CELEBRATE SUNDAY
WITH ST. MARY'S
SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT
God is with us in the darkness.
SECOND SUNDAY OF LENT
In Psalm 23, the psalmist sings his famous words as a glorification of the Lord: “even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.” These words bring us comfort as people of faith, to know and to understand that in the darkest moments in life, we need not fear because God is right there with us. But when we actually traverse through those valleys, those words of comfort cannot be reconciled with the fact that we usually feel very alone in our suffering. We enter into Lent as an act of solidarity with our Lord, to share in the wilderness with him before he embarked on his mission of death. At every other point in our lives, though, he walks in our spiritual deserts with us also out of solidarity, even when we do not see him.
READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE
God initiated his relationship with humanity in this age through the figure of Abraham. When He offered Abraham the covenant that bound Himself to this humble old man, he also offered the promise of countless descendants, among which we count ourselves as people of faith. Just as we might do when we read, reflect, or pray on the promises of our faith, Abraham doubted; a lot was offered to him without any indication of proof. God did not say “trust me.” God did not show Abraham a vision of the future, the future that we see today as a fulfillment of that original promise. Instead, God asked him to walk. The binding of the covenant was done through a physical action, one in which Abraham had to kill animals and walk among the blood and death of the sacrifice. In the midst of this distressing walk, birds of prey descended upon him and he had to protect those things that were gross and unsightly. At the end, Abraham was not greeted with a feeling of accomplishment or even cleanliness, but rather a deep and terrifying darkness that enveloped him. In the binding of the first covenant of this age, Abraham experienced the fullness of life and death: this life we live is filled with unsightly things and suffering that we try to offer up to God. When the influence of evil and its forces descend upon us in this life, we must protect what little we have as an offering to God. At the end of this life, though, is the same thing that awaited Abraham at the end of his walk–the deep and terrifying unknown we call death. But in that darkness of Abraham and in the death each one of us will experience, we are awoken by the presence of the Light of God; to Abraham, it appeared as a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch, and to us, it appears in the person of Jesus Christ. In both cases, the Light of God follows the same path we do, between the carcasses and the blood, between the suffering and the sacrifice.
How do we know that God is there in the shadowy valleys of life when we cannot see Him? We can be assured of His presence because He did it first. He bore the rejection of the Fall. He descended from the heights of His Heavenly glory to the confines of a human being. He fasted and prayed in the desert. He suffered and died. What has God not seen that we have? What have we suffered that He did not suffer first? At the sight of the Transfiguration, which we hear about in this Sunday’s Gospel, the full glory of Christ is revealed to Peter, James, and John, until they are also enveloped in a cloud, later revealing only the figure of Christ standing there in his humility and simplicity. We see God in the human form, in the actions and love of our neighbors, just as the Apostles saw the full divinity of God compressed into their humble teacher, who lived with them, ate with them, cried with them, laughed with them. Each one who went to his own death afterwards did so joyfully because they knew what the psalmist knew: God is really with us, even among the suffering and the carcasses and the attacks from the forces of evil. If we take Lent seriously and treat it as us following our Lord into the deserts of life, we will notice him when he follows us, like the light of God followed Abraham, in the deserts of our own life.
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