March 14, 2004

Like removing wrapping after wrapping on a package, the Gospel readings for the Lenten Sundays gradually reveal the reason for Christ's Passion. In the eleventh century, St. Anselm rhetorically asked in his greatest work, Cur Deus Homo?, why did God become a man? The Transfiguration of Christ in glory gave Peter and James and John proof that Jesus is truly God and Man, and that his crucifixion will make all things new. In the fourth century, St. Ephrem in Syria contemplated: a babe in a manger worshipped by angels, a man baptized in the Jordan and in that moment revealed as Son of the Eternal Father, a guest at a wedding in Cana who changes water to wine, a man who thirsts by a well yet is able to read the heart of the Samaritan woman, a rabbi who spits on dirt and uses it to heal a blind man, a victim nailed to a cross who forgives his killers, a body pierced with holes yet capable of moving through walls. "If he was not God and man, our salvation is a lie..."

Given the contrast between heaven and earth, the "Word made Flesh" is shocking in spiritual terms and absurd in rational terms: foolishness to the Greeks and scandalous to the Jews (1 Cor. 1:23). As Jesus radiated light on Mount Tabor, in the valley all was chaos: The apostles and scribes were disputing and a half-wild boy was screaming and his father was shouting for help. But Jesus who is "God from God and Light from Light" walked down the mountain straight into that moral cauldron. He does that in our daily lives and he does that to the whole world in each epoch of civilization. Cardinal Newman described that confrontation in the tumultuous revolutionary year of 1848, with words that might have been written today:

"There is an immense weight of evil in the world. We Catholics, and especially we Catholic priests, have it in charge to resist, to overcome the evil; but we cannot do what we would, we cannot overcome the giant, we cannot bind the strong man. We do a part of the work, not all. It is a battle which goes on between good and evil, and though by God's grace we do something, we cannot do more. There is confusion of nations and perplexity. It is God's will that so it should be, to show His power. He alone can heal the soul. He alone can expel the devil. And therefore we must wait for a great deal, till He comes down, till He comes down from His seat on high, His seat in glory, to aid us and deliver us. In that day we shall enter, if we be worthy, the fullness of that glory, of which the three Apostles had the foretaste in the moment of Transfiguration."

Fr. George W. Rutler