Dear Sisters, dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, at the end of last Sunday’s Gospel of the Temptations, St Luke told us that Satan left our Lord, only to return at an opportune time. I then observed that that time to which St Luke briefly alludes when Satan would return would be on Maundy Thursday night, in the gloom of the Olive groves of the Garden of Gethsemane. That event will be referred to directly in the Preface of the Mass today. Meanwhile, St Luke’s account of that fateful Maundy Thursday evening includes many important details, some of which I hope to speak about on the last Sunday before Palm Sunday, so I will leave further mention of that till three Sundays hence.
However, there is something worth pointing out here today about what we have just heard, which connects with the events in Gethsemane. It is the phrase, which only St Luke among the evangelists tells us, that during this event which we call the Transfiguration, our Lord was speaking together with Moses and Elijah ‘about His departure which he was to accomplish at Jerusalem.’ It is this reference, so short and so very allusive or elliptical, that can easily escape our attention. What does it mean? In one sense it is quite straightforward; the word St Luke uses in Greek is one that anyone will recognise straightaway: ‘exodus’, which means ‘way out.’ The Exodus of which we all know, of course, is that of which we hear so in the reading from Book of the same name at the Easter Vigil: the dramatic departure of the people of Israel from slavery in Egypt, led by Moses himself, who has just appeared in the Gospel we have heard, conversing with Jesus in glory.
Exodus, then, is the name of an event which is at once in the remote past for the Jewish people, and in the imminent future for Christ. In the past the Jews were brought out of slavery at great cost. Moses had to struggle against the will of Pharaoh who was determined not to allow the Jews to leave Egypt. God brought down several plagues upon the Egyptians before Pharoh finally gave in to Moses’ demands made in God’s name. Yet even then all was not over. First of all, as the Jewish people waited to cross the Red Sea and so to leave Egypt for good, Pharaoh once again changed his mind and began to pursue the fleeing Jews by force of arms to compel them to return to Egypt as slaves. But as you know, Moses, directed by God, stretched out his hand over the sea and opened for the people a passage between the walls of water on either side of them, through which they walked safely and dry shod to the far side and to freedom. Meanwhile, the Egyptians, pursuing them in their chariots, followed into this passage in the sea only to see Moses on the far side stretch out his hands in command to allow the walls of water around them once more to crash down to their proper place and so to overwhelm and drown the pursuing Egyptians. It is this miracle of power which forms the climax and defining image of the Exodus of the Old Testament, the event which began the life of freedom of the people of Israel.
Nonetheless, one cannot possibly ignore the vital fact that it was only a beginning. There lay ahead of the people some forty years of trial and testing travelling in the barren wilderness, before they would finally be enabled to enter the land God had promised them, and how much would befall them of disaster and rebellion against God and Moses in those forty years ahead! This is something to remember when we think of the Exodus from Egypt. It was the beginning of an arduous and difficult process, not just of nomadic wandering, but of learning slowly an dpainfully who God was for them, and how much they needed to be transformed in order to become His people, capable of serving Him in true freedom. And we know, do we not, how even after they did final reach the Promised Land, they would go through many centuries of rebellion against God and of repentance, constantly renewed and strengthened by the promises of God made through His prophets – men like Elijah, whom we have also encountered in the Gospel today, - promises that one day He would send them a Saviour who would be a new Moses and even more besides.
Can we begin to see, then, how the figures of Moses and Elijah mean so much by their appearance in today’s Gospel, and by the mention St Luke makes of our Lord’s ‘Exodus’ in Jerusalem? What we need to do next, of course, is to discover what our Lord’s ‘Exodus’ actually means. He was not going to pass through the Red Sea, but He was going to pass through the even more terrible passion and crucifixion. Our Lord’s Exodus was not a passing out of the land of slavery towards a new freedom in God, but He was about to pass through death to a glorious victory and new life in the resurrection. It was indeed His death, but it was endured for our sake, to free us from slavery to sin and Satan, and to bring us into the freedom of the children of God.
The first Exodus was the opening up of a passage for the chosen people through the waters of the Red Sea, the new Exodus was the opening up of a passage from death to life through the waters of baptism. St Paul connects the first Exodus with the sacrament of baptism in the first epistle to the Corinthians, saying: ‘our fathers … all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses … in the sea.’ This is why we read the passage about the Exodus at the Easter Vigil, the night on which the whole Church celebrates the new birth of those baptized that night, not into Moses, but into Christ.
We know only too well that our baptism, though it is the moment in which we enter into a new and wonderful union with Christ as our head, is by no means the end of our journey to God. Just as the Chosen People wandered for forty years of hardship through the desert on their way to the Promised Land, so too we must pass through the difficulties of this life before we make our final Exodus to the Lord, which takes place at our death in this life and our entry into eternity. It is the forty years of the chosen people wandering through the wilderness that represents our own earthly life’s journey. For although we have been liberated from original sin in the exodus of baptism, we still have to learn how to do away with sin in our daily lives before we can enter the kingdom of God for ever. And that is why the forty days of Lent have a special significance for us, representing the hardships and deprivations through which we must pass in this life so as to become ‘perfect as our heavenly Father is perfect’.
St Paul explains this for us in another way today. He reminds the Philippians that they are not citizens of this world, but of heaven. This world is a wilderness compared to the joys of the Promised Land of heaven. We must keep our hearts and hopes set on that future beyond our own exodus from this life. St Paul also makes the connection for us between what happens to our Lord today in the Gospel, namely His Transfiguration, and what will happen to us after our own wilderness years and final departure from the world have been achieved, telling us that: ‘the Lord Jesus Christ…will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body.’ His Transfiguration is the sign of our future transformation into glory. Just as in baptism we enter into union with Him in order to enter the wilderness of the forty days of Lent, so at our future exodus or departing from this life, we will by His power and glory enter into an everlasting glory in union with Him and all the saints. He has the power to do this because He has made all things from nothing and can transform them by His own command. So we continue on our way through these forty days looking towards the triumph of Easter glory, which is itself the foretaste and anticipation of our final victory which will last not for fifty days like Eastertide, wonderful though that season is, but for all eternity. Amen.