Second Sunday of Lent
Blinded by the Light
After the snowstorms, many of us found ourselves looking for sunglasses. The light outside was so bright, so dazzling that it was blinding. What a contrast to the dark, the extreme dark that we experienced in our homes without electricity or candlelight. When the three apostles climb the mountain with Jesus, they experience such a blinding light in the vision they had of Jesus transfigured, transformed. It took just such a blinding light for Peter, James, and John to begin to see or understand who Jesus was. They couldn’t see but they could hear God’s voice, “This is my beloved son. Listen to him.”
In the midst of all the voices we hear on a daily and nightly basis, which ones do we listen to? How do we make space and time to listen to the voice of Jesus speaking to us? Perhaps we too heard the voice of God during the literal darkness of the snowstorms. What did we hear? Think? Feel? How did we speak about it to others? Did we reflect the work of God in our lives?
“Coming down the mountain” is a familiar experience for persons who have made a powerful retreat, birthed a child, had a significant religious experience like Baptism, Marriage, a healing, an experience of forgiveness and reconciliation. We too are transfigured or transformed from the experience. Thomas Merton describes it as “We are all walking around shining like the sun.”
In the midst of our Lenten fasting, prayer, and almsgiving, perhaps as a fruit of those practices, we can shine like the sun, be light for others. We can intervene for others just as Christ intercedes for us. Part of our almsgiving can take the form of intervening for someone, taking a stand for him or her. We can ask God to illumine some of the problems of our country and help us to see what we can do to become anti-racist, to care for our earth and all living creatures, to cross boundaries and borders to include “the other”—someone who looks, acts, thinks, lives differently from us—in our love and care.
In this holy season of Lent, we ask for enlightenment, we ask to be purified. We seek to listen to the voice of Jesus over all the competing voices. For this, we work and pray.