LENT II [A]: Gen 12:1-4a; II Tim 1:8b-10; Mt 17:1-9

Lent is about a week and a half underway, and today’s readings remind us that everything we’re commemorating during this season hinges on faith in Christ. The disciples Peter, James and John who witnessed the transfiguration have been given a profound religious experience. They have been charged to share this experience when the time comes, but not until his resurrection. In all three gospels this Transfiguration scene comes just after Jesus predicted his suffering and death for the first time. The Transfiguration was a preview of the glory of the resurrection. Our own transfiguration can come only after our own passion and cross with Christ. 

This is the way it happened with Abraham too. He had to court the pain of leaving his kith and kin to embrace the promise of God and become the father of a gret nation. The call of Abraham is the beginning of God's covenant with his chosen people, Israel, from whom the Savior of the world, Jesus Christ, will come. With the call of Abraham, God's salvation of this sinful world shifts into high gear. God tells Abram exactly why he is asking him to leave behind his comfort zone and follow this call. He says, "I will bless you... All the communities of the earth will find blessing in you."

Fulfillment, lasting happiness, wisdom, maturity, the joy of a life well-lived - that's what God wants, for each one of us, and for the whole human family. That's why he stays involved in this world that rejected him and continues to reject him. Only God can bless us, because only God can remove from our lives and our world the obstacles that keep us from living as we are meant to live: selfishness, greed, lust, sloth, arrogance - in short, sin in all its forms.

Abraham received God's blessing and spread it to those around him and to his descendents. Why? Because he listened to God's call and obeyed it. We too can experience God's blessing more abundantly, and spread it to those we love, if we just do what the Father told Peter, James, and John to do: "Listen to Christ." To listen to him properly and clearly we need to spend some extra time in prayer during the Lent.

 Only by keeping in mind that God wants to bless us, and to bless others through us, can we find the strength we need to listen to him, to obey him.

Following Christ is always demanding. Christ's passion, crucifixion, and death are the pattern of Christian living. Every Christian has to share in Christ's cross in order to share in Christ's resurrection.

We have to die to ourselves, to our selfish desires, in order to be able to live for God and for others, which is where true happiness lies. We have to learn to put ourselves in third place, others in second place, and God in first place. That's not easy. It requires self-sacrifice, self-denial, self-giving. Our selfish tendencies want pleasure, comfort, ease, popularity, and visible success at all costs. But God asks us to sacrifice those passing, empty realities for a higher purpose and a more lasting happiness - just as Jesus did.

We can only do that if we are deeply convinced that living life God's way is the only path to real blessing. This was St Paul's point in the Second Reading. He wrote, "Bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God." And then he went on to give a summary of everything that God has done for us in Christ: saving us and calling us to a holy life, destroying death, bringing to light eternal life and immortality.

Today, let's thank God for reminding us that whatever he asks of us is directed towards our own blessing and the blessing of those around us.

And when we receive Jesus again in Holy Communion, let's promise that no matter what happens, we will "listen to him," following him even unto death on a cross. May this Lenten season give us the opportunity to become a blessing for others as Abraham was chosen to be a blessing for the world.