March 16, 2025

Second Sunday of Lent Cycle C

Genesis 15:5-12, 17-18; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 9:28-36

Sister Margaret Mary gave her first graders an assignment for their religion class: draw a picture of a bible scene, any one that they like. As she was going around the classroom, she came across a girl who was drawing an airplane that had four people in it. Curious, she asked the child which bible story had a plane in it. The child replied: “Oh Sister, you know. This is the flight into Egypt.” “Oh, I see. And who are in the plane?” “This one is Joseph, this one is Mary, and this one is the baby Jesus.” The Sister had to know: “And the fourth one?” “That’s Pontius. He’s the pilot.”

There once was a show on TV called “Kids Say the Darndest Things.” The show’s premise was that a comedian engaged children in conversation, and they said many things that either are truths that adults tend not to state out loud or are far out ideas based on how a child’s mind approaches the world. You know, why couldn’t Pontius Pilate fly a plane? Children sometimes create funny ideas of how something might work when they don’t understand it, which at their age is quite often, but even we adults also sometimes have trouble dealing with things that we don’t understand, and in some cases can’t understand. God falls into that category for most of us.

The Church teaches that there are logical arguments to prove the existence of God, ones from Saints Anselm and Thomas Aquinas being two of the more commonly cited examples. However, knowing that a God exists does not tell you anything about the nature of God. We can only understand what God is like when God chooses to reveal himself. This revelation comes in many forms. Since God created the world, by observing the world we can discover some things about the God that made it. This is known as natural theology. But mostly we know God because he chooses throughout human history to reveal himself in various ways to various people. Throughout the Old Testament, God revealed himself many times and in many ways to the patriarchs, prophets, and many others. Today’s First Reading is an example of God’s revelation of himself in his covenant with Abraham. We Christians believe that God revealed himself most fully in the incarnation, the fact that God became man and dwelt among us, spoke among us, did powerful deeds among us. One of these manifestations is described in today’s Gospel, the event known as the transfiguration, where God lifted the curtain just a bit. Saint Paul in the Second Reading tells us that we too have this glorification in store for us as citizens of heaven.

So a question presented to us today is this: what do we do in light of this insight, this revelation? Here’s one solution, the one adopted by Thomas Jefferson, the founding father of our country, author of the Declaration of Independence, and our third president: don’t believe it. Now as a deist he believed there was a God and as a rationalist he believed that there was a historical person named Jesus. But he quite literally took some scissors to the New Testament and cut out all of the accounts of anything supernatural, such as today’s transfiguration, as well as the resurrection and all the miracles. What was left is known today as the Jefferson Bible, and it essentially relegates Jesus to be just a learned man who said many wise things, a sort of Jewish Confucius. Jefferson and people like him believe that, if they cannot understand something, it can’t have happened. The problem with this is of course that, if you believe there is a God, an infinite being, believing that this infinite nature can be fully understood by our finite human nature is not an indication of a mind that can reason but actually is the height of unreasonableness. It simultaneously holds the idea that there is an all-powerful God with the idea that there are things this God cannot do or won’t do.

I would suggest that there is a more reasonable approach to this. Like the children who struggle to find explanations for a world they have not yet the education to understand, we should accept the fact that we adults still don’t understand some things as well, at least how they work in an existence that is beyond this world’s perceivable dimensions. With humility, we can accept that there are some things we can’t ever understand. But what we can understand is the effect on our lives of these instances. We can all understand the effects of the sun on our world without understanding how the nuclear fusion that powers the sun works. Can we, with childlike simplicity, accept that there are things we don’t understand but can nonetheless be true? Christians believe that the Gospel we heard today is a piece of a puzzle that we cannot yet clearly see the whole of, and at the end of our Lenten journey we will see another similar piece of that puzzle with the resurrection of our Lord. To the final picture, the completed puzzle where we get to see all the pieces, Jesus gave a name that he used throughout his earthly ministry: the kingdom of God.

Padre Pio used an example that illustrates this. A child playing with toys on the floor looks up and sees his mother embroidering. But he only sees the back of what she is doing, a jumbled mess of colored thread. When he asks about it, the mother turns it around for a second and the child gets a glimpse at the part that she has in her hoop. We too are like that child, seeing a sliver of what is to come, but only if we accept the fact that we do not and cannot know God’s ultimate plan fully in this life, but we do know that we will find complete joy in the finished product when it is finally revealed to us. And so we journey on as pilgrims of hope, believing that God is pointing us in the right direction, accepting the fact with humility that we cannot know, despite hints that we receive, exactly how and when we will arrive there. In the meantime, some people who think that they are as smart as God and can know these things in this life have the tendency to say the darndest things.

As we continue with our Mass, may this Eucharistic celebration bring us the grace to follow the lead of Christ to do the Father’s will, even though we don’t fully understand it. Let us humbly admit that we are finite beings created by an infinite God and can then accept our childlike dependence on God. Never let your trouble in understanding what happens or how it happens stand in the way of understanding what it means: citizenship in the Kingdom of God.