Gen 12: 1-4; Ps. 32(33):4-5, 18-20, 22; 2 Tim 1:8-10; Matt 17:1-9
THEME: THE BLESSING THAT AWAITS THE ‘LEAVING BEHIND’ AND THE ‘GOING TO’
After the marriage ceremony of my sister in 1997, and it was time to join the family of her husband and go home, my sister started crying with us because we could not allow her to go:“how can our only sister abandon us”. It was very difficult for us to let her go, and it was very difficult for her to say that injurious Bye-Bye. As this was happening, my dad came in and tried to calm the situation. I can still remember the words of my dad to my sister: “Go and build a family that your brothers can also call their family. Unless you leave them, you will not have your own family, and you will not give us an extended family”. It is never easy to leave one’s comfort zone. But the point remains that there is no greatness in comfort zones.
For one to discover him/her self, he/she must detach him/her self from his/her comfort zones and make a blind reap of faith into the unknown. Today in the first reading, Abram is asked by God to leave three things which he is already sure of: land, kindred and father’s house. The preposition מןִ(min) which means ‘from’ connotes a total separation from any attachment with the things mentioned. So, when God asks Abram ‘go out from your country(land); from your kindred; from your father’s house’, God was asking him to separate himself entirely from these three things which are actually what define Abram.
Meanwhile, in Gen 11, Abram is presented as the first son of Terah (11:27) whose wife, Sarai was barren, making them not to have any child (11:30). And that notwithstanding, he must have to leave his people. Why? Because they are not needed for the future God plans for him, a future that will make a serious demand of him. But before that future comes, the attachment Abram has for his root must give way for a higher attachment and allegiance to God. God made Abram a promise of land… a land different from Haran. But this land will not come unless he departs from and forgets about the people and circumstances, he has gotten used to. This land is an ‘unknown land’ being qualified only by ‘the land which I will show you (make/cause you to see). In the bit to find the meaning of our existence, it is not about what we are able to make of ourselves, it is rather about what God helps us to see. God remains the causative agent of our future and its realization. If he does not cause us to see the path, he has already prepared for us, we will keep wandering in the desert of life. Whatever God asks us to leave behind for his own course, he has a way of bringing them back to us. God asks to leave his country, father’s house and his people, for a land he will show him.
Hence, this ‘land which God will show him, will become his new country. But what of family and relations? In this new land to be shown to Abram, God will raise up a great nation from Abram. A new people will emerge. And then, the name which he loses by abandoning his family members, he will not only have another one, but a great one (Gen 12:2). But before these last two blessings, he must first get to the land. We remember that in the story of the Tower of Babel, the people decided to set about their work in order to make a name for themselves (Gen 11:4), but they did not know that it is God who gives name. They sought for an illegal way to acquire fame and relevance, but it is only God who gives such fames that attract blessings to both the person and others.
Any fame acquires outside God, is always struck down and made to crumble by God himself, just as he did to those of Tower of Babel. Someone may have fame which may even be malicious fame, but only in God is one’s fame GREAT. It is interesting to see that the only where Abram is commanded to be active in our reading today is in his ‘leaving’. Every other thing that will reward Abram’s obedience to this imperative “leave”, is an action of God. God keeps saying to him: “I will…” That is to say, “it is not you who are going to make yourself great… It is not you who are going to make yourself a blessing unto others…Rather, I myself will do that. But first, you must have to leave your comfort zone”.
(N.B THE TEXT DID NOT SAY THAT IT IS THE LAND THAT ABRAM DOES NOT KNOW. IT SIMPLY SAYS ‘TO THE LAND THAT I WILL SHOW YOU’. It is possible that Abram, being a pastoralist, had passed through the land that will be shown him. But now, it is going to be a land, not chosen by him but chosen and shown to him by God.)
In the gospel reading, Christ makes the three disciples to have a foretaste of the glory that awaits him. The moment of glory, in which the Law (Moses) and the prophets (Elijah) would be fulfilled in the Son (Christ), in order to win a people to God, establish a name that will be above every other name, draw to himself people from every nation, form a great nation for our God, and become himself both the blessing and the means of blessing for all the families of the world. The hour of Christ’s glorification will become the fulfilment of the promise made to Abraham.
In the movement to blessing and glorification, there are two important and inevitable steps: Leave and Go. In the first reading, God calls Abram to leave and to go. Abram was to leave everything about his current state, and go in the light of God’s guide, to another place. Unless these two things are done, the blessings promised to Abram would not have occurred. That is, God makes it in such a way that ‘leaving and going to’ become the conditions for God’s “I will bless you…make of you a great nation…make your name so famous…make you a blessing” to Abram. God understands the difficulty in detaching oneself from his land, family and his name, to go to a place where he does not know what to expect.
But the most important thing in this call of Abram is the faith God wants Abram to develop in him. God uses the expression “the land I will show you” to make himself the only person capable of leading Abram, and to show Abram that if he must undertake this journey, he must have faith, not in his own judgment or knowledge, nor in his calculations and ratings, nor in his association and relationships outside home, but in the One who has called him. He must therefore learn to listen to him, speak to and with him, inquire from him, follow in his lead. Otherwise, he would not arrive to that land meant to be shown to him. Having left behind his old life, and embarked on this journey of faith, the reward is that he will be blessed, and he will become a blessing. Though Abram left his life and identity behind, he would get back his life and acquire a greater identity to himself.
Christ’s glory as God-Man, in the same way, connotes ‘leaving and going to’. It was clear to Christ what he was leaving behind: his land, his position, his father’s house. He was to take human form, leaving behind his godly form. And in this human form, it was not clear to him what he was going to encounter. That is to say, Christ knew the details of what he was leaving behind, but he knew nothing (in his being man) of where he was going to (i.e the kind of suffering he is going to experience). But he knows that glory awaits at the end of the journey. It is the foretaste of that glory that he shows the three disciples today. Peter (and the other two with him) could not understand why such a glorious experience should not be permanent.
Thus, he demands that they make that Mount and the transfiguration moment, a lasting home. Little does he understand that this glory is meant to accompany Christ’s ‘going to’ (the cross). Not only that the Second Person left behind his divinity to become a human, this God-became-Man will also leave behind his human friends, because his staying with them is not the arriving point of his ‘going to’, but his death. Christ even warned the three not to say anything about what they experienced until he is completely glorified through his victory over death.
As Abram left behind his inherited life in order to give God the opportunity to make an inheritance out of him, so also did Christ leave behind his divine life in order to allow God to make an eternal inheritance out of him through his ‘going to’. The glory which he shows the disciples on the Mountain, is the glory which he will live in when he enters the land for which he has come.
Dearest friends, we all have a vocation, just like Abram and Christ today. As expressed by St. Paul, in the second reading, we have all received call from God to be holy. And this c call demands leaving behind our comfort zones, and faithfully following God for that which he will show us. Every Christian vocation calls us ‘to go’. Most of the time, it is not clear where we are going to. And this is because God wants us to trust him and have faith in him. There is no call unto greatness that does not demand a reap of faith and a moving away from our comfort zones. Lenten season is the greatest opportunity for us to leave behind those things that have almost become part of us, those persons who do not allow us to grow spiritually and in human maturity, those places we have made our homes because we have built and customized corruption and false life in them, and then go to the land which God will show us…the land that calls for a total surrender, a total self-abandonment to God; the land that calls for moving alone with God, listening to his directions, speaking directly to him, and allowing him to take a lead; to the land that keeps us close to him who calls and leads us.
What lifestyle do you have to leave behind? What cycle of friends? What setting? What environment? What entanglements, relationships etc do you have to leave behind? Have you agreed to allow God lead you and show you what he really wants of you in life? Do you feel so comfortable where you are now that you do not wish to allow your potentials to be fully put to use? Are you so comfortable in what you do now that you do not open the eyes of your mind and hearts to other things? Are you afraid to make that adventure, that journey, that reap of faith, that new beginning, that yet-another-beginning?
May God give us courage to identify the things, places, relationships etc which we must leave behind in order to climb to the mountain of our transfiguration, the mountain that will give a manifestation of glory of God inherent in us.
Fr. Chukwuezugo Nnamah