Bound in Love

From the Gospel today, we hear Jesus tell us what Lent is for:

As they were coming down from the mountain, Jesus charged them, “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”

From the story of the Transfiguration of Jesus on Mount Tabor, we get fairly early in the season of Lent an explanation for the meaning of Lent.

Why do we have Lent? We are given forty days to prepare for the greatest gift in the history of humanity. We are given forty days to ponder the love our Heavenly Father has for us. For at the end of the forty days, Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, begotten not made, will sacrifice his human life so that we can have eternal life. Jesus leaves the Transfiguration on Mount Tabor to go to Jerusalem to die on the Cross.

His death is the payment that redeems the act of pride and stupidity in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve were given the gift of sanctifying grace when God breathed his spirit into them. They gave that grace away to the Devil as easily as you give your car keys to the valet at the downtown restaurant. What would you do if you had lost your ticket and you couldn’t get your car back? What did we do when we lost our ticket to Heaven?

Well, we didn’t do anything that would work. We did not listen to all the prophets God sent us, nor did we learn from the saints that lived amongst us, and we wandered in our spiritual desert, alone and separated from the God who made us. We tried different forms of government, from religious judges, to kings, to tribes and finally now to modern technocratic administrative democracies. We tried every form of society, from tribes to families to communes to solitude and now to the alternate reality of cellphones and artificial intelligence. We tried every form of commerce, from raiding and piracy to free trading to managed competition and now to oligarchy. There was nothing on Earth that could reconnect us to God. We tried everything and none of it worked.

So God came into the world to save the world from itself. That is what happens from Christmas to Easter. We spend Christmas marvelling that God became Man. The uncontingent being becomes contingent. That is impossible. Not for God, for nothing is impossible with him. It is, however, so great a thing that we cannot fully explain it, and we need a long season in the Church year to dwell on it and appreciate it.

The gift only gets bigger in Lent. At the end of Lent, the “God become Man” will die a brutal death so that Man can come home to God. He will make the ultimate sacrifice; he will fix the unfixable wound. His death will pay the price for Adam’s sin. He redeems us; he pays the price; he is the ticket.

And three days later he will walk among his disciples, risen from the dead. The Devil, who ruled through death, is defeated by the Cross on Calvary, and Jesus walks with his disciples to show them the fruit of victory. Every Mass ever since, beginning with the first Mass with the disciples on the walk to Emmaus, is a recapitulation of that sacrifice and that victorious resurrection. Since we go to Mass every Sunday, or even more often, we can get habituated or even complacent about the reality of the sacrifice and the gift we were given through the Son by the Father.

So the season of Lent is given to us to prepare for that gift. For about a tenth of the year – a 40-day fast spread over 46 days because Sundays are a feast of the Lord and not days of fast – we give ourselves over to fasting, almsgiving, and prayer. We do these things not to get skinnier, more generous, or holier, but to get ourselves out of our habits so we can seriously contemplate the gift we are about to be given.

Do this with me as a mental exercise. Imagine you are standing right now. Those of you who have ever experienced heartache, injustice, pain, loss, abandonment, hunger, poverty, sickness, disloyalty, family strife, or even embarrassment should sit down. I doubt a single person over the age of 12 would still be standing. All those terrible things I listed are the way the world operates, yet we were made for not one of them. And we know it. It’s why we have a God-shaped hole, and it’s why our hearts are restless. That disconnection of our current reality from our origin and our purpose is why Jesus came. It is why the Father sent him. God loves us. God loves us so much he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

When we realize how much God loves us, we might discover that we love him back. It takes effort to believe in God’s love for us because the Devil is whispering fear and worry into our ears all day long every day of the year. Lent is a time to quiet ourselves and ponder the depth of God’s love. Lent is a time to quietly ponder what our love of God might look like. Through the fasting, the almsgiving, and the prayers of Lent, we can be more open to God’s loving whisper. We don’t hear the whisper in the noise of the world, but we can hear it in the stillness of our hearts.

The message of the world is grasping and competing. Because we are alive in the world we are somewhat dead to the kind of generosity God shows us through Jesus. We expect someone like us despite the long history of people like us being unable or unwilling to be as generous as Jesus. We expect someone we can understand despite the long record of what we can understand: violence and privation and transactional relationships. We need every day of the Lenten season to turn off the old messaging systems and connect with the message of God. Our God sent His Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

Be saved by him. Be saved by the gift. Be saved by the giver. Spend Lent pondering the gift and the giver. Don’t put God in a box of your own construction, but open the box and see God as he is. The Apostles saw him Transfigured. They kept that vision through all of Lent – through all of the journey to the Cross and the Easter resurrection. Be like those Apostles this Lent. Keep that vision of the sacrifice and the victory during your journey to Good Friday and Easter Sunday.