Reflection for the Second Sunday of Lent

This Sunday’s Gospel of the Transfiguration gives us a chance to meditate on what it means to seek the face of God. This longing of the human heart to see the face of God is expressed in the Old Testament in a number of places, but it has a particularly poignant place in the Psalms. As we sing the Divine Office each day, we pray with the psalmist: “My heart says, ‘Seek his face!’” (Ps 27:8), “When shall I come and behold the face of God?” (Ps 42:2), and “Hide your face from my sins” (Ps 51:9). 

 Our search for the face of God takes on new meaning in the Incarnation. God’s nature is in itself invisible — “No one has ever seen God” (1 John 4:12) — but in His Incarnation, God has revealed Himself to us through the Word made flesh. It is at the Transfiguration that the human face of Christ is first revealed in the glory of His Divinity. At the Transfiguration, Jesus’s “face shone like the sun” (Matthew 17:2).  This glimpse of eternal glory fortifies Peter, James, and John for the impending scandal of the Cross by pointing beyond it to the final glory of the resurrection in Heaven.

Just as the Transfiguration prepared the apostles for Christ’s coming passion, it prepares us too, in our Lenten journey, to face our own crosses and trials, looking forward to that day when we will see God’s face in the beatific vision in Heaven. The transfigured face of Christ prepares us for the disfigured face of Christ in His Passion and Death. And by suffering with that disfigured face of Christ, we are prepared to be worthy to gaze on his glorified face in Heaven.

In the beatitudes, we hear that “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” (Matthew 5:8). As we learn to gaze on the disfigured face of Christ, meditating on his Passion in this Lenten season, we are slowly purified from all that keeps us from God. St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that, through Christ’s Passion, “man knows thereby how much God loves him, and is thereby stirred to love Him in return, and herein lies the perfection of human salvation.” (ST III q46 a3). He goes on to say that the Passion sets us “an example of obedience, humility, constancy, justice, and the other virtues displayed in the Passion, which are requisite for man’s salvation.” By seeing how much Christ suffered on account of our sins, we realize the gravity of sin and are moved by love to seek God more faithfully and to avoid sin as the true evil it is.

By thus meditating on the love of God revealed in the Passion, we are preparing ourselves for the ultimate goal of our lives: the Beatific Vision of the face of God in heaven, where God in his perfect beauty will satisfy all the desires of the human heart.