Not too long ago, we started the season of Lent, with the celebration of Ash Wednesday. On that day, the Church invited us to start a forty-day journey of preparation for the celebration of the feast of feasts: Easter! Forty days can be a long time. Along the way we may lose our perspective, and the journey may become heavy and burdensome. A stop along the way becomes necessary to rest and to keep the perspective of our journey. This is precisely what this second Sunday of Lent is: a joyful stop along the Lenten road, which helps us foresee what awaits us at the end: the celebration of God’s gift to us in His beloved Son, who came to transform our lives!
The road of Lent is a road of reflection and penance. Indeed, during this time the liturgy changes and it adopts a more penitential tone. The prayers, the antiphons and the choice of readings are all meant to underline our need for conversion. But what is conversion? Conversion is to accept with humility our nature of sin, and to desire a new life.
If we are sincere, we must admit that we experience a certain dilemma almost each day. We want to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves, but our actions, many times, do not show it. There is a fight that takes place within us between our life in the flesh and our life in the spirit. Moreover, it is not difficult to realize that sin “comes natural” to us, while doing God’s will can be challenging. This Lenten time of reflection and conversion is not to be seen as an end in itself, but as a means to value what we will celebrate on Easter Sunday: the transformation of an earthly and weak body into a celestial body, through Jesus’s Paschal mystery.
Today’s readings help us to pause along the road of Lent, to contemplate the view of the victory of Easter on the horizon. All the readings today speak of the immense gift that the Lord has made for us in his Son Jesus Christ. This gift is prefigured in the first reading, which speaks about the sacrifice of Abraham. Out of obedience, Abraham is willing to give his “son Isaac, his only one, whom he loves,” to obey the command of God. The gift of God is also announced by St. Paul, in the second reading, as a guarantee of God’s love for us. However, the gospel shows the REAL meaning of this gift of Easter. In it, we hear the voice of the Father saying: “This is my beloved Son, Listen to him.” The Father is referring to Jesus, who has manifested His glory to the Apostles, by showing them his glorious body. The body that died a tortured death, is now glorified. The Apostles will give witness to this event, and will make it the center of their teachings, through which they communicate to us the plan of God: to make us sharers in the transfiguration of Christ’s body, so that the life of God may become a new nature in us. Thus, we can finally aspire to live the life of the spirit.
Let us continue, then, this journey of Lent, with our eyes fixed on the Lord. Let us rejoice this day in which we stop along the way and foresee our destination. Finally, let us ask that in this coming Easter, our lives may be totally transformed by the power of Christ’s resurrection.
[Readings: Gn 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18; Rom 8:1b-34; Mk 9:2-10]
