Lent Sunday 2 (Year A)

Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a; Psalm 33; 2 Timothy 1:8b-10; Matthew 17:1-9

We hear about the temptations of Jesus on the first Sunday of Lent each year, and we hear about the transfiguration of Jesus on the second Sunday of Lent each year. This year is the turn of Matthew’s gospel, but it is instructive to think about what each of the evangelists decides to omit and what he decides to include compared with the other two accounts of the same experience.

Matthew, for example, does not show Peter and the other two disciples to be quite as dim as they can seem in Luke and Mark. The comment that Peter, always the first to open his mouth, ‘did not know what he was talking about’ is omitted by Matthew. He is generally kinder in his account of the disciples anyway, certainly kinder than Mark who presents them as forever getting the wrong end of the stick.

In this, Matthew’s approach fits with one aspect of what the transfiguration means, that it is a moment of re-assurance for the disciples. It happens, he tells us, ‘six days later’. Six days later than what? Six days after Jesus had told them for the first time that he was to go to Jerusalem, to be rejected and condemned, to suffer and to be put to death. The transfiguration is a moment of re-assurance and encouragement for them to continue following Jesus even in view of what Jesus had begun to say to them about his destiny. It is a divine endorsement of the way Jesus is going and of what he is saying about his mission.

The scene is richly loaded with traditional and familiar figures, scenery and texts. Of course the disciples knew who Moses and Elijah were. The scenery – on a mountain, with an overshadowing cloud and a voice – immediately evokes an experience of the divine presence. They surely understood something also of the significance of the words spoken from the cloud. The beloved son with whom God is well pleased, is referred to by Isaiah and others of the prophets. They might well have been familiar also with Moses’ prophecy in the Book of Deuteronomy about a great prophet, whose authority would be comparable to that of Moses himself. ‘Listen to him’, Moses had said, providing words for the divine voice at the transfiguration.

But if the characters and scenery and words of this dramatic moment are all familiar, the meaning of their being brought together in this way, and the one around whom they are brought together, makes of this an experience of something radically new. Although each of its elements is anticipated in the Old Testament, there is nothing quite like it in the Old Testament. What Jesus is helping the disciples to do is to make the transition from the ways in which they understood life and God and themselves up to then to a completely new way of understanding life and God and themselves in the future. The journey they are being asked to take is solidly rooted in all that they had been taught about the God of Israel and yet it is a journey that will transform them completely as regards what they thought and how they lived. It is at once familiar and completely mysterious so their fear is understandable.

Related to this is another detail of Matthew’s account, which is not mentioned in either Luke or Mark. Jesus, he tells us, touched them and told them to stand up. They have done what human beings ought to do in the presence of God: bowed down, fallen on their knees and put their faces to the ground. But the great outcome of the adoration of God, as distinct from the adoration of anything that is less than God, is that we stand up greater for having worshipped.

Whenever we worship something less than God we must hand over some of our identity to that thing. We are then less than we might be for having worshipped an idol. It may be money or power or a group of people or a political ideology or a religious organisation or some vague abstraction– to worship an idol, a false god, always makes us less than what we are. We must pay tribute to whatever it is we worship in that way. We must invest something of ourselves and such false gods have big appetites.

But to adore God does not mean losing anything of our identity. In fact it means the opposite, for we are not rivals to God and God is not a rival to us. To worship God is to live in the truth. This is the reality of our situation, that we are the creatures and servants of God, called to follow the way of His Son. In the presence of God, the Son says to us ‘stand up’. Already we get a glimpse of the greatness that is being revealed, not only the greatness revealed in Jesus but the greatness revealed in Him for us. The second reading speaks of it as ‘the power of God who saved us and called us with a holy calling not in virtue of our works but in virtue of his own purpose and the grace he gave us in Christ Jesus ages ago’.

Romano Guardini, a theologian working in Berlin at the height of Nazi power there, decided with colleagues and friends to try to disseminate statements to counter-act what was happening. He decided to write first about adoration, for adoration, he says, is ‘the safeguard of our mental health, of our inmost intellectual soundness’. ‘Whenever we adore God’, he writes, ‘something happens within and about us. Things fall into true perspective. Vision sharpens. Much that troubles us rights itself. We distinguish more clearly between good and evil. … We gather strength to meet the demands which life imposes upon us, fortified at the very core of our being, and taking a firmer hold upon truth’.

To fall on our knees before God expresses the truth of our situation. To be enabled to stand up in the presence of the same God, at the invitation of His beloved Son and through His saving work, is the wonderful grace that has been manifested through the appearing of Jesus our Saviour.

Lent Week 1 Saturday

Readings: Deuteronomy 26:15-19; Psalm 118; Matthew 5:43-48

The Lord gives the people laws, customs, ways, statutes, commandments, ordinances, decrees and precepts. It is a lot of stuff and what is it all about? It is about helping us to see what God's righteousness and holiness will look like when translated into human affairs and into human relationships. So the law given through Moses is not an arbitrary collection of rules and regulations, a kind of obstacle course to see whether or not we can do what we are told. It is, rather, as is said later in the Old Testament, the wisdom of God being shared with God's people and coming to dwell with them. It is a first incarnation, the word or wisdom of God coming to dwell amongst the people.

The reason God is pleased with them when they observe his laws, statutes, precepts, etc., is because they thereby manifest to the other peoples of the earth what the Lord, their God, is like. They become a revelation of God. The deal between God and the people, the covenant they seal with each other, has these conditions. Once again they are not arbitrary conditions but simply aspects of the way of living that marks out those who entrust themselves to God. The payoff? 'He will set you high above all the nations he has made and you will be a people consecrated to the Lord, as he promised.' If that is something you want, then here is how you should live.

The Sermon on the Mount, from which today's gospel passage is taken, contains the laws, customs, ways, statutes, commandments, ordinances, decrees, precepts, beatitudes and counsels which Jesus gives to the people of God being newly re-shaped by him, by his teaching and by his presence. The concern is exactly the same: where are the people who by their way of living will become a revelation of God? Christian interpreters of scripture sometimes feel they must find some teaching in the Sermon on the Mount that is not to be found in the Old Testament. But there is nothing. It is all there already, in Jeremiah, Hosea, Deuteronomy, and other books of the Old Testament. Jesus is a Jewish teacher, working out of that strand of Jewish prophecy and wisdom.

The only difference (the only difference!) is that the man who now teaches these things is the one, the only one, who fulfills these laws, statutes, precepts, etc., with all his heart and all his soul. He is also the only one whose grace is such that he enables others to fulfill them too. He is the one with whom the Father is well pleased. He is the one set high above all the nations, the one consecrated to the Lord. In him we see, translated into human affairs and into human relationships, what the mercy and grace of God are like. He is the revelation of the Father's heart, full of grace and truth. 'You must be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect' is Jesus' conclusion according to Matthew. Luke is saying nothing different when he replaces 'perfect' with 'merciful'. For it is in this that God's perfection consists, mercy, love (even for those who hate Him), and grace (anticipating our efforts to live like this and enabling those efforts to succeed).

Lent Week 1 Friday

Readings: Ezekiel 18:21-28; Ps 129/130; Matthew 5:20-26

It sometimes happens that the Lectionary reading is too short and in danger of being misunderstood without its context. This is true of the first reading today, from Ezekiel 18. Really, it is necessary to read the whole chapter to see what the Lord is saying through his prophet. The main point in the section we do read is that each individual person carries his or her own moral responsibility: our standing in the sight of God seems to depend, then, on what we ourselves have done, good or bad, and not on the behaviour of the family from which we come or the people to which we belong. Think of how outraged we rightly feel where a family is punished for the crimes of one of its members. It is clearly just that individuals be asked to carry moral responsibility for their own actions: they cannot blame anybody else and nor should anyone else be blamed.

Or is it as simple as that? Human communities and societies continue to seek justice, equality and fairness, but these things prove elusive. A strictly just society might seem like the best thing to aim for but scripture often warns us against such a thing and does so by showing us what a strictly just society would be like. Many of the parables of Jesus do exactly this.

'What the Lord does is unjust', Ezekiel imagines people saying in response to his clear presentation of individual responsibility. 'Is it', the Lord says in response, 'or is it not what you do that is unjust, with your attempts to shift responsibility'.

An argument about justice: 'get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit' is what the Lord says at the end of this chapter of Ezekiel, anticipating a later, more famous text, where he speaks of the heart of stone being removed to be replaced by a heart of flesh instead. The heart of stone is strictly just, the heart of flesh is compassionate and merciful. If there is to be hope for humanity, strict justice is not enough: we need compassion and mercy also.

The gospel reading shows us where this heart of compassion and mercy is to be found. It may seem at first that the teaching of Jesus recorded here is simply an even stricter justice than that taught in the Hebrew scriptures - not just murder but anger towards a brother, humiliating a brother, cursing a brother - all of these merit the strictest condemnation and punishment.

So what hope have we? Well none if we want to stay within the canons of strict justice. So, Jesus continues, stay away from the altar and stay away from the court until you are reconciled with your brother. Leave your offering, be reconciled first, before you get to the court which can only offer you strict justice, a justice that is blind and, in its blindness, cruel.

It is in Jesus and from Jesus that a new heart and a new spirit are available to human beings. Of ourselves the best we can manage is an approximation of justice. The new heart and spirit brought by Jesus are those of the Father and the Holy Spirit, the divine life that is the source and destination of the world and its history.

St Thomas Aquinas puts it beautifully when he says: 'The work of divine justice always presupposes the work of mercy in which it is rooted. Divine action is always characterised by mercy as its most radical source'. This is revealed already in the prophets, often by simply reminding us of the impossibility of human justice. The divine life of justice rooted in mercy is established as the heart of the world's history by the teaching and actions of Jesus, the merciful and compassionate Sun of Justice, and Son of God.

Lent Week 1 Thursday

Readings: Esther 4:17; Psalm 138; Matthew 7:7-12

Esther is renowned for her beauty and for her courage. When we first hear of her we are told that out of all the young women in the kingdom, she catches the king's eye. She 'found favour in his sight': in other words she was the one he noticed out of all the candidates who wanted to be his consort. She must have been a woman of exceptional beauty.

Reading her story tells us that she was also a woman of exceptional courage. We know that perfect love casts out fear but we know also that our love is never perfect. So something of fear remains. And there can even be a heightened fear in relation to those we love, of disappointing them, of offending them, of wounding them. Great love is compatible then with great fear, not with the servile and self-centred fear of punishment which is cast out by love, but with the kind of fear we experience in the presence of great beauty, real holiness, undeniable goodness. A fear that is a kind of awe.

Courage is not a virtue that removes fear but a virtue that enables us to do what is right in spite of fear. We remain afraid even in the moment in which we act courageously. And we see this in the power of Esther's prayer, part of which is read as today's first reading. She is not so much afraid of God as she is afraid of her husband: she needs to take her life in her hands, and risk his wrath, if she is to intercede for the people.

But she does it, she is given words with which to pray. 'Save us from the hand of our enemies', she says, 'turn our mourning into gladness and our sorrows into wholeness'. Deliver us from evil.

Jesus encourages us to have the same attitude of confidence and trust in the Father. We should turn to him in prayer even when we are afraid and apprehensive, when we find it awesome and intimidating. Ask, seek, knock. If you cannot find words use the words of Esther, or the words of Job, or the words of the Psalms, above all the words Jesus taught us. They all speak already of the things for which we want to pray.

We should be practising prayer and this is the only way to learn it. We are already over a week into Lent and it is one of the main purposes of this season, to get back to prayer, to do it more regularly, to give more time and energy to it. We may need courage first, if we feel oppressed by our sins, disappointed at the state of our soul. We may need to go to confession in order to lift that oppression and banish that disappointment. And then we can pray with courage again.

And we must remember our neighbour in our prayers. Jesus will not let us take refuge in an egocentric spiritual life, a self-centred cultivation of 'holiness'. 'Do to others whatever you would have them do to you', he says in today's gospel. 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us', he says in the Our Father. Her love for her people gives Esther the courage to speak, firstly to God, and then to the king. When we too are moved by the great need of others we will find it easy to pray, the words will come. We will find also the courage not only to speak to God but to face into whatever it is human need asks of us.

Lent Week 1 Wednesday

Readings: Jonah 3:1-10; Ps 50/51; Luke 11:29-32

In what does the sign of Jonah consist? For Luke, the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the Ninevites is the sign for those listening to Jesus. The Queen of Sheba came to hear Solomon’s wisdom and the people of Nineveh heard Jonah’s preaching. There is something greater here than either Jonah or Solomon. You ought, then, to listen to him, to Jesus, to live by his wisdom, and to answer his call to repentance.

In Matthew, Jesus brings in the earlier part of Jonah’s adventures and points to his three days in the belly of the fish. This is the sign of Jonah, according to Matthew, a foreshadowing of the three days Jesus would spend lying dead in the tomb. Matthew’s account gives us the stronger imagery and we may be tempted to assume that Luke implies the same thing. There are few biblical images more powerful than that of Jonah in the belly of the great fish.

But for Luke the preaching of Jonah and the repentance of the people is the sign. And this clears the way for us to notice something else in Jonah’s experience at Nineveh. Not only do the people repent, but God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them. God’s repentance displeased Jonah exceedingly, we are told, and he was angry.

When Jesus directed his listeners to the sign of Jonah it has to be that the divine mercy shown there is uppermost in his mind. He has come, after all, to show us the Father. The repentance of God in the Book of Jonah anticipates so many of the parables of Jesus in which the justice of God becomes puzzling because swallowed up in God’s mercy. If we feel a bit angry at the prodigal son, or the eleventh-hour labourers who are paid the same as those who worked all day, or at the thought of prostitutes and other public sinners entering the kingdom of heaven before us, then we are in the company of Jonah.

He felt used by God. His mission was a complete success, the whole city repented at his preaching, and still he was angry. This, then, is the sign of Jonah. In calling us to repentance, God is asking us to become like Him. He is always ready to be merciful, to turn towards us. Like the father in the story of the prodigal son, the first sign of repentance from the sinner wins God’s attention and mercy. (In fact we believe it would not even be possible without God’s prior attention and mercy.)

Lent is a time of mutual repentance, then, as we turn our hearts to the Father knowing that the Father’s heart is turned towards us. We can be certain of God’s repentance, of God’s willingness to show mercy. Just as God saw from their actions that the Ninevites were turning from their sin, so we have seen from God’s actions that he is turned towards us. What about us then? We must show by our actions that we are answering Jesus’ call to repentance. In helping us to answer that call the Father has given us not just the sign of Jonah but the sign of Jesus.

You can hear this homily being preached here.

Lent Week 1 Tuesday

Readings: Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 33; Matthew 6:7-15

The passage from Isaiah is one of the shortest but also one of the most beautiful used in the Church's liturgy. The word that goes forth from the mouth of God does not return to Him empty. So the word is to return to its source. The word is therefore on a mission. It is spoken not simply in order to reverberate through the heavens in ever widening circles. It is spoken, like rain and snow, to make contact with creation, to water the earth and make it fruitful, providing seed and food.

The word that is spoken, how will it return, with what fruit, having generated what kind of life? It seems that it will return with other words, that it will return with the echoes it has generated, that it will return with the changes it has brought about, that it will return with the relationships it has established. Words do all these things, they echo, they invite other words in response, they change things, they establish and confirm relationships.

Reading this passage, as we do today, along with the passage from Matthew where Jesus teaches his disciples the Our Father, leads us into a deeper meditation on the word, words, and the Word. For in the Our Father we are given the best possible human words with which to echo the Father's address to us. Any word we utter that is in any way true or good is an echo of the word of truth and goodness that establishes creation and speaks to us through it. But now He has spoken to us through His Word, and that Word, the Incarnate Lord, gives us human words that enable us not just to echo God's truth and goodness but to participate in His conversation with the Father.

'Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him'. Prayer is one of the works of Lent not because it is meant to be penitential and tedious but because it is the heart of what we are about as Christian believers. Prayer is the way in which we participate in the exchange, the conversation, taking place between the Father and the Son. The Father speaks and the Word is spoken. The Father is the source of all being and life and understanding and is only adequately received and understood by the eternal Son, is only adequately appreciated and loved by the Son in the Spirit.

The Our Father is the translation of the Word into words. Here is the rain and snow that will water the earth, softening our hearts, focusing our minds, generating life and love in us. We are invited to enter the great circling that is the mission of the Word, spoken from all eternity in creation, sent in time to redeem creation, returning to the Father having accomplished what He was sent to do. We 'jump onto' this great movement by saying the Our Father, making those words our own. When they have become the truthful expression of our minds and wills then we have found our place as adopted children of the Father. In Jesus Christ we hear the Father's Word. In speaking the words He taught us we become the loving servants of the Word of God. We enter into the mind and will of Christ, we join the chorus of praise and intercession of which He is the leader, we are converted and return home to the Father in whom we come home also to ourselves.

Lent Week 1 Monday

Readings: Leviticus 19:1-2, 11-18; Ps 18/19; Matthew 25:31-46

To this famous scene of the last judgement, of the separation of sheep and goats, one could ask: what human being is there who has not at some point helped another? and what human being is there who has not at some point failed to help another? So the important teaching here is not a moralistic one and we must take something else from it. What we must take from it is its teaching about Christ in the least of our brothers and sisters: in serving one another we are serving him.

The Lenten triangle of prayer-almsgiving-fasting is at the service of the Christian triangle of God-others-self: this is the network of relationships in which we live our lives if we try to live them according to the great commandment of loving God and loving our neighbour as ourselves.

Who is the needy one? The answer from this gospel is very clear as it lists the basic needs of humanity and the works of mercy that attend to those needs. But the experience of a community such as l'Arche, for example, obliges us to think again about 'ability' and 'disability', about 'need' and 'strength'. There we learn about the ability of the disabled (for love, honesty, trust, for example) and the disability of the able-bodied (concerning love, honesty, trust, for example).

So the question of who is the least of Christ's brothers and sisters is re-opened. It seems that the answer is: everybody at some time or in some way. In caring for anybody who needs care we are caring for Christ. Sometimes care needed requires corporal works of mercy, looking after physical needs such as food, clothing, and shelter. Sometimes it is spiritual works of mercy that are required: encouragement, accompaniment, forgiveness, listening. Along the way of love taught us by Christ we discover our own neediness and our own strength.