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2nd Sunday of Lent B
March 1, 2015

Reading I: Genesis 22:1-2, 9a, 10-13, 15-18
Psalm 116:10, 15, 16-17, 18-19
Reading II: Romans 8:31b-34
Gospel: Mark 9:2-10


God's on our side!

We often recall how we were indoctrinated as kids with frightening ideas of an exacting god who would send us to hell for a bad thought or, as one lad said in confession, for eating bacon-flavoured potato chips on a Friday. My early memories of church contain the priest with his thick Irish accent insisting it is time to make your Easter Duty - that was confession and communion at least once a year, and in the heat of December reading out the list of Christmas Dues: McGuiness family ten pounds; Jim Bourke five shillings, Walsh family five pounds, Lawless family one pound 2/6, the Misses Farren two guineas, B and M Coyne seven pounds 14/6 proceeds of bar raffle, Tom Doyle half a crown,   T McMahon one guinea,  Miss Donovan one shilling and six pence, Quigley family two guineas, M Kehoe five shillings, T McGauran half a crown, L Tobin 7/6 ... There was boiling anger in the car driving home for the intimidation we were subjected to, but we turned up again next week, duty bound and afraid of hell.

That's how religion works: it binds the people to its god by fear, loads them down with formal duties, and exacts their tribute in God's name to maintain the system, Pray Pay and Obey.  It took unusually deep spirituality for anyone to believe that, behind it all, God was actually on our side. The phrase had a bad taste anyway because of its use in the hypocritical war-time propaganda that used religion to justify unconscionable mass-killing. Yet in fact, as Paul says today, God is on our side - always.

We need to curb our curiosity today as we read the story of Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son Isaac to an exacting god, and to shield our eyes from the razzle-dazzle of the transfiguration story. Do not use too much reasoning. Stay with the images, look at the pictures, but go through the screen's flickering images to the mystery within and beyond. There is much to be ignored if we are to see the commitment of the living God to our welfare. This is a most profound moment of transition from religion to spirituality, from obligation to freedom, from subservient obeying to intelligent love - and it is God who initiates it. Our pilgrimage is along this track of metanoia, and it seems we've scarcely begun.

The transfiguration will now be seen not as a show of triumph but as confirmation that the covenant will be fulfilled as the anointed one, the beloved son, is reaching his ultimate destiny. 

In the long line of our tradition reaching back into dim pre-historic times, Abraham is the first to be convinced that God was on his side, and this not because he nutted it out for himself, but because God told him so. In our discussions about the meaning of our spiritual pilgrimage, I think we are not always conscious of this: that it all starts on God's initiative. In the Jewish, Christian and Muslim tradition God is the initiator. And not just a  will-o-the-wisp provocateur, but one who pledges himself to be on our side. We have God's promise, God's commitment. 

If you follow the theology of sacrifice that sees Jeshua as the lamb of God, the point is not that his blood is shed to pay for sin's offence, but his blood is shed to seal the covenant of God's promise in the most graphic way imaginable, as a life and death covenant, a promise, as we read at the tail end of today's first reading, pledged on God's own self. That would be a way of saying that if God does not keep this promise he will be no longer God! 

We should go back to chapter 14 of the book of Genesis to read of another celebrating of this covenant, where Abraham was told to prepare animals in sacrifice. He chopped the animals in half, laying out the halves in two lines, and when it was dark a ball of fire came down and moved along the line between them. This is the kind of ritual that says: If I do not keep this promise I will be as dead as these animals, divided and destroyed. This is the covenant promise God has made to humankind on his own name. "I swear by own self, says the Lord."

Last week we read of Noah's saving through the famous boat they built, the ark. But again, that story is not the point, but the covenant pledged when the rainbow appeared among the clouds. Gen 9:12-15

God said: This is the sign of the covenant that I am making between me and you and every living creature with you for all ages to come: I set my bow in the clouds to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and every living creature — every mortal being — so that the waters will never again become a flood to destroy every mortal being.

It is peculiar to this ancient story-telling in the book of Genesis that the promise is repeated over and over, sometimes in a different setting, often just in repeated words as in these and following verses. This repetition must be a way of insisting on the importance of this promise God has made, God's pledge never to forget his promise. On this, everything in our spirituality depends. We are responding to the covenant God has initiated. We are not lost, alone in the bush, trying to find our way out. We are responding to the call of God's promise that our people have heard now for thousands of years. It echoes too in other spiritualities, clearly among the Buddhists and the Hindus, but not less among the earlier dream-time stories of ab-original peoples. 

In each of the five Sundays of Lent the first reading for cycle B is about the covenant. Next week it will be re-affirmed with Moses at Mt Sinai, the following week it will be renewed in the dedication of the rebuilt temple, and then raised out of the social to the intimately personal and spiritual in Jeremiah's wonderful summation:

The days are coming, says the LORD, 
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel 
and the house of Judah.
...
I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; 
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the LORD.
All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD, 
for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.

This is the New Covenant sealed in Jeshua's blood. 

This cup is the new covenant in my blood, even that which is poured out for you. (Lk 22:20)

It would be better, perhaps, if the cup were presented at the Eucharistic Communion with the words: "The cup of the Covenant". It is the pledging that's important. Our drinking of the cup is our response to God's pledge. The pouring out is only the sign Jeshua gives of the pledging. It is not the principle action, but the reverse side of the coin. In Jeshua's readiness to stand before a public court and speak truth to power, even though it meant his torture and death, in that readiness we have God's pledge re-iterated once again. It is re-iterated in every celebration of the Eucharist. We should always come away confirmed in hope, rejoicing.

Meanwhile, this might be an occasion to read the entire chapter 8 of Paul's letter to the Romans, since there he insists on the grounds of our confidence, approaching the issue from every side. I think it tells the story behind the transfiguration event, the solid grounds of God's promise on which everything rests. Today's short selection:

Brothers and sisters:
If God is for us, who can be against us?
He who did not spare his own Son 
but handed him over for us all, 
how will he not also give us everything else along with him?
Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones?
It is God who acquits us, who will condemn?
Christ Jesus it is who died—or, rather, was raised— 
who also is at the right hand of God, 
who indeed intercedes for us.

"I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God's love which Christ Jesus our Lord shows us."

Shalom. Peace to all.

Tony Lawless