2nd Sunday of Lent 2020
Genesis 12:1-4a; 2Tim 1:8-10; Matt 17:1-9
Have you ever experienced a moment of sheer joy, a moment which you wanted to last for ever? Have you felt in that moment that it was good to be alive, that you were truly happy, that you could accomplish anything, that everything had been transformed? I hope that you have. Indeed I hope that you have experienced many such moments.
They do not happen every day. They may not occur every month, or even every year. There is no way of predicting them: indeed, their unexpectedness, their suddenness, is part of the joy. I can remember such days from childhood, usually on a Wednesday afternoon or early evening, when our shop was shut, and we would go for a long walk along the riverbank or the canal, before returning home by bus. I can remember them from student days and from adult life. Take a moment now to remember some of your own such days, to wallow in the memory, to thank God for them.
You know the problem with such moments, don’t you? They don’t last. However much we may wish to cling onto them, to pitch our tent in them, they will fade. Please God they will leave an afterglow which will sustain us during the times when life feels less rosy, when we experience the wilderness, rather than the mountain of Transfiguration.
Because that is what we are really thinking of, isn’t it? We are experiencing God-given Transfiguration moments, sharing some of the joy, and the ecstasy, and the awe of Peter, James, and John, as they saw Jesus transformed before their eyes, and realised, however dimly, that they were receiving a precious gift from God; that God was indeed very close to them.
They too want to seize the moment, to “pluck the day” as the Roman poet Horace expressed it with his famous aphorism carpe diem. They wish to fix that moment forever, to make their present experience permanent.
“It is wonderful for us to be here,” exclaims Peter, before volunteering to make three tents, the underlying thought being “so that we can stay here forever”. The moment was to become more wonderful yet. Not only were they to be in the presence of their transfigured Lord, and of Moses and Elijah, the representatives of the Law and the Prophets, but they were to be enveloped by the cloud, the shekinah , in which God made Himself present to the Israelites in the wilderness, and to hear the voice of the Father witnessing to the Son. Even our most awesome moments cannot match that. No wonder they wanted to stay.
Yet even for them the moment had to pass. Like us, the three disciples had to leave the mountaintop and head back to the valley of everyday life. Their closeness to Jesus was soon to take them to a much darker place, for they were the three chosen to accompany Our Lord into the Garden of Gethsemane, where the Transfiguration was replaced by the Agony, and they were to hear, not the Father commending the Son, but the Son praying in anguish to the Father.
Did they then recall their time on Mount Tabor, which, we can say, was given to them to prepare them for this starkly different event? If they did, the contrast seems to have unnerved rather than strengthened them, for they took refuge in sleep.
What about us? We too have to leave those moments of joy, which we can regard as our Mt. Tabor moments, and return to the valley of everyday. Sometimes, we will find ourselves in the wilderness; at times, we will enter the Garden of the Agony. Will the recollection of the joyful experiences sustain us then?
We have one advantage over Peter, James, and John. We know, as they couldn’t, that the Passion of Our Lord was the prelude to His Resurrection, of which the Transfiguration was a foretaste. That realisation will not banish the confusion of the wilderness, or the anguish of Gethsemane, but it should enable us to bear them better, knowing that our own Transfiguration times are a tiny reflection of the fullness of joy to come.
