Second Sunday of Lent Yr C 2025

Title

Our Citizenship is in Heaven

Outline

The internet is full of talk about patriotism and citizenship

Many government properties in Washington are being sold and the workers who are not laid off are being dispersed to government buildings in red states where there are true patriots. Tariff barriers are being raised to preserve the economic independence of the USA so its inhabitants can be truly free citizens. Now I do not use these examples for any other use than to point that the topic is “in the air” and that the claim is that this citizenship is ultimate and overrides quite a few principles of Catholic social ethics. And of course that means that those supportive officials who claim to be Christians are like those claimed believers of whom Paul says, “Their minds are occupied with earthly things.”

In contrast to that Paul says, “our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we also await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” Notice that it is the heavenly sphere now, but Jesus will come and transform and subjugate this earthly sphere. This is not a rejection of this earthly world as garbage.

Now look at our gospel

On the eighth day, the day of the new creation, after Peter’s confession and a passion prediction, Jesus takes his witness core of three up a mountain, as Moses and Elijah went up a mountain, and there they do not meet God but see Jesus transformed revealing to them that he is God. Moses and Elijah, citizens of heaven in every sense, speak with Jesus as God about his Exodus, not from Egypt but in Jerusalem. Peter, awaking in awe, does not equate himself with Moses and Elijah, but takes a royal slave’s role: we are here to set up tents, probably assuming, from which you three will go on to take over and rule in Jerusalem.

Then comes the voice from the cloud, “No, this one, Jesus, “is my chosen Son,” not the other two, whom he fulfills, so “listen to him.” Listen to him, not your ideas about what the kingdom should look like, not even Moses or Elijah, but listen to him, period.

They had spoken the right confession before but had not heard the passion prediction in their hearts and had carried, not the cross, but their ideas of the kingdom up the mountain. Stop; listen to him.

And so it is with us

We have to silence the voices of what much of the church and and certainly the world thinks Jesus’ kingdom will look like and how to bring it. We may like Abba Arsenius have to “flee, be silent, and be at peace” to experience a vision of that kingdom. We may have to shut out the calls of the world to claims of citizenship here and its demands as Abba Anthony did when he moved to the desert (although he would come back to assist Athanasius in asserting the true nature of the kingdom of heaven and of Jesus). But we have to listen to Jesus and know with Paul that our true citizenship is in heaven and that every citizenship down the line is totally subordinate to it.

It would take the passion and the resurrection for Peter to get it; it may take our carrying the cross for us to get it, which is fitting in this season of Lent, and it may take our fleeing and being silent in long hours before our Lord for it to grasp our hearts. But for peace the outside voices must be silenced, including the citizenship claims of the world, so that the one quiet voice that determines all we do is his. “Yes, Lord, I listen to you.”