2nd Sunday of Lent B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2021

Today’s Gospel incident followed on closely from Jesus’ announcement to the disciples that he was destined to go to Jerusalem “to suffer grievously, to be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the scribes, and to be put to death.” It blew their minds. They were just coming to terms with the sense of his specialness and struggling to put words around it. Even though he added that he would “after three days .. rise again”, rather than clarify things, that served only to confuse them more.

And then we have today’s incident — Jesus’ transfiguration. After he had witnessed Jesus transfigured, Peter’s response was, “Let’s make three tents, one for you, one for Moses and one for Elijah” [who had appeared along with Jesus]. The other disciples, James and John, said nothing. Mark’s comment on Peter and the other two, no less frightened or confused than Peter, sounds somewhat patronising, “He did not know what to say, they were so frightened”.

The “voice from the cloud” would hardly have improved things — “This is my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him.” Whose voice could it have been? In telling them to listen, it seemed to affirm what Jesus had so recently said about himself being killed. But if it were God’s voice [and whose else could it be?], how could God let that happen to his “Beloved Son”? The “frightened” Peter’s mind would have been exploding.

What Jesus had to say on the way down the mountain, “Say nothing to anyone until after the Son of Man has risen from the dead”, would simply have confirmed their confusion. No wonder that, among themselves, they discussed what “rising from the dead could mean”. They simply could not hold together both the obvious specialness of Jesus, their friend, and the fact that he would face being humiliatingly and cruelly killed. That would “mean”, surely, that their dreams, their hopes, were over.

Perhaps our current experience has led many of us, too, to wonder, like Peter, James and John, what does it all “mean”. Our Church, our Catholic Church, has “clay feet”. So many people have left, lost interest; and we worry what will happen when the pandemic ends. Will people come back?

The early disciples struggled to hold together Jesus’ only too obvious humanity, his weakness, his powerlessness, his embarrassing death with his equally obvious specialness, his wisdom, his wonderful attractiveness, especially his resurrection and his breath-taking forgiveness. They came in time to accept that Jesus was inseparably both a divine and an only too human reality.

Today we struggle to hold together the Church’s only too obvious humanity with its undeniable goodness and its equally undeniable sinfulness. It welcomes people such as ourselves; it is people such as ourselves. Among us are wonderfully generous, merciful, heroically loving, radically good people — saints. Others have behaved abominably, have betrayed the Christ they claimed to follow, have missed the point completely. Others again are somewhere in-between, ordinarily good and ordinarily sinful. Yet others are an inconsistent, regularly changing, mixture of all these virtues and vices.

But more than this human dimension, we believe that the Church is also the Body of Christ — it is not just a human reality, a human institution. To accept this divine reality is a pure act of faith. But that is no surprise. We know that. It makes the difference. And the effectiveness of our act of faith in the Church seems to be a reflection of the freshness and depth of our personal relationship with Jesus.

The only response that can ultimately sit with all that and hold it together is love — unconditional love.