Second Sunday of Lent
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The Church Fathers have consistently taught that the Gospel we heard today, that of the Transfiguration, allowed Christ to assuage the distress of the announcement of His Passion, so that the Apostles could know that, after the Passion, the glory of the Resurrection would follow.
And during our Lenten observances, as we discipline ourselves and “waste away” from fasting and abstaining, it is good to keep our eyes on the prize and realize for what God made us. Because God did not solely destine us for this earth and all of its fallenness. God made us so that we could live with Him eternally in heaven, and the glory that He has by nature He would share with us by grace. We, too, are meant to be transfigured.
So often Catholicism is simply presented as rules to follow. St. Paul today tells us not to give in to fornication and not to give in to lust, as do the pagans. And in this way, St. Paul tells us, God will make us holy. Certainly, many people think about the Church’s teaching on sex as “don’t do [fill in the blank].”
But the Gospel reminds us that Catholicism is not, at its heart, about rules. Catholicism is about letting God transfigure us to be more like Himself, which is how He made us. Rules can often seem very external, but God desires that His grace not only affect our actions, the externals, but also affect our entire being, both externals and internals. The chief complaint from the Lord about the Pharisees was that they only cared about the externals, so He calls them cups where only the outside is washed, while the inside remains dirty, or white-washed sepulchers, finely decorated on the outside, but full of death on the inside. The catch-word for Lent, repent, comes from the Greek 𝜇𝜀𝜏𝛼𝜈𝜊𝜀𝜄𝜏𝜀, meaning a change of mind or a change of being.
And as we hear St. Peter say that it is good that they are at Mt. Tabor, and should stay there in three tents, even he, in a sense, thinks only about the externals. Christ allows His divinity to shine through, and Peter is awe-filled. But it doesn’t require any change of his own life. He can simply watch the Lord and bask in His brilliance. But a disciple is not just about “me and Jesus,” to use a common Christian phrase. Following the Lord means that we allow God to transform our life, which pushes us out to share that new life with others. When we conform our lives to God, we conform them to love, which is diffusive; it wants to be shared with others, not kept to ourselves.
This transformation cannot only be on the outside. St. Paul, elsewhere, talks about the glory of the law, which pales in comparison to the glory of righteousness. Moses, the Apostle writes, had this glory, but the glory faded, which is why Moses covered his face: so the Israelites didn’t see the slow fade of the glory. The Law had some transfiguring effect, but not a total transfiguration. Moses could give the law, but grace and truth came through Christ, as we hear in St. John’s prologue at each Mass.
It is all too easy to “do the right things.” It is easier to simply do the external things that we are told that we need to do than to allow those things that we are supposed to do change us, both outside and inside. But the point of the externals is to change the internals. God does not only want us to look good, He wants us to be good. And so those things that we do should change our interior dispositions to be more like Christ.
So as we engage in our Lenten disciplines, ask yourselves: is this discipline opening me up to the grace of God so that I can be transformed? Or is it only an outward action that does nothing to my interior spiritual life? And if we’re not being transformed, it’s not that we stop our penances. We can’t simply eat meat on Fridays because we don’t experience how abstaining from meat on Fridays transforms us to be more like Christ. What it does mean is that we have to examine how that practice, or any others that we undertake, can make us more receptive to God’s grace. Maybe by not eating meat by choice, I ponder those who cannot choose what they want to eat because they have no money. My heart grows in love for the poor, and I am led to consider how I can help them according to my own state in life. I no longer see them as “others” who annoy me, but as beloved of Christ, and even Christ Himself, as He says in Matthew 25, for whom I have a responsibility to care.
I know I preached about externals and internals on Ash Wednesday, but the Gospel of the Transfiguration reminds us that Christ did not come only to change religious practices. Christ came to make us more like God, not on our own terms, like what Adam and Eve tried to do when they disobeyed God, but on God’s terms, with a transformation that shines more brightly. May our Lenten practices not only discipline our bodies, but also help us to be more like Christ, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit is God, for ever and ever. Amen.
