“Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them up a high mountain” (Mark 9:2).
Sunday’s Gospel of Jesus’s Transfiguration is paired with the narrative of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of his son Isaac in the first reading, prompting the question: What is the link?
Jesus says to His disciples: “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me” (Mark 8:34), so by following Him up the mountain, Peter, James and John are, implicitly, accepting to sacrifice their lives for Him.
When they arrive, they are given a foretaste of the Resurrection to strengthen them. They offer to build tents to stay there, but God the Father makes clear that He wants obedience rather than anything else from them when He says about Jesus: “Listen to Him.”
Abraham’s experience was similar: he accepted to make a sacrifice for God before going up the mountain; he witnessed a foretaste of the Resurrection when Isaac was saved by the angel (in fact, the letter to the Hebrews states that he believed his son would rise from the dead); he offered a ram in place of his son, even though God did not ask this and made no reference to it in the subsequent blessing for Abraham’s obedience.
These two accounts together can shed light on our interior life, especially in Lent.
We have all made a self-sacrificial decision to follow Christ, even if the consequences of that decision are clearer at some times – as they were for Abraham – than at others, as was the case for the three closest disciples who did not yet know what their decision really entailed.
We are all given a foretaste of the Resurrection in the very moment of our sacrifice – as Abraham experienced – and in order to strengthen us for future trials; just as the disciples were fortified for the Cross by seeing Jesus’s Transfiguration.
And, as in these two narratives, we are then called to go back down the mountain into our ordinary life, where Jesus is no longer glorious but “alone” and in a normal state.
We are called to obedience above anything else – God is not interested in the “tents” or “rams” we spontaneously offer Him, but in the whole-hearted listening that He asks of us.
Let’s ask for the faith of Abraham, to believe that, no matter how painful the sacrifice God asks of us, He will never be outdone in generosity and His promise will always be kept, and to understand that He wants obedience in our ordinary life more than anything else.
Photo: A screenshot section from The Transfiguration of Christ (1605), by Peter Paul Rubens.
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