With Spiritual Sight Made Pure: Second Sunday of Lent

O God, who have commanded us
to listen to your beloved Son,
be pleased, we pray,
to nourish us inwardly by your word,
that, with spiritual sight made pure,
we may rejoice to behold your glory.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.

– Collect, Second Sunday of Lent –

We begin with the end in mind.  Our aim — by the grace of God — is to behold the glory of God as the apostles Peter, James, and John did on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration of Jesus.  This Collect invites us to share in that same vision in the Mass wherein we listen to the word of God, which purifies us and makes us able to see the glory of the Lord present in the Holy Eucharist.

In the Collect, we ask God first to nourish us by His word.  Paragraph 104 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church says, “In Sacred Scripture, the Church constantly finds her nourishment and her strength.” The word is our daily sustenance, and we ought to be attentive to what the Lord is saying to us at Mass because Scripture is so important to the Christian.  In addition to nourishing us, the word of God in the Holy Scriptures should passionately call us to conversion.  It should call us daily to love God more ardently and pursue Him more intensely. 

The word of God purifies our spiritual sight, according to the Collect.  As Psalm 24 says, “Who shall climb the mountain of the Lord?  Who shall stand in his holy place?  The man with clean hands and pure heart.” We can think of the mountain to which the Psalmist refers as like Mount Tabor, which the Apostles ascended to behold the Lord’s glory.  But the Psalm says that in order to climb the Lord’s mountain, purity is required.  Of what does the soul need to be purified?  If we are to behold the glory of God, we need to be purified of lies, of false ideas of God.  The Holy Scriptures strengthen our faith because they proclaim to us what is true.  They help us to come to understand who God is, especially when the word of God is read with prayer and attention.  When we come to understand God better, we can love Him better.  Thus when God becomes sacramentally present to us on the altar and we unite ourselves to Him in reception of Holy Communion, we rejoice to behold Him in His glory.  We rejoice to behold Him as He truly is.

Not only do we need to be intellectually pure, or pure in the sense of ridding ourselves of false ideas, we also need to be purified of disorder in our affections.  God is worthy of all our love, and He is more worthy than anything or anyone else of our love.  The Scriptures help us examine our conscience and evaluate whether we are loving something more than God in our lives.  For example, when we hear Psalm 51 sung at Mass, as we so often will this Lenten season, are we examining our hearts as the Psalmist did and experiencing true repentance for our sins?  Do we see our sins in the same way as the Psalmist saw his?  May the reading of the Holy Scriptures purify us in such a way as to receive Holy Communion with greater love.

If our spiritual sight is made more pure in the Liturgy of the Word, meaning if we have even in some small way grown in knowledge and love for God, we rejoice all the more to behold His glory in the Liturgy of the Eucharist.  God comes to us veiled under the appearance of bread and wine, but it is truly His precious Body and Blood.  We can only recognize and adore this reality through the eyes of faith.  The requirement of faith is expressed in this English translation of a verse of St. Thomas Aquinas’ hymn Pange Lingua:

Word-Made-Flesh, true bread He changes
By a word His Flesh to be,
Wine to Blood of Christ transforming
And though sense no change may see,
Faith alone provides assurance
If the heart sincere should be.

Through faith we can be in awe of God’s manifestation of Himself as Peter was in the Transfiguration.  Blessed Peter Julian Eymard, known as the Apostle of the Holy Eucharist, in his series of Eucharistic meditations writes about Peter wanting to stay with the Lord beholding Him in His glorified state on Mount Tabor.  Peter was also so dazzled that he sought to build tents and stay awhile in that place, but this prayer of Peter’s was not answered right away.  It was answered in a different way in the Eucharist.  In the Most Blessed Sacrament, the Word pitches His tent, indeed His tabernacle, among us that we might behold His glory here on earth.

We behold God’s glory in the Eucharist, but we also are given in this Sacrament, a “pledge of future glory” as it is described in the O Sacred Banquet prayer.  Blessed Peter Julian Eymard expresses this reality beautifully:  “The Eucharist deposits in us the leaven of resurrection, the source of a special and brighter glory, which after having been sown in our corruptible flesh will shine in our risen and immortal body.”  Indeed our Lord says, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” (John 6:54, NAB)

By our union with Christ in the Eucharist, we are given a foretaste of our union with Him in heaven.  This union here on earth is sweeter and more profound if our spiritual sight is purified by the word of God.  When we come to know our God more deeply and love him more fervently through the reading of the Holy Scriptures, we rejoice all the more to behold His glory in the Holy Eucharist, the pledge of our future glory.