The Agony in the Garden, Sandro Botticelli
GN 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18; PS 116:10, 15, 16-17, 18-19; ROM 8:31b-34; MK 9:2-10
This Second Sunday in Lent, year B (that is, Mark’s year) presents us with an embarrassment of riches. The Gospel is the Transfiguration, about which much should be said – but at least it has its own feast day. The first reading is the Sacrifice of Isaac. This reading needs really a lot of unpacking, and unfortunately the only other time we read it will be Easter Vigil, when there is too much else going on.
For now, however, let us just consider what these things have to do with Lent.
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The Lectionary, you know, was changed, mostly in good ways, after Vatican II. But the Transfiguration has always been the reading for this Second Sunday. Why?
There used to be readings in this first week of Lent (the Lenten “Ember Days”) that give some different models for the Forty Days. We know of course about Noah in the Ark and Jesus in the wilderness.
But there is also Moses: “When I went up the mountain to receive the tablets of stone, the tablets of the covenant that the LORD made with you, I remained on the mountain forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water” (Deut 9:9; cf. Ex 28:18, 34:28).
And then Elijah gets chased away by Queen Jezebel: “he himself went a day’s journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die” (as we might be starting to ask, ten days into Lent!). “An angel touched him and said to him, ‘Arise and eat,’” and gave him bread and water. “And the angel of the LORD came again a second time and touched him and said, ‘Arise and eat, for the journey is too great for you.’ And he arose and ate and drank, and went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb, the mount of God.”
Both of these characters are fasting for forty days – and going up a mountain. Both of them are beyond their strength, sustained only by the Lord. And both of them are going up to meet God.
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Although, interestingly, Jesus is talking precisely to Moses and Elijah in the Transfiguration, the Transfiguration isn’t about forty days. But it is about climbing the mountain of God, and it is perhaps in that way that it it serves to frame our Lent.
Yes, Lent is a long difficult fast, a “journey too great for you.” But in order to understand that struggle, we have to see its goal – just as, in order to understand the Israelites wandering forty years in the wilderness, we have to see the Promised Land at the end. We are going up to meet the Lord.
A couple nice details: “his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.” A more literal translation would say, “no clothes maker could make them so white.” We are on our journey to become clean – nay, not only clean, but dazzling, filled with the light of God. No human power can do it. But we go up to the mountain to meet Jesus, who can fill us with light.
The story ends with them “questioning what rising from the dead meant.” But again: the journey is too long for us, but the power that raises Jesus from the dead will be our strength, too, our bread from heaven, our sustenance that “gives life to the world” (John 6:33).
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The sacrifice of Isaac is a complicated story. But notice here, too, Abraham is going up the mountain. He is asked to make a sacrifice too hard for him, a Lenten Cross no man can be expected to bear. But God provides – Abraham in fact names the place “God provides.” Christ helps him carry his cross, so that he can offer perfect sacrifice.
And the story ends, like our Lent, not with the death of Isaac, but with the promise of life. “I will bless you abundantly and make your descendants as countless as the stars of the sky and the sands of the seashore.” It is the sign of God’s life-giving power. It is worth climbing the mountain, starving and gasping for air, to meet the Lord, the giver of life, at the top.
And so our second reading, from Romans, gives the simple principle: “He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him?” Why do we fear? Why do we hoard for ourselves? Why instead do we not go out to meet Christ in the wilderness, and let him be our bread from heaven?
Where do you secretly ask yourself whether God is worth the trouble?
