One of the great themes of our faith is the idea that it is a journey, a pilgrimage towards God. You can see and hear me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brfeTp20eAg
At first sight, it might seem that apart from our 1st Reading, (Genesis 12:1-4) where Abram (later called Abraham) sets out on his journey, the other Readings are not on this theme. Well, today I aim to show you that the Gospel offers us the same idea, even if it is not so obvious until we start to think about it a bit more deeply. However, let’s start with Abraham: and the first thing we need to remember is that although he has the vision and the promise from God, he doesn’t know where he is going. The rest of the story that isn’t in our Reading tells us that he first went to Haran, and then after a bit moved on to what we now call the Holy Land, and even after that he faces famine and ends up for a while in Egypt, and only later comes back to where we expect him to be. The second thing we need to remember is that the promise from God that his descendants will be “A great nation” is something he doesn’t see. He ends up with just one son Isaac, a pretty fragile hope in the days when so many people died young and without children. St Paul tells us that we, the Christian Church, are all children of Abraham. We, the people of God spread all over the world, are his descendants – something Abraham could never have dreamt about in a thousand years. His journey is a journey into the unknown.
One might think that when Peter, James and John experience the Transfiguration, as in our Gospel (Matt 17:1-9) they have a vision that they can carry with them from then on. But we know that this was far from the case. If they’d really understood the vision, they would not have run away when Jesus was arrested. Instead, they sought a more immediate glory, expecting some kind of kingdom in this world where they would find a special place in glory with Jesus. Indeed ,we see Peter determined to stick with the vision rather than to go on beyond it into the darkness and uncertainty, and so he wants to enshrine Jesus with Moses and Elijah on the mountain, rather than going back down to an ordinary hard life where the vision would be likely to fade.
I expect many of us are in the same position. We can look back to a time when we probably had no doubts about the faith. Maybe in our childhood, if we were brought up as Christians, or maybe at some time when it came to us that Jesus was a living reality that we wanted to follow, or maybe a bit of both. For some, it may be an actual event, a moment of vision, when we felt God very close to us; whilst for others it may be a gentler on-going and maybe growing awareness that the Church is where we want to be, where we want to belong. However, few of us will not have had many moments when we have struggled to find God present for us, when his glory and his love have seemed very far away from us, when we have felt that we are in the dark. The only comfort I can get when this happens to me is that many of the greatest saints went through this too, even if those around them knew nothing of their inner struggles and torments.
Some people have described this as being similar to the temptations of Jesus, a challenge from the power of evil, To recognise such experiences as of the evil one, something that must be opposed, can be useful sometimes, but it can also make us stressed and anxious, gritting our teeth as we try in our own strength to fight such things. I prefer St Paul’s approach, for what he stresses is our need to see such things as an encouragement to turn to God. His most vivid expression of it is when he talks of “a thorn in the flesh.” (2 Cor 12:7) For although he sees this trouble as “a messenger from Satan,” his solution is to admit to God his weakness. He goes so far as to say “I will boast .. of my weaknesses,” and why? “So that the power of Christ may rest upon me.” In other words, he turns something that might appear negative, a reason for struggle and stress, into an opportunity to trust God more.
Think of the Hymn “Be thou Guardian and my Guide”, the 2nd Verse begins:-
“The world, the flesh, and Satan dwell / Around the path I tread
But then it proposes the solution
“O save me from the snares of hell/ Thou quickener of the dead.”
We all know of times when we have failed to be all that we want to be, all that God wants us to be. This often happens in Lent, when we have often made resolutions, only to find we cannot keep them, or that the temptation for that thing we have given up gets too strong for us. I even have a friend who gave up alcohol for Lent, and then forgot about his resolution the next time he was in the Pub with some friends! St Paul would want us to see such failures as opportunities to deepen our faith in God. Our failure then becomes a moment of self-awareness of our weakness, of our lack of self-control. It then becomes something positive, a time which enables us to share with God more of what we are really like, and to discover more fully his love and understanding of us. It is then that God says to us, as he said to St Paul ““My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
This takes us to our 2nd Reading today (2 Tim 1:8-10) with the message “Bear the hardships for the sake of the Good News, relying on the power of God who has saved us and called us to be holy – not because of anything we ourselves have done but for his own purpose and by his own grace.” I think it’s lovely to think that we are called to be holy, not by anything we have done or failed to do, but through the power of God working in us. It takes us back to that Transfiguration story, when the disciples had to discover that any props they might propose to offer to God were meaningless. All they had to do was to “Listen to him”, and then “Stand up” for Jesus and him alone.
Might I recommend a short book for Lent on this subject. It is called “To believe in Jesus” by the Carmelite Nun Ruth Burrows. It stresses that as soon as we stop concentrating attention uselessly on ourselves, and instead recognise our weakness, our need, the way is open to encounter God and the holiness of Jesus which is his gift.
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