Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Lent

Abraham in today’s first reading is called by God to “Go from your country … and from your fathers house” – called to leave the familiarity of home and country and set out on a difficult and challenging journey, putting himself in God’s hands. To where? God makes a promise that he will bring Abraham to “a land that I will show you” where “I will make of you a great nation”. Further, God tells Abraham that he will make him and his descendants a blessing to others: “by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves.” St Paul in the second reading also speaks of a call. God “called us with a holy calling”. This refers not to a physical but a spiritual journey. Its destination? God has called Christians to “immortality and life through the Gospel” – God promises us heavenly beatitude with him: the destination is paradise. Even clearer than in the first reading is that arriving at this destination is the work of God rather than a simply human endeavour, for it is a promise made “in virtue of his own purpose and the grace which he gave us in Christ Jesus”. This journey too involves suffering –  “Take your share of suffering for the Gospel in the power of God” – for Paul (he wrote this in prison) and Timothy as a bishop were indeed called, as are all Christians, to their share of suffering for the sake of the Gospel. In the Gospel reading, one sentence contains a remarkable parallel of what has gone before: “Tell no one about the vision, until the Son of Man is raised from the dead.” This is also a journey, through death and into life. It contains a promise – that Jesus will rise from the dead. This journey is by God’s power alone (cf. John 10:18, “I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again). And finally, suffering is at the heart of this mystery: the Passion and the Death of Jesus. This is the paschal mystery which transcends the promise made to Abrham, not an earthly but a heavenly promise, but, crucially, one in which we are ourselves are called to share. This in fact is St Paul’s message: we become sharers, through Our Lord’s Cross and Resurrection, sharers in his life, his immortality, his grace, his holiness. The Transfiguration as an event strengthened the disciples in the midst of this journey – they had suffered and would suffer – in view of the eternal promises they had been made. All of this has deep meaning for us in Lent. We leave behind certain familiar things – food, certain activities perhaps or entertainments, on a spiritual journey that therefore involves suffering. But beyond these specifically Lenten sufferings, we recognise afresh that in this life we have a cross to carry, the suffering that marks the span of our human lives, and we are invited anew to take up that cross and follow Jesus. And to where? To Easter – to a renewed annual sacramental participation in the paschal mystery. But also to heaven, the “eternal paschal feasts” of which the Sacred Liturgy speaks: we hope to enter into the heavenly Jerusalem. By our sharing in Our Lord’s paschal mystery, by Faith, by Hope, by Charity may we become on our earthly pilgrimage a blessing to others, so that by the Church, the Mystical Body of Christ, “all the families of the earth may bless themselves.” Amen.