Refresher Course

Two weeks ago, the double snowstorm prevented us from having Mass on Ash Wednesday. It probably felt strange to begin Lent this year without that black smudge of ash on your forehead. It was strange for me to not have that same black smudge on my thumb for the three or four days afterward. For whatever reason, we Catholics love to receive ashes. It’s partly due to the fact that they are only offered once a year. But, at a deep level, I think the ashes also remind us of our own mortality, and our imperfection, and we kinda like that. When we come forward to get ashes, it is as if we are saying, “Yes, I know I am just a poor sinner,” and there is something honest and liberating about that.

Of course, ashes last only for one day. The knowledge of our mortality and the recognition of our sinfulness – the two go together – are not so easily wiped away. Yet, that is precisely what God wants. Sinful imperfection and what follows as a result, death, were not part of his original plan for humanity; they entered the world through the Fall of our first parents. And ever since, God has sought to blot them out — to find a solution to sin and death that would restore us, his beloved creatures, to the glory of friendship that we once had with him.

For the last few weeks, the first reading at Mass has told us how he enacted this plan. Last Sunday, we heard about how God formed a covenant with humanity through Noah, promising to save us from ultimate destruction. In today’s reading, we hear how he established a bond of total fidelity with Abraham, even asking him to hand over his only son Isaac, as a foreshadowing of God’s own readiness to hand over his Only-Begotten Son for our sake. Next week’s reading will tell us of the Law that God gave to the Israelites through Moses, instructing them on how to follow his commandments so as to live as his People.

All of this, of course, is a preparation for the final and full revelation of God: Jesus Christ. In Christ, the love of God for us is revealed not in signs and covenants but in a Person: in his words, actions, and every part of his life. It is especially by the end of his life that that love is fully made known: in the Lord’s crucifixion, death, and resurrection. All of the covenants and bonds God had made with humanity lead up to the New and Eternal Covenant God forged with us through the Cross, the only way to finally root out sin and death from the world. As Christians, we recognize this mystery every time we are at Mass, every time we pray to God: though sinless himself, Jesus took upon himself the weight of our sins in order to put them to death on the Cross and so make us also righteous in God’s sight. Even as we understand in faith the reason for the Cross, at a certain level it should always remain shocking to us.

Carl Heinrich Bloch, The Transfiguration of Jesus (1872)

Jesus knew the Cross would be shocking for the disciples too. Despite continually telling them that he had come in order to suffer and to die and to rise again, they didn’t get it. And so, he provided for his three closest followers, a glimpse of his true identity, the glory of his divinity, as a confirmation that the power of death – shocking though it would be when it came – would not have the final word. In the Transfiguration, we see a glimpse of the Resurrection, the eternal life that follows the Cross, the only thing that gives it meaning. It is this life, this light of glory, that has been God’s purpose all along – not only for his Son, but also for us – to wipe out sin and death, to sweep it away like ash.

I mention all of this not only to provide hopefully some insight into our readings today, but also to help us call to mind the truths of our faith that must always be held present there. The season of Lent is a kind of refresher course on salvation, about how we are to understand the mysteries of sin, death, redemption, eternal life – not merely as external ideas to be considered, but as truths that press upon our minds and hearts and reveal something critically important about us, about who we are, about what we are doing in this life, about how we are living right here and now. The truth is, like the disciples, we don’t always get it, and we need to be reminded anew of the basic realities of our faith, the fundamental proclamation of the Good News. If that’s a struggle – if it’s hard to understand how all these things I’m talking about matter for our day to day life – then perhaps we have, right there, the very purpose for our Lent, the goal toward which our prayer and reflection and good works should all be directed. Like the disciples, let’s ponder in faith the saving mysteries revealed to us, and made real for us, in the Person of Christ, who alone can take us from being poor sinners here and raise to be friends with God forever in the glory of heaven.

May this Eucharist that we will celebrate be a light to our minds, that we may behold in faith here and now the Real Presence of the Lord who was once transfigured on the mountain, raised up on the Cross, who sits now in glory at his Father’s right hand.