Word on Faith

The readings for the first two Sundays in Lent are always the same - Jesus is tempted in the desert, Jesus is transfigured on a mountaintop. The juxtaposition of these two images functions like a hologram for me.  

In the desert, Jesus is tempted - as I often am - by worldly promises of security, power, esteem. Jesus resists the world’s enticing promises. Experience has taught me that such promises generally do lead to anxiety, compulsion, alienation. Yet, while he is being tempted, I identify with Jesus - my sense of him is grounded in our common humanness.

In the reading from the second Sunday in Lent, Jesus is no longer in the desert but on a mountaintop. Here Jesus is revealed clothed in “dazzling white.” He is conversing with holy figures of the past, being called God’s Son in the present moment, opening to his disciples a sense of a mysterious future.  Jesus is shown to be the Cosmic Christ, enfolding all of us, all of time, all of creation in Holy Mystery. 

Much of my life has been spent in the desert, believing what God asked of me was to resist temptations.  Perhaps most of us need to start in the desert, but I don’t think we were ever supposed to stay there. We too have been invited to mountaintops where the vista is enhanced. We perceive life through a much larger lens, peer deeper into reality. Through mountaintop experiences, we humans are given a sense of grace and glory in our lives. We come to a deeper, more spacious understanding of reality. Such revelation changes a person. Like Peter, John and James, we are reduced to silence, unable to ever fully explain what we have beheld.

Here at the beginning of Lent, we are being given an image in the desert of our human frailty and an image on a mountaintop of human participation in Divine Mystery. May we be transfigured by the interplay and beauty of this hologram.