2nd Sunday of Lent 2006
The mountain we call Tabor rises some 600 meters above the Galilean plain, an impressive, if not awesome height. The experience of climbing it must be pretty exhausting; when we ascended to the summit, it was in a Palestinian taxi whose driver must have had a graduate degree from a Parisian transportation company. At the top, a splendidly restored church fulfills Peter’s confused wish for a permanent monument to what he thought was an unique event. There is even a foot-like indentation in the rock where tradition tells us Jesus’s foot fell, and his glory left a lasting remembrance of his presence there.
But the transfiguration of Christ before his disciples, dramatic though it was, cannot be thought of in isolation from the rest of His life. As our Holy Father teaches, if Scripture tells us anything about the life and person of Jesus, it is that He was in constant communication with the Father. The only thing unique about this wonderful encounter on the mountain, is that there were witnesses, Peter, James and John. Jesus was always praying, always in touch with the God with whom He was in love. And we have to understand, as St. Luke teaches in His Gospel, that Jesus’s prayer was transfiguring, even transformative. If we can learn to be one with Jesus Christ in His communication with the Father, we can be transformed, even if we are not in this life transfigured.
It’s good to remind ourselves of the Catholic teaching on the Trinity, because there are three threes here on Tabor: the three disciples, Peter, James and John; the three prophets, Moses, Elijah and Jesus, and the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit in the form of a cloud. God the Father, eternal and changeless and perfect, has perfect self-understanding. The utterance in silence of His self-understanding, His Word, is so perfect that the Word is divine, co-equal with the Father, eternal, changeless, perfect, the Son of one substance with the Father. Father beholds Son; Son beholds Father. The joy and wonder and love they have for each other is so perfect that this Love is divine, a divine person, the Holy Spirit. We can’t understand this even to a 1% level, but it is true. An analogy might help.
Try to think back, you who have been married for a little while or a long time, to the day you looked for the first time on the young man or young woman and saw for the first time The Beloved. Did you lose your breath for a moment? Did you give out with an involuntary “Wow”? That is the eternal experience of the Father and the Son. They are totally in love, but that love is a perfect, personal, divine love. And the oneness that the Trinity shares is so total, so infinite, that they are not three individuals, but three persons in one nature. Threeness in Oneness, oneness in threeness.
It is the Son of God who became human, who took on the form, the nature of a human being in the womb of His mother, Mary. He was in every way human except in our sinfulness. He was a divine person, God, with the nature of God and the nature of man. As God, He had perfect self-understanding, and as God, He was in perfect, constant communion with the Father in the love of the Holy Spirit.
But St. Luke tells us that He did not come into Mary’s body as a fully formed human. Luke says twice that the child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom, the favor of God upon Him. He increased in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man. Jesus, in His human nature, grew, changed, learned. And as He grew, His human capacity to participate in divine communion with the Father also grew. Is this the reason it took thirty years for Jesus to be ready for His earth-changing ministry, for the healings and teachings and battles with evil, and for His final battle that ended in His death and Resurrection?
We ask this because our spiritual growth and our union with Christ does not happen in a day, or a week, or even a year. It is a lifetime process. The Catechism even refers to all prayer, all communion with the divine, as a battle. “Against whom?” it asks. “Against ourselves and against all the wiles of the tempter who does whatever he can to turn us away from prayer, away from union with God.” Just as we resist the Law of Christ, hesitate to act habitually in union with the Spirit of Christ, so also we only with reluctance develop a habit of prayer in His Name.
But God aids us in our struggle to be united with Him. He gives us the grace we need to communicate with Him, just as in Luke’s account, he gave His Son a consoling angel to help during his death struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane. Even when we do not hear His voice clearly, He is here. Sometimes we cannot hear Him because He is too close.
And that is when we are in pain. If we are the children of God, we can expect to be treated just as Jesus was treated. There are, there will be times in which we are so close to Jesus Christ that we are united to His pain. The Catechism warns us that filial trust, the trust a son or daughter has in the Father, is tested and proved in tribulation. Jesus suffered, even though He did not deserve to suffer; we, too, suffer in union with Him. Even though we do not deserve any union with Him, it is in suffering that we find ourselves most closely one with Him. It is when we are in pain that we pray the most intensely. It is when a friend or relative is in trouble that we intercede most earnestly. And we must remember that the entire period of time Jesus was dying on the cross for us, He was in prayer with the Father. His seven words were communications with the Father: asking the Father to forgive us, even though we, you and I, had pounded the nails into his wrists and feet; giving us His Mother to be our Mother, even though we deserved by our sins to be left orphaned; telling the Father of His thirst for our souls to be united with His. On and on He prayed, so that we could unite our prayer with His, even to His last prayer from the cross: into Your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit. It is finished.
The challenge we have before us today is to pray like that, to communicate with the Father so regularly, so intensely, that in our last breaths we commend ourselves to the Father. The way we develop that habit is to constantly seek this divine service, to constantly remind ourselves that God loved us so much that He gave us His only Son, and to participate in serving others so that we get the habit of giving always, of always turning outward to helping others.
It really sounds like way too much for a human being, weak and distracted as we are. But we have a help and model, the Mother that Jesus gave us from the cross. She, too, was nothing without God. As she acknowledged that fact, so should we. “Lord, you look on your servant in her nothingness.” As she glorified God in all things, so should we. As she suffered with Her Son, so should we. And as she was transformed by constant prayer into the true Mother of all the living, so shall we be transformed, little by little, into images of Her divine Son.
