2nd Sunday of Lent
READING 1:
Genesis 22: 1-2,9a, 10-13, 15-18 Psalm
116 READING 2:
Romans 8:31b-34
GOSPEL:
Mark 9:2-10
One day last week I noticed one of our dads walking away from church with his arm over his son’s shoulders after a daily Mass. The boy had a school holiday. I turned to the person I was in conversation with and said, “That is what every son longs for.” Today’s readings suggest this is a good day to speak about a father’s love. There was a movie in 2002 called John Q. Denzel Washington plays a man named John, an ordinary, hard working man, a husband and father. The family has a good life until one day his son collapses on the field while playing baseball. After the boy is rushed to the hospital, they find out the boy needs a heart transplant immediately or he will die. Unfortunately, the dad discovers that his health insurance HMO will not pay for a heart transplant. The hospital prepared to release the boy to die at home. John and his wife try to raise the money but the cost is $250,000 and just too much. So, John goes to the hospital and takes hostages and tells them he will kill the hostages if they don’t give his son a heart. A woman who happens to be a good match for the boy dies in a car accident and the hospital performs the surgery successfully. The boy will live, but John, his dad, goes to prison. Another movie, named, Life is Beautiful, is about a young Jewish family in Italy . The husband and father achieved his dream of opening his own bookstore just weeks before the German army starts rounding up Jews for deportation. Guido, the Jewish man, and his son and finally his wife are placed in boxcars and sent to a concentration camp. There, the dad creatively tells his son they are on a special vacation adventure that has a contest and that whoever avoids being seen by the soldiers the longest wins a tank. Guido places is own life at risk many times to reassure his son and get messages to his wife to keep the family alive and hopeful. Finally, just days before the camp is liberated by our American GIs, in one last performance to keep his son hidden, Guido is killed by a German soldier. His son lives and is reunited with his mother. Dads put their entire lives on the line for their children. This powerful love touches our hearts in a profound way because these stories are our story. My own family is not dramatic movie material, thank God. But every Sunday morning, my dad made breakfast for us kids. It might be pancakes or eggs and fried potatoes, but it was always terrific. I never considered even for one moment that there wouldn’t be enough. I never hid a pancake for later; I never even imagined going hungry. I knew without thinking about it that I would always have what I needed because my dad would make sure of it. The love of a good dad is a spectacular foundation for a good life. Today, we hear the voice of God proclaim Jesus his beloved son and telling us to listen to him. So, how could our God intend His Son suffer and die? When we hear that even when we were in sin, he did not come into the world to judge it but to save it. Remember: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and the Word became flesh”? This is not an ordinary father-son relationship. Jesus and the Father are one. This Gospel story started as four buddies going up on a mountain for some time together. At the top they were surprised and terrified by their experience. They didn’t understand it at all, but they knew it was great in that magnificent glimpse of heaven on the top of that mountain and didn’t want to come down to reality. Who would? Our reality is not so clear or so simple, after all. Our lives are not necessarily neat and things do not always turn out as we would like. But the mountaintop experience these buddies shared is the experience of our Father’s love we all long for. You see, we are God’s beloved children. If we would listen to Jesus and trust God even as I trusted my dad, imagine the world we’d leave our children! Imagine if we made the Sermon on the Mount our mission statement as a society. Jesus turned out to be a challenge that was too much for people in Jesus’ day and we don’t really do much better today. But people would rather not take a chance and change our ways. People are just people and reality is just reality. That is why Jesus ultimately said, “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” What we can understand, though, the good news we can take in as we prepare for Good Friday and Easter Sunday, is that we can rely on our Father’s love because it is proclaimed for all time from that cross. Fr. Jeff McGowan |
