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Second Sunday Week of Lent B (February 28/2021)
Your Daily Blessing: May God our merciful Father confirm you as one of His choicest vessels! Amen.
Read Gen 22:1-18; Rom 8:31-34; Mark 9:2-10; pray Psalm 116.
NARRATION: We all long for our own bodily transformation. Our basic desires like hunger, thirst, pleasure, along with those inner drives: to succeed in life, to be better persons, to be holy, and live saintly lives are all progressive expressions of the deepest hunger of all: our ultimate transformation.
NARRATION: We all long for our own bodily transformation. Our basic desires like hunger, thirst, pleasure, along with those inner drives: to succeed in life, to be better persons, to be holy, and live saintly lives are all progressive expressions of the deepest hunger of all: our ultimate transformation.
We all yearn for a ‘liberation of our bodies’ (Rom 8:22) Paul alluded to. We want to be more! To be good, better, and best versions of ourselves.
The transfiguration experience is God’s way to letting the apostles, the pillars of his liberation agenda, to have a peep into that future glory we all hope and yearn for. At some point in our lives, we have to come to terms with the reality that we cannot save ourselves. We do not have it in us to change to be better once we have taken of the fruit of the tree of death (knowledge of good and evil).
Sin is then nothing but the corruption of our wills such that it has become naturally rebellious.
Our journey to liberation is to rediscover surrender – to finally realize that nothing is of value here except what God wills, however he wills it, and whenever he wills it.
That is the miracle of justification that Abraham modeled in the first reading; (confirmed in the second reading and Gospel). He took his only son Isaac without question, and was ready kill him at God’s command.
Hence, all morality eventually revolves around what God values. In Abraham we see a near perfect surrender of will; which Jesus now perfectly models “I have come not to do my own will but that of my father”. That is why the core message of the transfiguration is (see today’s Gospel): “This is my beloved Son, listen to him.”
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In other words, he asks us to ‘obey him,’ ‘surrender your wills’ to him if you want to be transfigured like him some day. The secret of our liberation is then in this surrender of will. His life will be ‘passed over’ into us through His spirit living in us so that “it is no longer I who live but Christ lives in me” (Gal 2:20) It is our unwillingness to surrender that is keeping us from being transformed into a mirror image of Christ.
A secret remedy to this challenge is the Holy Eucharist. God hides his greatest blessings in plain sight. I believe that literally eating the body and blood of Christ with an honest longing to receive this special grace of complete ‘surrender of will’ is one miracle each of us should pray to witness someday. Do just that and keep praying, waiting, hoping. It will happen at God’s own time, not ours. It is part of the surrender itself. God has given us everything in His Son. And I am sure in this ‘last days,’ a ‘Eucharistic Spirituality’ is the remedy for our greatest sickness: stubbornness of will.
PRAYER: Father, you ask us to listen to your beloved Son as a gateway to our transfiguration, grant me the grace to surrender myself to him without looking back. Amen
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