By Fr. Jeremy Miller, O.P.

The inspiration for this Lenten meditation comes, once again, from the biblical readings you will be hearing this Sunday in Church. Perhaps I ought to say at the outset why there is a particular richness in developing meditations with a gentle anchoring in the Sunday readings. I mentioned two weeks ago that Lent is a type of Church retreat. All retreats take on a special pregnancy, a special spiritual fruitfulness, when they can follow in the rhythms of the Church’s official prayer and adopt its tones and inspirations. The Sunday readings are a major part of our official Lenten prayer.

This Sunday we will be hearing the story of Abraham’s attempted sacrifice of his son, Isaac, whose hand God restrained only at the very last instant. Then St. Paul will speak of a God who did not restrain His hand from the sacrifice of His only Son. And finally St. Mark will describe the Transfiguration of Jesus before three of His disciples, but then add the puzzling note that the disciples will not fully understand what this meant until after the Resurrection.

What can we bring into our homes and into our personal lives from this “message from the Lord?” Think of something or someone you cherish dearly, something which gives your life meaning, direction, sustaining power and hope. Perhaps it is a particular job here in Georgia, a particular neighborhood home and circle of friends in which you can finally sink roots after many moves and many years of being forcibly uprooted. Perhaps it is a spouse, a child, or for a single person a unique friend, what the French so aptly call an ame soeur. Perhaps it is a personal sense of autonomy and self-direction after being under the beck and call of others.

All of these are cherished blessings, and in moments of deep insight we see and acknowledge them as blessings from the Lord. Let us call them covenant gifts, gracious expressions of a gracious God who in choosing us as His own blesses us in this world into which He has brought us and through whose events He directs us.

If this cherished someone of cherished something is taken away, uprooted from us and snatched from our appreciative grasp, then perhaps after many painful and confused days and weeks, or longer still, we may come to see God’s purposes. Someone might be able to say, in his or her disappointment, “this is God’s will.” That job, or that friend, was not meant to be.

But wait a moment. Let me describe what is really at issue in the Sunday readings as they might apply to us. What if that cherished something or cherished someone not only comes into our appreciative grasp but that we know for certain, beyond any doubt, that God is bestowing it, that God means for us to be so blessed, so covenanted. Would we not claim it all the more dearly as ours? Could we ever imagine its being snatched away? And could such loss be God’s will in this case?

Think of Abraham. For his risking trust to leave his family and homeland to go forth to a foreign and unfriendly land, God promises him descendents. Many barren years pass and finally Isaac is born in Abraham’s old age. “Yes,” thinks Abraham, “God is finally blessing me as he promised.” Then comes the command from God to strike down and extinguish his only son of promise and hope. In the face of such passionate hopes and in the presence of the very child of promise, the very sign of the covenant, could Abraham easily say, “This is God’s will?”

Take another set of passionate hopes. Take the three disciples catching in a momentary glimpse the glorified sight of the covenant promise to Israel, Jesus on the transfiguring mountaintop. They surely thought that He is the One on whom their hopes rested. Then Jesus confuses them when He says that they do not yet really understand what kind of a glory and what kind of a promise they are actually beholding. It is a glory which will come about only after He is snatched away from their appreciative grasp in death. Think of the crushed hopes which still await these three disciples when the one on whom they had placed all their hope hangs dying. It was not simply that Jesus came into their lives as a blessing but their further conviction that God meant His coming into their lives. And that covenant blessing was snatched away.

Where do we stand if we were asked to stand beside Abraham or later beside the three disciples? How in our lives, in their cherished somethings and someones, do the blessings of covenant and confusion of cross come together in some deeper expression of God’s purposes? This God who so blesses us is the God who did not hesitate to let go from His appreciative grasp His very Son in death.