“With each passing day, more and more poignant stories of survivors and victims are emerging. Immediately after the quake, seventy-nine year old Katsutaro Hamada fled to safety with his wife. But then he went back to his home to retrieve a photo album of his fourteen-year-old granddaughter, Saori, and ten-year-old grandson, Hikaru. Just then the tsunami swept away his home, and rescuers later found Hamada's body, crushed amidst the rubble. The Kyodo news agency reported that he was clutching the photo album to his chest.”
Even amid these many stories, the plight of students in a school in Ishinomaki is still particularly heartbreaking. Ishinomaki, was a town of about 160,000 people situated fifty miles north-east of Sendai and just a mile from the ocean. When the tsunami hit, parents were beginning to pick up their children at the Kama Elementary School.
One of the teachers explained that some of the parents and children were able to be brought into the building for safety. Those who had already left for homes behind the school probably survived – the ones who went the other way, probably did not.
The school currently has no running water, electricity, or heating, and is filled with mud and debris – but it still serves as a shelter for nearly seven hundred survivors. Among them are thirty students between the ages and eight and twelve whose parents never came to pick them up that day, and are presumably among the thousands of victims.
Because these stories all involve families – the love of parents and grandparents for children –they hit close to home for all of us. These are, after all, the most important relationships in our lives, and so stories and images like this are particularly hard for us to bear.
I tell them here today, because they came to mind for me as I read this Sunday’s first reading and Gospel. First, in the reading from Genesis, God promises Abram that he will make of him a great nation, and that “all the communities of the earth shall find blessing” in him. It’s a great promise.
But in the back of our minds, we’re probably recalling how we know the story unfolds: how Abraham was already seventy-five when God made this promise, and that he was one hundred years old when Sarah finally bore their son Isaac. And how God then tells Abraham to go to the land of Moriah and on the mountain there to sacrifice his only beloved son!
With Abraham we have to ask, how could God possibly fulfill His promise to make him the father of a great nation if he kills his only son. And the fact that God’s angel stays Abraham’s hand doesn’t really make us feel that much better.
Even if God wasn’t so ruthless and brutal that He wanted Abraham to sacrifice his son, even if it was just a test, does that mean that God is that arbitrary and capricious, playing with us and testing us through torment?
The stories and images from Japan leave us with awfully similar questions. Where is God in the midst of the disaster in Japan? Why has He allowed this to happen? Is this some kind of twisted test as well?
Brothers and sisters, the entirety of the Scriptural tradition clearly tries to show us that this is not at all how God treats us – but it can sometimes feel like that. And so, we’re left to figure out just what the story of Abraham is really all about, and how it relates to our Gospel, and just how those lessons can helps us make sense of a tragedy like Japan.
The entire story of Abraham’s life, from God’s promise to the “sacrifice” of Isaac, is in its essence a story of faith. Throughout the Book of Genesis, God is constantly asking Abraham to have faith – to trust, not so much in the promise God has made, but in God Himself.
Faith is trusting in God’s promise not as we understand it, or as we would choose to have it fulfilled, but trusting in the One who made the promise – trusting in God Himself.
This is the faith that Abraham shows when he is willing to offer as a sacrifice even the son he loves above all else. Abraham puts his trust, not in how he thinks God should fulfill the promise of many heirs – but he has faith in God’s trustworthiness, in God’s desire and ability to fulfill His promise, no matter how it might sometimes seem to us.
This is all a crucially important frame of reference, because our first reading about Abraham’s faith, and the blessing he will be for all the communities of the earth, is very purposefully paired with today’s Gospel reading. In our Gospel from St. Matthew, we are once again on the top of a mountain – and we are once more in the presence of a Father, and the Son He calls “beloved.” Only this time, it is not a misunderstanding: the Son will indeed be sacrificed.
When Jesus is Transfigured before the Apostles, when they see the glory that Jesus shares with the Father in heaven, they long to build three tents on the mountaintop – to remain in the peace, and beauty, and calm of that moment of Divine transcendence. We’ve all had moments of that kind of certainty and faith, and have hoped we’d never again have to face suffering or doubt.
But Jesus takes His disciples back down the mountain – down to Jerusalem, where the Son of Man is betrayed, arrested, tortured, and killed – God so loved the world, Jesus so loved the Father, that He followed the Father’s plan for our salvation, and refused to forego the Cross.
Friends, the Cross, which the Transfiguration prepares the Apostles for, is where God’s promise to Abraham is fulfilled, that all “communities of the earth shall find blessing” in him – the Cross is where God is in the midst of the tragedy in Japan. “God did not spare His Son, but gave Him up for us all.” God’s Son becomes one with us, He enters into the suffering and death that human sin has inflicted, and He gives us life and joy in return.
Our second reading, from St. Paul’s Letter to Timothy, beautifully summarizes this central truth that today’s readings are trying to confirm us in. St. Paul assures us that God has “saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works,” not according to our plan, or to how we think things should work out, “but according to His own design.” This saving grace is “made manifest through Christ Jesus, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality!”
There is yet one more lesson for us to glean from this Gospel of the Transfiguration. In the Apostles’ vision of Christ’s heavenly glory, they hear the voice of God say: “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” – the very same words heard above the waters of the Jordan when Jesus is baptized by John.
Baptism, then, must be understood as linked to the heavenly glory revealed in the Transfiguration. When we were baptized, we too hear God the Father say to us, “You are my beloved child,” and we were admitted into the promise of Heaven that can be glimpsed in the Transfiguration.
Jesus’ Transfiguration isn’t just proof of His Divine glory – it’s proof that we too are destined to share Divine life! But in order to do that, and in order to bring the glory of Divine life to this suffering world, we must have faith and trust in God’s plan, and embrace the Cross in emulation of Christ.
Brothers and sisters, this season of Lent invites us to recommit to our Baptismal faith – faith in a God who loves us so much, that He did not spare His only Son. Through prayer, penance, and works of charity we train ourselves to rely solely on Him, to need only Him – and to trust in His love even when we are given a cross to carry.
When we do these things, we share more deeply in the Church’s mission to transfigure the world – and we bring the divine life we share in Baptism, to a world so broken, so desperately in need of His love and salvation.
And so we pray with the Psalmist, “Lord, let your mercy be upon us as we place our trust in you.”
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