Reflection for the Second Sunday in Lent Year A 2023

   ” God has saved us and has called us to a holy life, not because of any merit of ours but according to his own design…. “
         ” Jesus took Peter, James, and John , his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. He was transfigured before their eyes, .,,,” there is a high cost to transformation. We avoid it. We avoid it just as much as we avoid reducing our four trillion dollars national debt and balancing our national budget. We want it all to go away without cost, without raising taxes while reducing our special entitlement spending programs.
       Oh, to be sure, we stand committed to providing college educations for our children. We will pay any price and walk any distance to assure  that they will have the intellectual perfection and the educational excellence to do anything they want in this world. And we will likewise exert any effort to have a beautiful body that’s able to meet the standards set by society.
        But MORAL perfection? Ah, well…. that’s another matter. We can always tend to that later, after other more important matters are met. Furthermore, we far too often repeat  the secularists’ beliefs that ” values are a private matter” and ” morality is not meant to be imposed,” and ” one’s religious commitments really don’t matter because we’re all going to get to heaven anyway.” The only public morality we have left as a society is not to hurt anyone else, or rather not to get caught at it.
        The cost of transformation is high, both in terms of our own personal changes and the changes needed in our culture and society. Keeping unexpected children are hard decisions to make, calling, as it does, for us to make enormous sacrifices in our own personal lifestyles. Neutralizing racism and bigotry demand that we step out of the crowd and take a public stand. Blowing the whistle in cases of corporate immorality can cost us our jobs. Living the Christian life to the fullest can cause us to be branded fanatics. Christianity, you see, is a religion for adults, demanding heroism. It is not , as the secularists would have it, a religion for children to be observed only at Christmas and Easter.
        The life of Christ is meaningless unless it point to the meaning of suffering for a better world, with a morality based, and recognized by Christ, on the sacredness of human life. This is why the transfiguration of Jesus Christ occurred immediately before he went up to Jerusalem to  suffer and die, and then be raised by the power of the Holy Spirit.
         So may we today ask God to give us the wisdom, understanding, knowledge, courage, and fortitude humbly to attack our own personal shortcomings, and those in our culture and society. Why?So that we may enter his kingdom here on earth. The kingdom that he tells us is not far removed from where we are. And his yoke is, after all, sweet, and his burden is light.
          For God has saved us and has called us to a holy life, not because of any merit of ours but according to his own design, that he may be ours and we may be his here in his kingdom on earth.
May God bless you all
Fr. Dominic
Your brother in Christ