"It is good for us to be here"
2nd Sunday Lent C
Norwood
16 March 2025
My friends,
Pope Francis continues to ask our prayers for him in his illness. We continue to do so. Because of the precarious reports of his state of health we have journalists writing already about his Papacy and the long-term impact it will have on the life of the Church. It’s understandable but too soon.
However, Francis and all his predecessors are always happy to draw on the rich teaching of those who went before them. Pope Benedict wrote a letter called “Deus Caritas Est”
‘God is love’, in which he has left us the memorable teaching on being a Christian disciple.
“Being Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” Deus Caritas Est.
This teaching comes to mind when we read again the gospel of the Transfiguration – The account of the encounter of Peter, James and John with the person of Jesus in his transfigured body.
The observation of Pope Benedict is that an encounter with the person of Christ gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction – all is changed.
Individually, we have our personal journey and story of how we have related to Jesus, the Lord through our lives. While we place our trust and faith in him, we have had our doubts too. Our teachers in faith have been our families and the Church. Increasingly, people detach themselves from the shared journey of faith, prayer and practice in the community of the Church. This is a pity and a great loss to them and to us who acknowledge our need to journey together in hope.
The experience of the apostles Peter, James and John on the Mount of Olives can be most enlightening and instructive for us on our own journey. When we answer the call to come aside and spend time with the Lord – something happens within our hearts – we become open to a new impulse, a new influence, call it grace if you will where something new awakens within whereby like Peter, we instinctively realise it is good for one to be in this space.
Such a moment of realisation is or can be truly transformative. It gives us a new vision of our life because we have been touched so deeply by our experience of grace and goodness.
The experience of Mount Tabor did not or could not last in its sheer intensity – the desire of Peter to build tents and stay missed the point. The journey of return to the plain had to be undertaken but never again in quite the same way. The challenges of everyday remain but we view them with new eyes and embrace them differently.
The insight and teaching of Pope Benedict is so worth revisiting – if only to remind ourselves that by our continual encounter with Jesus, in prayer and in life that gives us a new, fresh horizon and a decisive direction. It sets on a steady consistent journey inspired by goodness, truth and beauty in its many forms.
