Monday, March 05, 2007

Sermon for 2nd Sunday of Lent 4.3.07

2nd Sunday of Lent 4.3.07 Transfiguration

The Transfiguration is Our Lord’s way of assuring us of His glory in the midst of His degradation.

While He (or we) go through suffering there is always that backdrop or foundation of glory to sustain us in hope and joy.

The question is: will we hold on or give up when things get difficult?

If our first introduction to Our Lord was seeing Him on the Cross, we might not be inclined to join whatever religion He was starting. Yet how wrong we would be, and how deceptive appearances can be. We have to look deeper to find the glory that is there.
As did St Lawrence who could joke with his executioners in the midst of excruciating pain (and many other martyrs have shown composure and joy in similar moments).

So when we see Our Lord on the cross we are always aware of His resurrection, and that the Cross is temporary.

This is how we are meant to see our own crosses in this life.

We have trouble coming to terms with suffering. We hate it and find it very hard to say anything good about it.

Yet our religion teaches us that suffering is good for us, and we should not only endure it but actually embrace it.

Take up your cross each day and follow Me, says the Lord. And He means take up with both hands and full will, not just a sort of half-hearted reluctance.

Our mistake is that we don’t focus enough on the glory side of suffering. We focus on how much it hurts.

If we were to be thrown to the lions tomorrow we would be thinking about lions’ teeth and blood and pain etc.

When St Felicity was thrown to wild beasts she was in such a state of ecstasy that she did not even know it was happening. She came to consciousness and said, when are they going to start proceedings, only to be told that she had already been mauled by one of the beasts. She was focused on glory and this greatly diminished the suffering.

The Scriptures exhort us everywhere to look to future glory as the anchor for what we go through now.

And they tell us that what we go through now is trivial by comparison with future glory.

Also that what we suffer now can be good for us by purifying us of earthly attachments, atoning for sin, and helping others to be saved.

We will be more certain of future glory which will seem not like some far off thing but the main focus of our whole lives. We long for heaven like the deer yearns for running streams. This life is like crawling through the desert. Heaven is the water we seek.

Not only that, we will see the good that suffering united with Christ can achieve. It is a pure form of suffering, softened by divine consolation, and useful for others.

If you were asked to suffer some intense pain for a period of time and promised that your pain would bring world peace and an end to all cancer, would you not consider the suffering worthwhile?

You might doubt your strength to do it, but you would will to do it, and then God could provide the rest.

A lot of our trouble is not with suffering in principle – we are capable of making sacrifices – just that we don’t see the good that it does.

The transfiguration is a reminder of the spiritual world around us and an encouragement to trust that any suffering, cheerfully offered in union with the cross, is going to do some good somewhere. And the more suffering and the more cheerful the more good it does. (cf great saints, saving many souls, many miracles).