The Second Sunday of Lent: 3/1/15
At a book fair some years ago I picked up this book that’s entitled History of the War in Front Pages. It’s subtitle
is “Actual Reproductions of Newspaper Front Pages, Selected from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Covering Major
Events of World War II,” and that’s what it is, actual front pages from the former Globe-Democrat spanning from
December 6, 1941, through September 23, 1945. When it comes to World War II, we take it for granted because
we know the end of the story, but imagine what it was like to wake up and to read these headlines: on December
8, 1941, “JAPAN ATTACKS U.S., DECLARES WAR”; or on April 10, 1942, “FALL OF BATAAN IS WORST U.S. DEFEAT;
JAPANESE ARMY FREED TO INVADE INDIA; ENEMY 30 MILES FROM BURMA OIL FIELD”; or on May 6, 1942,
“CORREGIDOR SURRENDERED TO JAPANESE; BURMA BEING RAPIDLY EVACUATED BY ALLIES”? I’m sure that our
perspective would be very different if we were to read them as that day’s news as opposed to pieces of
information 73 years after the fact and knowing that we won.
I mention the difference of being in the moment as opposed to looking at things in hindsight because of today’s
readings. Imagine that you are Abraham. You have been yearning for a child for years and years. Finally your son is
born when you are 100 years old, but then the God who gave you that son says “I want you to kill him.” Imagine
the anxiety, the sadness, the heartache in Abraham. But yet he trusts. The same with St. Paul in this letter to the
Romans. To be a Christian meant to have a price on your head and to have a target painted on you. You would have
been thought to be a traitor to the Roman Empire since all of Roman law was based on the belief that Roman
emperor was a god. The Christians come along and deny the divinity of the emperor thereby undermining all of
Roman law and also undermining all of Roman civilization. No wonder Christians were persecuted with unspeakable cruelty. Imagine what it would have felt like to be so reviled and hated by your fellow citizens as Christians
were. Yet St. Paul, who later paid the price of that hatred, can write some of the most beautiful words in all the
New Testament here in Romans chapter 8 where he begins “If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not
spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?” We
tend to look at Abraham and St. Paul as we do World War II and so fail to treasure the beauty of their faith.
Let’s look too at today’s Gospel. Peter, James, and John hear some very distressing words from their very best
friend who keeps predicting that he is going to be put to death at the hands of their fellow Jews. Don’t you think
that they spent some restless nights trying to figure all of that out and wondering how his being put to death might
endanger them too? That’s why the miracle stories we find in the Gospels are so important because those events
gave them confidence and reason to believe that all would eventually be good, the same type of confidence that
Abraham and St. Paul would develop. The miraculous event described here, the Transfiguration of Jesus, is one of
the most important of them all. Theologians call such events a “theophany,” that is, an epiphany, a manifestation
of the presence of Jesus as God to these three apostles. That realization and others like it, especially the
Resurrection, would give the apostles and St. Paul the courage, the confidence, the faith, the reassurance to
traverse all the known world to spread the Good News of that God-man Jesus despite having prices on their heads,
despite being reviled by so many people.
We might envy Peter, James, and John and their experience of such a theophany or a manifestation of the
presence of Jesus as God. But doesn’t that same theophany happen every time we come to Mass and celebrate the
Eucharist? That’s really what every Mass is: it’s the Transfiguration all over again. It’s a showing of Jesus as the
Father’s beloved Son. If we really realized what every Mass is, what every celebration of the Eucharist is, then we’d
have the faith of Abraham, the confidence of St. Paul, and the reassurance of the apostles.
Today’s reading from Romans chapter 8 is only three and a half lines of that section. Let me read the whole of
that section so we can realize the confidence, the faith, and the reassurance that Jesus wants us to know because
he is so close to us at all times, especially when we celebrate the Eucharist: If God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else
along with him? Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who acquits us. Who will
condemn? It is Christ [Jesus] who died, rather, was raised, who also is at the right hand of God, who indeed
intercedes for us. What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or
famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? … No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him
who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things,
nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.