we have Jesus, and He continues to abide with us. Jesus admonishes His apostles, “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead” (Matthew 17:9).
Jesus has risen. Now, we can speak of His vision. The Eucharist as the memorial of His passion, death and resurrection sends us forth to proclaim the marvelous things He has done for us. The liturgy takes us to the mountain.
If the liturgy of the Church is indeed this encounter, then I find it hard to understand how anyone would miss or dismiss it. When someone tells me they missed Mass because of a soccer tournament or a family reunion, much less his or her indifference, then I can only think that person does not fully realize or know what it is he or she missed. It is an ignorance that cries out to heaven to be informed.
In this Lent, may we come to more fully understand what it is we worship. For this reason the liturgy of the Church cannot be like any other. We cannot reduce it to the mundane or the pedestrian, because as worship of the one God it defies our categories. To worship we enter a liturgy, as though into the shekinah, the cloud of His presence, where the Lord as the beloved Son communicates Himself and we must listen. And we cannot listen unless we have ascended the mountain.