Today’s readings: Genesis 22, 1-2.9-13.15-18; Romans 8, 31-34; Mark 9, 2-10.
In today’s readings we have two different stories on two different mountains of two different manifestations of the divine. We normally interpret Abraham’s experience in the land of Moriah as his major test or trial on the part of God. A very dull moment in his relationship with God turned out to be a new window on a deeper unfolding of God’s covenant with him.
The three disciples’ experience of the transfiguration also opens a new window in their experience of Jesus whom they knew differently. What they were seeing now was too clouded in mystery for them to understand. Unlike Abraham, they came down from the mountain disturbed as to what all that they had seen could really mean.
After Christ’s temptation in the desert, now is the turn of Abraham to be tempted in something so dear to him and so central to his faith. According to our logic, the fact that Abraham’s faith was first rewarded and then tested sounds very contradictory. It is the journey of his soul’s dark night. It was an uphill journey literally and metaphorically. As it is narrated in the Scriptures, it is also prone to lead to a terrific image of God in whom no one of us would want to believe. There are really disturbing questions about the whole story of Abraham being asked to kill his son.
On this second Sunday of Lent, the Scriptures call on us to rediscover faith at its real core and to open up to its extraordinary power in our lives. Abraham and the disciples, though believers in God, went through a process of purification of their faith. The experience of the transfiguration of Jesus, so deep and awe-inspiring that Peter wished it could never end, was a light so fragile and so easy to extinguish. It was itself in turn a faith that went through its testing.
Real faith is always overshadowed by the paradox of dying to live, by the need to experience the resurrection only after having experienced the death of self. Faith in its essence, is a deeply personal and private moment of truth that, unless lived, can hardly be transmitted. As André Louf, once abbot of a Cistercian monastery in France, writes in his book Tuning in to Grace: “It is part of all Christian experience to have to live between fervency and weakness.”
We cannot escape the split, even the conflict, between a spirit that is fervent and the flesh that remains incurably weak. Salvation, our being whole and in harmony with ourselves and with our God, is never experienced as the elimination of weakness, of our fragility, but in the balance between weakness and grace. As long as we go on resisting our weakness, the power of God cannot come into its own within us.
The invitation in this Lenten journey is to be reconciled with our own weakness, to unveil to ourselves that with which we are mostly uneasy in life. Escaping from one’s own self is never the remedy. It is true that our weakness is many times not consistent with the ideal self-image we would like to project everywhere and with everyone. But it is only in our weakness that we are vulnerable to God’s love and power.
This is the felix culpa, the blessed fault which the Church sings out in praise on the night of the Easter vigil. Many a time we struggle our way ahead attempting to resolve our issues with a lot of good will and noble intentions. We even try to thrive on our honesty and our generosity until we simply fall apart helplessly.
The real breakthrough in Abraham’s faith in God came in the land of Moriah, on the mountain where something so terrible was asked of him. As long as we continue to be governed by our illusions and our idols, we would remain outside the conversion process. It is reconciliation with our true selves and with our own weaknesses that is actually the core of every faith experience, the most important condition for being touched by grace.