They saw his glory…
How might Lent change your vision?
If the Lord told you to look at the sky and count the stars, do you think you would ever look at the sky the same way again? In the Book of Genesis, God points to the stars in the sky as a revelation of the extraordinary numbers of descendants who will be born of Abram’s line. Then, to assure Abram that this promise is trustworthy, God plunges him into a deep, terrifying darkness as he cuts a covenant with Abram. Abram’s faith in God’s promise will result in both progeny and land; Abram’s vision has been changed, transformed, by his trust in the extraordinary relationship he has with the Lord. Abram knows, as Psalm 27 will one day proclaim, that the Lord is his light and his salvation, and he believes that he will see the bounty of the Lord in the land of the living – because Abram waits for the Lord with courage!
Although Jesus tells his disciples that his death is both necessary and imminent, they fail to see or understand, limiting their vision to what they know rather than seeing past what can be seen with the eyes. And so, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus takes Peter, John, and James and goes up the mountain to pray. There, the disciples’ vision will be radically altered when, during the Transfiguration, they are able to see Jesus as God sees him: they see his glory! This change in vision is compounded by a voice that comes from the cloud that says, This is my chosen Son; listen to him. Peter, John and James will continue to struggle, for they have no concept for a suffering Messiah. But they will remember this moment into the future.
In his Letter to the Philippians, Paul will reinforce the importance of believing not only in the resurrection but also in the crucifixion. Many, Paul says, conduct themselves as enemies of the cross of Christ, giving no credence to the notion of a Messiah who suffered for their sake. But without Christ’s dying, his love is not revealed; the cross is the revelation of his glory as much as the resurrection is, and we must see Christ as God sees him in order to claim our citizenship in heaven.
Faith shifts how we look at our world, allowing us to see it – and ourselves – as God sees it – and us. We often get focused on the tangible, but in Lent, we are called to a transformation of vision, that we might see what we have not seen before, and trust that one day, Christ will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body… all because we, like Abram, change the way we see the world and put our faith in the Lord!
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
No comments:
Post a Comment