The 2nd Sunday of Lent: Cycle B 23-24
The 2nd Sunday of Lent
Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18 | Romans 8:31b-34 | Mark 9:2-10
Oh God, who have commanded us to listen to your Beloved Son, be pleased, we pray, to nourish us inwardly by your word that, with spiritual sight made pure, we may rejoice to behold your glory. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
The theme of this set of readings is captured in the word listen. The opening prayer asked us to really listen, to listen to something that will change us, to open our eyes to see, to feel, to know something, and it’s a spiritual insight, according to that opening prayer. Open our eyes that we might see something, something radically new. It’s fascinating to me that we have two sets, in a way, of readings to work with in terms of scripture revealing to us the truth of who God is, who we are and why we’re here. And it seems to me, when you look at the first set of teachings in the Old Testament, what we’re hearing very clearly is the story of a God who reveals himself like other gods, and one of the things that he requires from us is the absolute capacity to surrender to whatever he asks us to do, to trust in him. And the way we express our trust is to do whatever he asks, no matter how difficult or how hard or how demanding.
So the ultimate thing with testing Abraham, who is the first person that God called into this intimacy with him, he was asked to basically give up the one thing that had been given to him as a gift from God, and that’s the first way that God reveals himself to Abraham. “I’m a God who can give you what you’ve never ever had that you’ve always longed for, a son. I’ll give you that.” And that gift was everything — everything to Abraham, and then for God to turn around and to ask him to sacrifice his son is so — really bizarre, in a sense. It’s like the son that you created, that I helped you create, that is something that God is willing to destroy just to show God that you are trusting him. There’s a phrase somewhere in the scripture there that implies somehow that Abraham thought, “Well, if I do sacrifice my son, something will come from that that will be maybe more than what I’m giving up,” because that’s got to be somehow — in human nature, you can’t give up everything, thinking that it’s going to leave you with absolutely nothing. But what I think this image is — and it comes up over and over in the Old Testament, people sacrificing their will to God’s will — it is a way of understanding your relationship with the divine power when human beings are in need of their help, and they need to know that we really trust in them. God needs to know that we are there with them, and so it’s one way of imagining your relationship with divinity. He gives us wisdom, gave us the Ten Commandments, and the relationship he wants with us is, “You follow these Ten Commandments, and if you don’t, you will be punished. If you do, you’ll be rewarded.” So it was a very binary world. It was a world of good and evil, a world of reward and punishment, and it makes total sense to the mind.
That’s very logical and very easy to understand, and that’s where God first began to reveal himself to our minds. But there is potential beyond that, and then we have a New Testament, a whole new vision. And you’ve got to look and understand the very radical difference. Imagine in the Old Testament, the ideal was to listen to the law and to follow it, and in place of the law and in place of all those prophets that demanded that people follow God or be destroyed, all of that was going to go away in the New Testament. That’s the hardest thing, to realize the Old Testament is old, and the New Testament is new. It doesn’t mean the Old Testament isn’t loaded with wisdom. In fact, the most interesting thing about the Old Testament is there are over 300 references to exactly what the New Testament is going to be, describing almost perfectly the life of Jesus. And so the first testament was never the full message. It was never intended to be the full message. It was reaching human beings where they were in terms of consciousness. That’s the best you could do, is get hold of their minds and give them some kind of sense of what’s right and wrong and justice and injustice, fairness, and God always demanded a lot from those who he was going to take care of. They earned his care, and that was what saved them from a life of destruction. It was motivation. They needed the motivation of punishment. It’s like maybe a child doesn’t understand fully the depth of why they shouldn’t play in the street, and so they’re spanked, or they’re punished for playing in the street. It’s about a more primitive — primitive understanding of life, and life on this planet has always been a case of human beings evolving more and more and becoming exactly who God created them to be, which is a reflection of God.
So time was a very important element in this revelation, story. So it began by listening to the law and trying to follow it. So we see that image, in the first reading, of that whole process, but there’s a part of God in that first reading that reminds us that every time that God was acting in the way that most gods acted, because the gods were always demanding sacrifice, there is this thing that this God of the Old Testament, Yahweh, does. Every now and then, he will take the stand that all the gods did, and then at the end, he goes, “Well, I’m not really going to do that. I just really wanted to see if you trusted me.” So then in the New Testament or in the gospel — let’s go there. The gospel is about what’s new in the New Testament. In the Old Testament, you had to listen to the word of God. Now, in the New Testament, the word of God is not a written word. It’s not a spoken word. It’s an incarnate word. It’s a word made flesh. It is a word that is living and active. It is something that can only be read with the eyes, not just the ears but the eyes. So Jesus comes into the world, and he’s going to be the one that opens the eyes of everyone to who God really is and what the relationship that God wants with us really is. And it’s something that could have never been fathomed by people with a much lower conscious level. It had to be — people had to grow into some potential to understand this, but he’s saying, “I want to come and dwell inside of you, and when I dwell inside of you, I bring you something. It’s called the truth, and the image of the truth is light, enlightenment. I will come into the world, open your heart, your mind to what is real, to what is true, and when you see the truth, when you are aware of it, it changes you. It makes a shift inside of you. It is a spiritual event. It is not something you can do for yourselves. It’s a mystery.”
So when you see this beautiful image of the transfiguration in the gospel, you see all these images that are loaded with meaning. Jesus calls just a few to give them a hint of what’s coming — Peter, James and John, and basically what he shows them is who he is. What they see with their eyes is they see this Jesus figure, who is conversing with the Old Testament images, the law and those who demanded the law be followed, the prophets. It’s as if they’re getting together and saying, “Well, thanks for your work.” This is Jesus saying, “Well, thank you for the law, and thank you guys for all this. But basically I’m telling you that there’s a new thing coming.” And then the disciples see the new thing, and when they see enlightenment flowing out of this figure, Jesus, they’re completely mystified. They entered the mystical world, the world of mystics, and they encountered divinity. They encountered divinity in their life, and that didn’t happen in the Old Testament. If anybody thought that God would enter into them, they would be disintegrated in a second. There was such a division between the goodness of divinity and the ugliness in the sin of humans they could not ever come together, and this new vision that is placed before them is just the opposite. No, no, there is no division between a sinner and God. There’s nothing but unity and communion. How could that possibly be? Because human beings are not anywhere near who God is. Well, the whole notion of the incarnation, when Jesus was revealing himself as the revealer and telling the disciples, in a sense, though they couldn’t understand it, that this is their destiny. They’re going to be like Jesus. They’re going to be something that Jesus later would say, “You are the light of the world.” Anyone that believes in the indwelling presence of God’s spirit inside them is a light to the world, and that interior life of God within us that Jesus manifests is also a manifestation of a God who is more a servant than a master. And Paul was so aware of this. He was so conscious of the fact that that’s who God is that he talks about it in this way. “If God has died for us, if God sacrificed his Son for us,” using Old Testament images, “then how could we not trust him?” We can trust him because he gave up everything for us, and what he gave up was this thing that is so crucial for us. He gave up any sense of demanding from human beings justification for their sins. In the Old Testament, you were always required to make some kind of action that would make up for your sin, and Jesus said, “This is blinding you to the real work that I’m here to ask you to help me with. You’re not in charge of getting — making up for your sins. I’ll do that. I’ll do that for you. Don’t worry at all about the justice issue about your sinning. That’s taken care of. Don’t wallow in shame and guilt and fear that you’re going to be punished. That’s just not going to help, because what I need you to do is not to be focused on your sins and the past but to be focused on the power that is now within you.” And the most powerful way that power is manifested is when you begin to have that same disposition that Jesus revealed to these disciples, the enlightened position that you are like the Christ, bringing into the world an image of a God relationship that is so radically new and different that it’s still hard for people to grasp it. God is so in love with you, with me that every one of our sins, because he knows that’s an obstacle for us to be close to him, they’re written off. He said, “I paid for all of that. Don’t even think about the fact of how you’re not worthy. Just think about the fact of how much God wants to give you an insight into who you are, the dignity, the value of the core that he created in you, and he wants you to find that, connect with that and share that with other people.
Good religion, truth is contagious as our lives, and when the truth is lived in a person, it awakens the truth in another person. When a person is lying constantly, the other people begin to think that lies work. They don’t. The only thing that works is truth. The only person that’s really valuable in the world is a person who’s living in the truth. They have all the authority. They have all the power, even though it seems that those who lie and cheat and steal, that they get all the power. Well, they don’t. They have power in a world of materialism and using and taking and killing, but we enter into a world of light, enlightenment, awakening people to the depth and beauty of who God is, who we are and why we’re here. It’s a great blessing.
Father, we have such a hard time believing you truly abide, live, dwell within a heart that is open to your mercy, to your credible gift of forgiveness. Our minds are so strong and justice is such a part of that. And we have a hard time moving to the heart that understands completely what this is about. It’s about love being the core of who we are, who you are, and what we’re supposed to bring to the world. No judgment, no division, simply a longing for all things to come to the fulfillment that you created them for. Bless us with this kind of faith, and we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.