Second Sunday of Lent, February 21, 2016, Year C
Life is not a straight line. We all experience ups and downs, times of tranquillity and moments of doubt and darkness, peaks of light and valleys of doubt and darkness. This is true also for the life of Jesus, as he was fully human “in all things but sin”, as the letter to the Hebrews says. The Gospels mention three spiritual “peak” moments when Jesus experienced very strongly the presence and intimate closeness of His Father, His “Abba”. The first occurred at the age of twelve, for a Jewish kid the turning point from childhood and being counted as an adult. During his first pilgrimage to the Temple in Jerusalem, he was so deeply touched by God that he wanted to stay in the house of his Father and forgot all about his parents. Even today the time of transition from childhood to adulthood is often marked not only by deep questioning and crisis but also by profound insights and experiences of the divine. The second moment was Jesus’ baptism. He “saw the heaven opened” i.e. he communicated directly with God and “the Spirit came to rest on him” to empower him for his mission. The transfiguration on mount Tabor is the third time Jesus is drawn so closely to God that even his body is transformed and he experiences a foretaste of the resurrection. What is common to all three moments of enlightenment is that they do not last. Jesus comes down from the mountain and enters a time of testing, a spiritual crisis. After the baptism he is “lead by the Spirit” into the desert, the place of hardship and the territory of evil spirits. At a moment of hunger, weakness and exhaustion the devil tries to pull Jesus away from his true mission. He lures him with the same kind of temptations that are also at work in our own times and often make us silence the voice of our conscience and abandon our values: the possibility of a life of leisure and pleasure, the insidious desire to seek popularity and fame and give in to peer pressure, and the abuse of power which makes instrumentalise other people for our own interests instead of serving them. Jesus resists and Satan “left him to return at the appointed time” which is the time of his suffering and death. But before he enters his last temptation the Father gives Jesus on mount Tabor this extraordinary moment of tasting something of the glory that awaits him. In the strength of this experience Jesus hangs on to trust God’s word even when all abandon him and even his “Abba” seems absent. During Lent we could take some time to recall the peak moments of our life when we had an experience of God’s presence, of his peace, of his light. This gives the strength to stand firm when doubt and darkness seem to overwhelm us. What happens in the life of Jesus and in our personal lives is also a pattern of the history of humankind. There are times of peace, prosperity and progress and there are times when the order of the world is shaken. After two world wars with some 100 million dead we had the extraordinary privilege to live through 70 years of relative peace, at least in the Western world. Now our world seems to slide into a period of uncertainty and conflict. Jesus’ experience and maybe also our own assure us that God is always at work and eventually turns evil into good.
Fr. Wolfgang Schonecke MAfr