The Reward of Trust: 2nd Sunday Lent

Here's one takeaway from the story of the Transfiguration: one time up on a mountain, the Apostles saw Jesus in His radiant glory. They saw how He fulfills the Law and the Prophets, bringing to completion all of God’s work of salvation from the very start. They saw everything snap into focus, and they got it, and their lives of following Jesus made total sense. At the time of the Transfiguration, they saw the clouds part and heard an actual literal voice from Heaven tell them they were on the right track, revealing the big picture with clarity… beautiful, complete, undoubtable clarity.

Another takeaway is that most of the time, they didn’t. The other side of this extraordinary event is that it was, well... extraordinary. As in not typical, not the norm.

The Transfiguration is beautiful but it’s so fleeting. Even in telling the story, Luke emphasizes the desire of Peter to hang on to that moment, to camp out in that moment, and it’s the same for us. We’d love to hold on to those moments of clarity and vision, we’d love to spend our lives camping out in that peaceful happy place.

This is a good point to back up to the story from our first reading about Abram, in Genesis 15. Abram, later Abraham, lived so long ago he was ancient to Moses. Maybe we’re used to thinking of characters in the Old Testament as not having the revelation of Jesus, or the books of the New Testament. But Abram didn’t even have the Old Testament! He didn’t have the Law revealed later to Moses. He didn’t have the ancestral stories of deliverance and guidance by God. He was a man trying to make his way in a confusing and sometimes scary world, a world in which there was much he didn’t understand, a world in which he was certainly not the most powerful thing and over which he had precious little control.

In a word, he was a man like us in a world like ours… but without the revelation that would begin with him. He certainly wasn’t perfect. As a husband and as a father, frankly, he gets an ‘F’ (if that shocks you you haven’t read Genesis lately). He had some good moments and some very good moments, some bad moments and some very bad moments. Like I said, a man like us. Note this, now: God didn’t wait around for some perfect haloed moral superhero to arise so He could work with him! No, He reached out to humanity as it is, to us as we are. He made use of the sort of person we actually are, with the strengths and weaknesses that entails.

But by this point in the story Abram’s life wasn’t turning out quite the way he thought, and the promises God had made to him didn’t seem to be coming true the way he expected. The family thing wasn’t happening like he hoped. The mission, the purpose he felt for his life — it didn’t seem to be going anywhere as the years slipped away.

In Genesis chapter 15, he asks God about that and you know what God tells him? God says, “I am your reward.” If you’re looking for one meditation point to hang on to from this Mass, I suggest that one. “God, where’s the payoff, where’s the results?” “I am your reward.” The reward for trusting God is God. If you want something different, well, you aren’t trusting God, are you? To really trust God means to trust that He is all you need: to will only what God wills, and to want all that God is doing.

In verse 5 God leads Abram outside. He tells him, “look up and count the stars, if you can.” I love this move. Something about looking up at the stars just makes a mystic of you. More seems possible. Knowing more science than Abram did doesn't make them less astounding, but far more! Is it too romantic to say the stars are nature's nightly Transfiguration?

So God lifts Abram's eyes to the sky. He says “your descendants” — and to Abram this means his fruitfulness, his purpose, his place in the world — “will be like this.” Then Abram performs a sacrifice, a symbol of offering and trust in God, and in verse 12 the sun sets.

Did you catch that? The sun sets in verse 12. In verse 5 God tells Abram to "look up at the sky and see if you can count the stars: so shall your descendants be,"... this happens in broad daylight.

But Abram believed in the stars he couldn’t see. Of course: nobody thinks the stars stop existing just because we can’t see them in the glare of day. God is asking Abram, and asking us, to trust Him the same way. There are Transfiguration moments when His grace and His glory are clear and visible and undoubtable, and thank God for those beautiful moments. There are also times when we have to just trust that His grace is with us, and those times are themselves a grace and a gift. God is a Father who sooner or later is going to insist on taking off the training wheels.

Why does God allow us these times when we have to trust Him? Because, as Abram learned, to trust Him is its own reward. To carry on, to honor our vocations, to keep our commitments, to love our neighbors, to stay faithful to prayer, whether or not any of these things feel great or feel terrible or don’t feel like anything at all right now… the reward for trusting God is God.

I was talking with a friend this week about distributing the Holy Eucharist at Mass. As she was helping distribute at Mass she had just had a powerful experience of knowing what she was doing, really feeling Who she was placing in the hands and on the tongues of the people Christ loves unto death. She used the word “jarring;” like it really hit her you know? She always believes it, but this time she really felt it; it was a Transfiguration moment. So we were talking about how sometimes it’s like that, but why isn’t it always? I think part of the answer is that the glory and beauty of the Eucharist is too much to ever really feel, so we feel it more or less depending on our disposition and depending on what God is asking from us. Sometimes He wants us to really see clearly. Sometimes He wants us to trust, like the stars of the afternoon sun.

The Transfiguration moments feel better for sure. They’re just great! But when Jesus calls His apostles and calls us away to get back to work, back to the mission, He’s calling us to something even better. He’s calling us to a life of trust… and the reward for trusting God is God.