Second Sunday of Lent, C

            I think sometimes that our struggle with believing in God, the God and Father of Jesus Christ, is not so much that we can’t accept the possibility of miracles that are part and parcel of the Christian faith -- for most people pray for a miracle when they really feel like they need one. Rather, I believe, the struggle of faith is often in believing that God could possibly be as good as the Gospel, the whole of the Scriptures, insists that He is.  Yet, even though we have heard this, in our prosperity -- and these are prosperous days -- we tend to forget God, His goodness and our duties to Him.  And when times get bad, as they inevitably do, we go back to God with oh such mixed motives, seeing this God as a kind of last resort.   Few people -- some try to -- but few people would put up with such nonsense from a so-called friend or lover.  But God always welcomes us back.

            Even when the biggest blunder ever was committed, when Adam and Eve said “no” to God in such a definitive and final way, even there in the very midst of this new darkness and sin invading a once pristine world, even there God speaks His word of forgiveness in the promise that one day all things would be set right. 

            Almost every day I hear someone either wondering or complaining about all the evil in the world.  That marvelous writer and very good theologian Dorothy Sayers comments on such complaints about the way things are, why God does not stop horrible evils in the world (and, of course, by that we always mean someone else’s evil):  I quote from her book Creed or Chaos -- “‘Why doesn’t God smite this [or that] dictator dead?’ writes Sayers, “is a question a little remote from us.  Why, madam, did He not strike you dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and unkind slander the day before yesterday?  Or me, before I behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that well-meaning friend?  And why, sir, did He not cause your hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to that dirty little bit of financial trickery?  Your misdeeds and mine are nonetheless repellent [even if] our opportunities for doing damage are less spectacular than those of some other people.”

            Whatever we say about all the evil in the world, two things we must remember:  we sometimes in our own little (or big) ways, add to this evil; and, secondly, that the God who could remove us from His sight in a split second deigns not to do so.  On the contrary -- and here the goodness of God shines forth so clearly -- He deigned to undergo it (our sins, our evil), all of it, in and through Jesus Christ.  If anything should be crystal-clear about the Christian faith it is this astounding truth:  that God turned Himself over to us, He came among us as a human being; and this was the occasion of the greatest evil ever -- that we crucified Him and still do with our sins.

            Tough talk, I know.  But it’s truth, and you dear people of God are worthy of the truth.  For too long, way too long, we have been coddled with milk toast, cotton candy sermons designed not for the explication of truth about sin, about God and God’s holiness, but rather sermons designed to keep from offending anybody that might hear it.  Well, the person who is only interested in not offending somebody with the truth will never say anything really worth listening to.  But the truth, though sometimes painful, is our best hope.  For if we have failed -- and we have, often -- so too do we have a forgiving God, a merciful God, a God whose thoughts are not like ours, whose ways are far beyond and better than ours.  We on occasion turn our backs on Him over the merest trivialities of sin, and God immediately makes moves to woe us back.  And, of course, that’s what the story, the history, of Jesus of Nazareth is all about.  He came among us to unite us back to God, whose will for us is our happiness, and we killed Him.  And what does He do?  It’s so typical of this God: He rises from the dead that He might share everlasting life with us, a life that evil is powerless against.

            But even before His resurrection, just a short time before Jesus’ great test of suffering and crucifixion, Jesus took His closest followers up onto a high mountain to show them something.  It was as if to say that, yes, the penance of a dark and agonizing Lent is about to fall upon us. You are about to undergo the greatest of tragedies; but I want to let you in on a secret; I want to show you what it is all leading up to, what the ever-good and loving God has up His sleeve.  And as today’s Gospel relates:   “...He was transfigured before them, and his clothes became dazzling white, such as no fuller on earth could bleach them.”  The message:  the greatest evil that humanity could ever come up with -- to murder the Savior -- was about to seemingly crush our Lord, and He showed His three followers -- and us from their account -- that such evil would land upon One who would receive it, drink this cup of evil and woe to the dregs, and then obliterate it. 

            But His glory was too much for them.  The insight they were granted into the truth of just who this person, this Jesus, is, caused them to fall prostrate on the ground in fear and trembling -- something of how this amazing, sin-destroying goodness of God does to us sometimes.  It is too much for us.  Then we hear the words in today’s Gospel, after the terror of God’s blinding and awesome holiness, we read that Jesus was still there, alone, standing next to them, with them.  In like manner, we see the Eucharist held up before us at every Mass, and we hear the words, “This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.”  Your sins, my sins, the sins of the whole world.  God’s goodness is overwhelming, almost incredible, but that’s not what we should be afraid of, really we should not, but rather we should fear the sins that could keep us from that goodness.  God’s goodness is overwhelming, almost incredible, but it is revealed to us around this truth:  that for His part, God just will not let us go.  Thank God, for His part, He just will not let us go.