Lent always begins with the temptation narratives from one of the three synoptic Gospels. And it is always followed, in the second Sunday by the transfiguration scene. Today we have Mathew’s version of it. The point is that the transfiguration points to what we are supposed to become, and what we look forward to at Easter. So this falls very neatly in line with what I propose as a general theme for Lent. It is this notion that is so prominent and forceful in the early Church that the Christian life is the process of illumination, enlightenment. Another aspect of that is clarification, and that is what the transfiguration theme is all about. Here it is really important to recall that the Gospels of Mathew Luke and Mark did not believe that Jesus was the second person of the Holy Trinity. These guys did not believe that Jesus was divine at the time that they wrote. That clarification of belief in this man Jesus developed over centuries as a matter of fact. And that makes a huge difference, I propose to you, in the way we understand this text.

First of all a technical note: the transfiguration is probably a throwing back onto the life of Jesus, an Easter experience of Jesus. Even having said that we cannot say that this is God doing God’s business and we are just interested as spectators. No, that is not what is going on here at all. We have in the baptismal narrative the same statement "this is my son, the beloved". To be called the son of God was a normal Jewish notion. Any good faithful Jew was the son of God (as this was a patriarchal society, they didn’t say daughter of God). So we are not talking about God pointing his finger and saying this is the second person of the trinity, so now behave yourselves and pay attention to him. Rather, we have in Mathew’s reading of this, God saying: this man is what I meant the human being to be when I created him in the first place. All human beings are the children of God, but this is my especially beloved son, because you will see in the course of his life, he is absolutely faithful to Me. And in that fidelity Jesus spelled out the very meaning of what it was to be a human being.

There is even an echo of all this when the letter to Timothy says "Jesus brought life to light". What does that mean He brought life to light? That clarified the meaning of human existence: what it meant to be alive as a human being is present in this man Jesus.

And it is played out in the first reading too, with the call of Abraham. Where Abraham is told that through him all the families of the earth would be blessed because out of his progeny would come the person who is going to show the world what it is to be a human being. That means that this person is going to embrace everybody.

Everybody has heard all this n number of times. But I would like to make a suggestion, that struck me this week because of my own mediocrity as a Christian. It is so easy to live with this notion of Jesus in some remote part of my consciousness, and to pay absolutely or virtually no attention to it at all. It terrifies me about myself. Oh yes, I believe in Jesus. Jesus is my Saviour. And then I simply carry on business as usual. Even the whole history of the Church can be read as a co-optation of the figure of Jesus, or the tailoring of the figure of Jesus to the human desires. We are told Jesus wants to save me from the ravages of inflation. Jesus wants Notre Dame to win ball games. No. What is stark and striking and not a little terrifying from these readings is that: this is what it is like to be a human being if you are serious about living a human life. You cannot temporize, you cannot live in this bifurcated world - to have Jesus up here and the standard operating procedures down here.

The whole purpose of Lent is to clarify that bifurcation in us. First of all, to look at this man, to be puzzled by this man. There is a wonderful book called Jesus the Stranger. And until Jesus is really strange to us, is a source of puzzlement, wonderment, amazement, confusion, as well as worship and hope, and love we do not have a real vision of Him. "This is my son, with whom I am well pleased, listen to Him." Maybe the pivotal word in all that I have said, certainly for myself, is mediocrity. We are so willing to adjust Jesus to the way we think life ought to go, where as there is supposed to be a ferocity in this figure. There is a line in the Gospel of Thomas: "he who is near me is near the fire". And Luke will have Jesus saying: "I come not to bring peace on earth but the sword." "I come to spread fire upon the earth". We are supposed to be uncomfortable. And it should go without saying that being uncomfortable does not mean that I don’t agree with the Pope on birth control. That is not the kind of discomfort I am talking about. Eighty-seven percent of the Catholic Church does not believe that the Pope is right on birth control. So that doesn’t get us anywhere. This is something larger and deeper. A shaking of foundations – I think that that is a Kirkegaardian phrase is it not? That is what Jesus is supposed to do for us. We are then to clarify where Jesus is absent in our lives, a clarification that only comes by really seeking who this person really is. Only if we seek who he really is can we even begin to talk about his absence. Otherwise we just say, "oh, good old Jesus, somebody up there likes me, my buddy Jesus." No, it will not wash. And Lent is this wonderful time for us to reassess who we are, where we are, what we want, to be illuminated by this man.