2nd Sunday of Lent 16 March 2025 Supernatural
Our Lord reveals His glory to three of His apostles on the mountain.
It was not all His glory because that would have killed them; but enough to make a lasting memory.
One of the purposes of the Transfiguration was to give to those apostles courage for the coming ordeal of seeing Jesus crucified.
On that score the apostles were not outstanding in their courage because they all fled when Jesus was arrested, though Peter and John did come back to be within range.
However, the Transfiguration is for all disciples of every age. We need reassurance too as we encounter many difficulties in our earthly pilgrimage.
We tend to go too much by our sense experience – especially sight. I will believe it when I see it, is a common response to religious matters.
Yet we know our eyes can be deceived (mirages, etc) but we put more trust in them than in the testimony of holy men and women of two thousand years.
We can know things without seeing them. Nobody would deny there is a place called London. We can know that whether we have been there or not. We accept what others tell us.
On any non-religious subject there is that same calm acceptance, but when it comes to religion suddenly everything has to be visible.
Even the religiously minded suffer from the same problem. A very close apostle of Our Lord said the same phrase: Unless I see it I will not believe it (the Resurrection). Blessed are those who have not seen and still believe.
We should not insist on seeing to believe, but sometimes God lets us see it anyway, at least through the eyes of others.
Once seen, never forgotten, we could hope, but there is another difficulty. The experience of certainty can lose its grip on us over time.
If I saw Jesus on the mountain yesterday that would count for more than if I saw Him fifty years ago. For no reason except that we let that happen. We let our faith cool off and we cannot afford to do that.
We need to be wide awake and on the ball; be like servants who are ready for their Master’s return. He may come when least expected. (Mt 24,50)
To keep on the boil, we must pray every day and keep our faith front and centre, working on it like people keeping fit or learning a new skill.
We live in two worlds, the natural and the supernatural.
The natural world is where we have to make money and deal with a host of problems.
The supernatural world is above all that, as its residents contemplate the glory of God as a matter of course. No one in heaven doubts whether God exists or not!
Freed from the cares of this life they dwell in heavenly light.
Heaven is another one of those places where people might say they will believe it when they see it. We believe there is such a place, because other people have seen it, and they tell us; or they tell others who keep the faith alive.
We have never seen an angel or a glorified saint or experienced the delights of heaven, but we can believe those things are real. God has willed them into existence, the same as He has done for us.
God wants us to trust Him, to come to Him with the pure faith of children, not insisting and demanding all the time, but humbly accepting.
All this we can learn from the Transfiguration, a momentary blast of glory, glory which is usually invisible but always there.
No comments:
Post a Comment