2nd Sunday of Lent, Year C
First Reading: Gen 15:5-12, 17-18
Second Reading: Phil 3:17-4:1
Gospel Reading: Lk 9:28b-36
Many people “live as enemies of the cross of Christ,” St. Paul says. “Their minds are set on earthly things.”
However, along with their materialism, they often have a deep-seated suspicion that life is more than what we can see. Accordingly, they try in various ways to “get behind the scenes.”
“Consulting horoscopes, astrology, palm reading, interpretation of omens and lots, the phenomena of clairvoyance, and recourse to mediums all conceal a desire for power over time, history, and, in the last analysis, other human beings, as well as a wish to conciliate hidden powers,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
The First Commandment forbids all such superstition as contrary to “the honour, respect, and loving fear that we owe to God alone,” it says. “All practices of magic or sorcery, by which one attempts to tame occult powers, so as to place them at one’s service and have a supernatural power over others – even if this were for the sake of restoring their health – are gravely contrary to the virtue of religion.”
Nevertheless, it says, our desire to “get behind the scenes” has a divine origin. Superstition is “a perverse excess of religion,” a “deviation of religious feeling.”
Yes, there is another world beyond what we see. As St. Paul says, “our citizenship is in heaven.”
In this Sunday’s Readings the veil over that world is torn aside. God himself makes a covenant with Abram. The apostles see Jesus as God the Son and hear God the Father confirm it.
Normally that world is hidden from us. “We walk by faith, and not by sight,” St. Paul says. Nevertheless, “we are full of confidence.” We know that “when the earthly tent in which we dwell is destroyed, we have a dwelling provided for us by God, a dwelling in the heavens, not made by hands, but to last forever.”
In the meantime, as the Catechism says, we know that God is “master of the world and of its history;” he has “absolute lordship” over it; he is “the sovereign master of his plan” for it. He cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history.”
As for us – God loves us and wants us to know and love him. Accordingly, he has revealed himself to us ever since he made his covenant with Abram: first through his prophets, then through his son, and now through his son’s Church.
In particular, he does it through the Church’s sacraments – baptism, confirmation, the Holy Eucharist, penance, the anointing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony – which, says the Catechism, were “instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church” to “dispense” divine life to us.
The sacraments are “perceptible signs (words and actions) accessible to our human nature.” However, unlike the deceitful superstitions the Catechism condemns, they actually do bring into being the supernatural realities they signify, “by the action of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit.”
For example, baptism gives us re-birth as children of God, so that we share his very life. The Eucharist nourishes that life. Confirmation enriches us with a special strength of the Holy Spirit. Penance gives us God’s pardon for our sins and re-animates our supernatural life when mortal sin has killed it. Matrimony establishes between spouses the supernatural love that exists between Christ and his Church.
The sacraments are God’s “masterworks” in his new and everlasting covenant with us, says the Catechism. They are the true link between this world and the supernatural world, for God has promised solemnly, by the blood of his own son, that if we perform their outward signs in accordance with the Church’s intention, the Holy Spirit will give us divine life and everything we need to maintain it, so that we can live in the Holy Trinity, perfectly happy forever.
Who would settle for anything less?
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and Sessions 1-23 in YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Session 24, “The First Three Commandments,” will be available in YouTube form starting March 13.