2d Sunday of Lent
March 12, 2017
2 Tim 1: 8b-10
Gen 12: 1-4
Matt 17: 1-9
Holy Cross, Champaign, Ill.
“Beloved:
Bear your share of hardship for the Gospel with the strength that comes
from God” (2 Tim 1: 8).
Lancelot didn’t prove to be as pure as he boasted. By the story’s end, he’s entered an
adulterous relationship with Queen Guenevere and helped destroy the “most
congenial spot for
happily-ever-aftering that
was known as Camelot.”
In Christianity there’s a long history of
self-reliance, of believing that we can be so good that God must reward us with
heaven. That actually isn’t so different
from what Jesus’ foes in the Gospels believed:
perfect observance of the Torah was what made people pleasing to God,
and less observant mankind—including all of the Gentile world—was doomed. It’s not so different today from what’s known
as the “prosperity Gospel,” which preaches that if you live a virtuous life God
will make sure you prosper even in a material sense. And from a belief in one’s own virtue, it’s
not a far stretch to think, as many do today both inside and outside the
Church, that we’re entitled to define what is
virtue, what is morally good,
regardless of what the sacred Scriptures or the Church may teach.
Jesus had a hard time with the
self-described virtuous (or righteous).
Instead, he welcomed and forgave sinners. He offered grace, i.e., God’s pardon and
eternal life, not as something earned by the practice of virtue but as God’s
freely given gift.
Who hasn’t sinned? Who has kept God’s law perfectly? We know very well the answers to those
questions. St. Paul speaks to us today
of relying on the strength of God and not on our own strength. Our own strength is no more powerful against
our sinful inclinations and the baneful influences of the world than Lancelot’s
strength was.
Recall last weekend’s readings. Had we been in Adam’s or Eve’s place in Eden,
how would we have responded to the tempter’s appeal to our pride and
self-esteem? Had we been with Jesus when
the devil came to him in the desert, would we have whispered to Jesus: “Yes, Lord, do it! I’m hungry!
Let the world see how much God loves you! Think of all the good you could do if you
ruled the world! And you can just be
pretending to worship Satan. You know
he’s the father of lies, so you can lie back to him. What’s a little white lie, anyway?”
Instead, St. Paul reminds his faithful
disciple and helper Timothy, “God saved us and called us to a holy life, not
according to our works” (1:9). God has
called us for holiness, but that holiness isn’t the fruit of our own good deeds
or virtuous actions. On our own, we’re a
bunch of Lancelots.
If God were to call you the way he called
Abram in today’s 1st reading—“Leave your father’s house and your kin, leave
your homeland, pack up your immediate household, your tents, and your flocks,
and move to a new land that you’ve never seen, among other tribes and nations
whom you don’t know” (cf. Gen 12:1)—would you do it? No road map, no GPS, no compass; no texting,
no telephone, no mail; only some word-of-mouth knowledge about where you’re
heading. Would the virtues of obedience
and trust be strong in you?
Even priests and religious struggle with
that kind of directive sometimes when their bishop or provincial superior tells
them to pack up and move to a new assignment.
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The Lord's Agony
(Carl Bloch)
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We can imagine that Jesus struggled with
his “assignment.” At his transfiguration
(Matt 17:1-9), he conversed with Moses, the giver of the Law, and Elijah,
Israel’s 1st great prophet. What did
they converse about? I’m sure it wasn’t
the weather, the stock market, or the Cubs.
Immediately after the vision experience, Jesus charges his 3 favored
apostles, “Don’t tell anyone about the vision until the Son of Man has been
raised from the dead” (17:9), which strongly suggests that Moses, Elijah, and
he had been conversing about his “assignment,” his fulfilling the Law and the
prophets thru his approaching passion, death, and resurrection. In fact, in his account of the transfiguration, St. Luke says that is what they talked about.
To go thru with that, Jesus certainly
needed “the strength that comes from God,” from his Father in heaven. If you doubt that, re-read the Gospels about
the agony he suffered in the Garden of Gethsemane, when there was still time
for him to run away, or even—as he says to Peter while he’s being arrested—time
for him to “call upon my Father and he will provide me at this moment with more
than 12 legions of angels” (Matt 26:53) to protect him from the malice of the
Romans, the Jewish leaders, and the devil.
So, assuredly, we need God’s help to live
holy lives. God has called every one of
us to holiness. That call doesn’t depend
upon our own goodness, our own virtue, but only on “God’s own design and the
grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began” (2 Tim 1:9). God has had a plan for your holiness and mine
forever, even before he created the universe!
His plan doesn’t depend on our goodness but only on “the appearance of
our Savior Jesus Christ, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality
to light thru the Gospel” (1:10).
Sometimes it’s hard to live a holy
life. You know that, even if God doesn’t
give you a dramatic call like he did to Abram, or if he doesn’t knock you on
your tail like did to St. Paul when Paul was persecuting the Church. Sometimes it’s hard to be truthful, to be
faithful to our spouse, to work diligently, to be patient with people, to
follow the Church’s moral teachings on sexuality, human life, and biotechnology,
to spend a little time every day in prayer or Scripture reading, to be known
among your co-workers or fellow students as a Catholic. “Beloved:
bear your share of hardship for the Gospel with the strength that comes
from God.” We need God’s strength to be
faithful. With his strength we can be faithful. With his strength we can live the holy lives
to which he has called us. His holy ones
will enjoy eternal life because Jesus has “destroyed death and brought life and
immortality”—as a gift to us from God, who called us because he loves us and
wants us to be with him.
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