The Hidden Victory

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Vol. 57 No. 12     The Last Sunday before Lent (Quinquagesima)     February 15, 2026

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I trust you have all had this experience, or one like it. Maybe it’s a word game, or a work of art, or a poem, or a mathematical problem: you look at it, and you are perplexed. But you kept looking at it, you kept thinking about it, maybe you walked away from it for a while and came back to it afresh – and suddenly you see it. It is like someone turned on the lights, and everything that was perplexing before now becomes charged with meaning. It was there all the time, but you couldn’t see it.

That’s the situation of the disciples in the gospel lesson for this Sunday. Jesus tells them plainly what lies ahead: “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem”, to experience suffering, death, and resurrection. But the disciples do not understand. “This saying was hid from them”. They could not grasp how God’s Messiah could enter his kingdom through rejection, shame, and the Cross. Their blindness was not a failure of intelligence, but of vision. Measured by the standards of worldly wisdom, the Cross makes no sense.

The Cross of Christ is God’s hidden victory. To the world, it appears as failure and defeat—the emblem of shame and loss. What the world cannot see is that this apparent defeat is the very means of life and glory. Only in the resurrection, is the hidden victory revealed, the victory of God’s love: love for the undeserving, love that gives itself without calculation or return love stronger than death.

Like the disciples, we often find the word of God perplexing, the word of the cross above all; yet the gospel lesson of this Sunday offers hope. Just after commenting on the spiritual blindness of the disciples, Luke tells the story of the blind man who cries out to Jesus for mercy: “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” His prayer—made in faith and undaunted hope—is answered. He sees—and then he follows. He joins Jesus on the road that leads up to Jerusalem, toward the place where God’s saving purpose will be fulfilled, where love is perfected.

For us to see this more clearly than ever before, is the goal of our Lenten disciplines. That’s why, during Lent, by old tradition, we veil the sacred images of the church, above all the great image of the Risen Lord above the altar. They teach us that Lent is a journey from blindness to sight. We are on pilgrimage. Our eyes are being trained to recognize the Cross not as loss, but as gift; not as failure, but as victory. “Now we see through a glass, darkly”, says St. Paul, “but then face to face”—which in Biblical idiom means plainly, without obstruction. “Lord, that I might receive my sight”.

And this training of our sight is not instantaneous. It is learned slowly, by practice, by habit, by returning again and again to the same truths until they begin to shape not only what we think, but what we desire and expect. Lent does not give us new truths so much as it re-orders our loves, so that we may at last see clearly what has been there all along. The disciplines of Lent are not ends in themselves; they are instruments by which the Holy Spirit heals our vision.

Fasting loosens the hold of the immediate and the obvious, teaching us that we do not live by bread alone. Prayer stretches our hope beyond what we can secure for ourselves, training us to wait upon God in trust. Almsgiving breaks the illusion that life is a possession to be guarded, and draws us into the generous self-giving love of Christ. In these practices, our vision is gradually corrected. The standards of worldly wisdom begin to lose their authority, and the wisdom of the Cross comes into focus.

This is why the Church veils the sacred images during Lent. The veils do not deny the glory of Christ; they teach us how to look for it. They remind us that, for now, much of God’s work remains hidden from our eyes, and that we must learn to see differently if we are to recognize it. The great image of the Risen Lord above the altar is not removed, but concealed—just as Christ’s victory was concealed in his suffering, and revealed only in the Resurrection.

Lent, then, is a season of hopeful blindness: a time when we admit how little we see, and ask, with the blind man, “Lord, that I may receive my sight.” And the promise of the gospel is that this prayer is not in vain. Those who follow Christ on the road to Jerusalem—who remain with him in faith, even when they do not yet understand—will see.

At Easter, the veils will be lifted. What has been hidden will be made plain. And we will discover that the Cross, which once appeared as loss and defeat, is in truth the very victory of God’s love—the love that has conquered sin and death, and given us life. “Behold, we go up to Jerusalem.”