Lecturer's Reflections
BK David Werve provided a “Homily by Paulist Evangelization Ministry Fr DeSiano” and Brian Jeffers read the Homily. Please read the Homily below.
“We have a little bit of a problem with the very powerful Gospel story of the Transfiguration of Jesus. In this Gospel, after all, Jesus seems to show a different face to his disciples. The Jesus they saw when they went up the mountain with Him, is now more complicated. They have an image of Jesus when they first met him, as well as an image of Jesus in radiant glory; and then the post-Transfiguration of Jesus as they came out of their trance. “After the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone,” the Gospel tells us. And they said nothing to anyone. How could they ever look at Jesus the same way again?
I’m sure one of the reasons they said nothing was because they had seen way more than they could process. How could they make sense of Jesus at this point? And, a few weeks later, they will see yet another face of Jesus, bruised and immobile with death and three days after that, another face that of the Risen savior.
In some sense we need all these images of Jesus to keep us from pigeonholing him. There is one Jesus but that Jesus comes at so many different moments of our lives it takes a lifetime to begin to see them all. Maybe that’s one of Lent’s goals: to force us to try to see Jesus more deeply, in the various ways he is present to us, in the various ways in which we need him. Like the apostles, we need to be overwhelmed again with our overwhelming Savior.
We Catholics have yet another way to see Jesus. We have the Mass, the Eucharist, and this central act of worship that defines Catholic life. Perhaps it is this image of Jesus, built up Sunday after Sunday, which is the most important one for our understanding. After all, would our faith change much if someone could go back in history and take a photo of Jesus? I gave a Confirmation class I am teaching three different renderings of Jesus. They were puzzled because they always though Jesus was blond and blue-eyed. Seeing Jesus is seeing Jesus through faith.
Lent is a time for us to explore the Eucharist once again in our lives: how Jesus speaks to us in the Liturgy of the Word; how Jesus encounters us, and invites us to encounter him, in the second part of the Mass; and how Jesus sends us forth as witnesses and missionaries to bring the fruits of the Eucharist to our daily lives.
This Lenten time of renewal not only calls us to reflect on how we see Jesus. It also calls us think about how Jesus sees us—the way we live his life and the way we do not; the faith that we have or that we might struggle with; sense of closeness we have of Jesus, or the sense of distance. Christ shows us his many faces so that we can know that we do not have to hide any of our faces from him. He loves us in all the ways we are because that’s how he invites us to always look toward him. Abraham put his faith in a God he could not see. Jesus invites us to put our faith in him precisely because we can always, one way or another, see him.”
