Second Sunday of Lent
 

“ Jesus… led them up a high mountain where they could be alone.”
 
Brian Blessed is a larger-than-life English actor, famed for his booming voice and also for his adventures, including climbing mountains. He once went on an expedition into the jungles of Venezuela, during which he survived a plane crash; and he was the oldest man to walk to the North Magnetic Pole. He has succeeded in climbing Mount Aconcagua in Argentina and Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and has attempted Mount Everest three times without oxygen. He is a fully trained astronaut and on the waiting list to travel to the International Space Station. He is now over eighty, so maybe there is hope for us all.
 
He once paid a lovely tribute to his parents: “My parents taught me honesty, truth, compassion, kindness and how to care for people. Also, they encouraged me to take risks, to boldly go. They taught me that the greatest danger in life is not taking the adventure at all. To have the objective of a life of ease is death. I think we have all got to go after our own Everest.” He was fortunate to have had parents like that, and it is interesting that he links together truth, compassion and kindness with taking risks and hardships, like climbing Mount Everest.
 
Truth, compassion and kindness feature very strongly in the life of Jesus, and so does climbing mountains. Last week we heard how the devil took him up a “very high mountain” to tempt him. And in the Gospel today Jesus led Peter, James and John up a “high mountain” – not any old mountain but a high one. High mountains are dangerous, people die on them; climbers need stamina, determination and strength. Was Jesus making the same point as Brian Blessed? That life is about challenges and that a life of ease is no life at all? And that it should be combined with compassion and caring for people? In its own way caring can involve hardships, and in the long term may be as difficult as climbing Everest. St Paul urges us to bear hardships for the sake of the Gospel, but he adds, “relying on the power of God”. God our Father asks us to reach out for his help.
 
Abraham was called by God to an adventure even more challenging than Brian Blessed’s expedition into the jungles of Venezuela. The Lord told Abraham to leave his homeland and his family, and travel into the unknown. It was to be a life involving great hardships and sacrifice. How could he be sure it was the voice of God and not some imaginings of his own mind? He acted in faith. But the hardest part is always summoning the courage and trust to get on and do it, “relying on the power of God”. The apostles had a similar call, and told Jesus, “We have left everything and followed you.” It is the same struggle that many Christians grapple with as they seek their vocation in life.
 
After their exhausting climb up the high mountain, the three apostles were rewarded with a vision that is unimaginable to most people. They glimpsed the glory of heaven and were told not to describe it to anyone else until after Jesus had risen from the dead, even though at the time, as Mark tells us in his account of the same story, they could not understand what “rising from the dead” might mean. They saw Jesus in his heavenly glory, the glory he had before the beginning of the world. And they saw the great prophets of old, Moses and Elijah, whose words they knew so well from the scriptures, in glory too.
 
Despite their pleading to be allowed to build tents and stay there, to extend their clarity of vision and certainties, Peter, James and John had to go down from the mountain, into the realm of faith rather than sight, the way of struggling rather than illumination. What they were given is what we have been given, in every age of the Church: the voice of the Father, telling us, “Listen to him.” It was what Our Lady had learned as well, when she said to the steward of the wedding feast at Cana, “Do whatever he tells you.” When St John Henry Newman wrote about faith, he stressed that faith is not just about good thoughts, but about “doing”. “What is living faith?… works, deeds of obedience, are the life of faith,” he said.