Second Sunday of Lent, February 28, 2021 – Genesis 22:1-2, 9A, 10-13, 15-18; Romans 8:31B-34; Mark 9:2-10

There’s an old joke that makes its way around teachers’ faculty rooms, about the teacher who assigned her class an essay on Abraham Lincoln, and one child, more enthusiastic than historically accurate, wrote, “Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin that he helped his father build.” Of course, what happened was, in a fit of enthusiasm, the child knew a couple of facts about Abraham - one was that he was known as the log splitter, one that he was born on the American frontier at that time, and the other was that he grew up a very well behaved and helpful boy - then kind of smooshed them all together. Nowadays we frequently refer to bringing something into a story before it belongs there as a “spoiler alert.” We tell someone who dies in the final reel before they watch the movie, that’s a spoiler alert. But in Biblical literature there is another word for doing that. It’s called “proleptic,” and the Greek means to catch on to something, or leap on to something, before it happens. And most scripture scholars believe that is what the stories of the Transfiguration are. They’re stories from the resurrected life of Jesus, placed into His ministry, for the purpose of the writer. In Mark’s case, it’s to give the chosen apostles, the leaders, a glimpse of Christ’s divinity.

You have to understand how this story is placed. At the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, after He’s baptized by John the Baptist, He comes out of the water and, according to St. Mark, Jesus, and only Jesus, hears a voice saying, “You are my Son, my Beloved. On You my favor rests.” Now, when Matthew and Luke get a hold of that story, they let everybody hear the voice. But Mark says only Jesus heard it. But, half way through the story, in the Transfiguration, the three chosen leaders get to hear the same voice. “This is my beloved Son, listen to Him.” That won’t happen again until after the crucifixion. When Jesus is hanging dead on the cross, a pagan centurion looks up at the dead body and says, “This truly was the Son of God,” and now the secret is out and everybody knows. That’s how Mark constructed the story.

So let’s look at what happens in the story. First of all, notice who Jesus is meeting with - Moses and Elijah. They represent the two pillars of Old Testament wisdom, the tradition of Jesus’ people and Jesus himself. The law - Moses - and the prophets - represented by Elijah, the first and greatest of the prophets. And so, the entire background, the backstory of Jesus, is there on the mountain with the present generation. Notice the things that happen in the story; Peter wants to build three tents - one for Jesus, one for Elijah, and one for Moses. What’s that all about? It’s about one of the greatest Jewish feasts, the feast of the Tabernacles. If you drive through Bloomingburg in the harvest time, you’ll see that people have constructed little boxes out of plywood that attached to their houses. That’s the tradition of Tabernacles. Because the Jewish people, when they were largely a farming people, built tents out in the fields, and slept there at night until the harvest was done. And that was the great celebration, that God had provided, once more, for His people. So Peter is trying to connect something that’s happening, that he doesn’t understand, to something familiar that he does understand. And finally, when they go back down the mountain, Jesus tells them not to tell anybody, and they didn’t understand what ‘rising from the dead’ meant. That’s why they shouldn’t tell anybody, because they don’t understand yet.
We’ve been talking about a journey through Lent, a journey for home. Last week, our journey was inward, to identify who we are; that’s our real home, who we really are. Now we have two more journeys - one is outward toward other people, the other is upward toward God - and today’s story is all about our relationship with God. This story tells us a couple of things about that relationship. First of all the relationship is based in tradition. Our faith life doesn’t spring from inside of us, it comes from our ancestors, our parents, our culture, our scriptures, our church, a whole bunch of things that have existed for a long time before us and have formed us, given us a certain direction and focus. The second thing is that our own experience of God is always opaque. It’s not clear. We try to understand what our relationship with God is all about, and we try to link it to the familiar, but that doesn’t always work. Therefore, what’s frequently required of us is that we shut up, be quiet, until the future makes things clearer to us than it is at the present moment.

Now, how do we know that that’s the message for us? Certainly the message works both in our religious life and our civil life, that we begin to understand things by relating to our past. History is important; it provides contexts, and the past gives birth to the present. So, if we ignore the past, we ignore it at our own peril.

But there are several other things in today’s readings that tell us that that’s the way to look at things. The first thing is something the angel tells Abraham that God said. God said, “I swear by Myself.” What a strange thing to say. None of us ever swear by ourselves. We swear by other stuff. “I swear by Myself.” That’s because God is unique and totally other. It is not something that people can understand, what and who God is; He is different from us, and totally other than us. The second thing is, what it says in the Psalm response. You may wonder where those Psalm responses that we sing come from. The verses come from Psalms in the Bible, but over the centuries the church took little snippets of phrases from the Psalms, reconstructed them to fit their own situation, and placed them there as a refrain before and after the Psalm. Today’s refrain says, “I will walk before the Lord, in the land of the living.” The last part is the important part - “in the land of the living.” We never go to God alone; we go to God as a people, and so what matters to us in our relationship with God is how we relate to other people, and how all the other people in our community, especially our fellow Catholics, relate to God. That’s why we have liturgy - to come together as disparate people, and enter into something that never changes, and that is God’s worship of His Father, God’s sacrifice, through Jesus, to His Father. The third thing is what St. Paul says - you can almost always rely on the second reading to sort of pull stuff together. The very first that St. Paul says in the second reading it this, “If God is for us, who can be against us?” That’s the main point, that although we are conditioned by our past, although our present is opaque and not easily understood, and although sometimes it is better not to jump to conclusions, the one thing we always know is that God is on our side.