First Sunday Of Lent
As the annual season of Lent begins, the Scriptural readings turn to the opening book of the Bible. In the theological plan of instruction intended by authors and editors of the Book of Genesis, God never gave up on his wayward human creatures. It all began with the ideal existence of a man and a woman in Eden or Paradise. As the story goes, this pair was not satisfied with the ideal existence. They turned against their Benefactor and lost their ideal existence. God cared enough for his rebels to provide for their continued existence. Then from the same family brother murders brother out of jealousy. The murderer was spared and God provided a future for him. Next was the declaration of unlimited revenge by the patriarch Lamech. He also was granted a future through his son Noah. Despite all the merciful acts of creation and provision, the authors of Genesis write in 6:11, “The earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and was filled with violence.”
More drastic action was needed – a major cleansing of the earth. The great deluge was to be the method of cleansing because “I have determined to wipe out all flesh.” Still, the Lord did not want to wipe out all of humanity. Noah and family are the chosen few to repopulate the human race after the flood. This is where this Sunday’s first reading begins. God forms a covenant with Noah and his sons as they emerge from the ark. The rainbow in the sky is the sign of that covenant with the renewed human race. The “bow that appears in the clouds” is however not just a rainbow, but it is God’s warbow which he has hung up, resolving never to make war against the earth and the human race again. Whenever humanity sees that rainbow/warbow, it is God’s promise, that the storm which just passed, was only a skirmish, a reminder of what could happen if God had not promised to not make war again. It is impossible not to mention Noah’s so human response. He got drunk.
Why was this reading chosen for the beginning of Lent? Because it so well reflects our own relationship with our Creator. Beginning our life with the grace of baptism, we fall again and again, but God is always there with a remedy – reconciliation. Baptism is the rescue by water from the original watery chaos over which the Spirit (Breath of God) hovered in Genesis 1:2, as creation begins. Very few escape the shipwreck which follows baptism as we go through the adult years of our lives. Reconciliation is called the second plank after shipwreck, the piece of wood onto which we cling to once again reach shore. The Responsorial Psalm reminds us that God shows sinners the way out, because, “Your ways are love and truth to those who keep your covenant.”
The second reading is a selection from the First Letter of Peter. This reading reminds us that it is not our own efforts that bring us out of the depths of sin, but that accomplishment comes from “Christ who suffered for sins once…, that he might lead you to God.” St. Peter recalls how God did not give up on the human race but preserved and restored it through Noah and family, “eight in all, saved through water.” He continues, “This prefigured baptism, which saves you now.” As Noah and family were saved from the corruption of the earth through water, so we are saved from the corruption of our sins through the water of baptism. Part of this Letter of Peter is an instruction on baptism – a catechism. Next question: Where and how does the simple rite of baptism gain such power? He explains, “It is not a washing off of dirt,” but “an appeal to God for a clear conscience through the (power of) the resurrection of Jesus Christ.”
On the first Sunday of Lent, the gospel is always one of three gospel versions of the temptations of Jesus to which he submitted in the wilderness of Judea. Both readings and the Responsorial Psalm emphasized cleansing. The encounter with temptation that results in victory over it is itself a cleansing. In Mark’s catechetical instruction, the humanity of Jesus is not eager to undergo this testing in the wilderness for forty days. Therefore Mark, who writes in Greek, deserves a clear translation of the beginning of his version of the temptation of Jesus. Our official translation reads, “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert….” Drove? In what conveyance? Best to translate the Greek verb which Mark as we translate it to express Jesus’ expulsion of the tempter in exorcisms. Therefore Mark wrote, “The (Holy) Spirit, (who had just come upon Jesus at his baptism by John the Baptizer), expelled (forced against his human will) Jesus into the desert.”
Thus the first step in the “rejection” of Jesus – a theme which runs throughout the Gospel of Mark. The theme begins with the Holy Spirit at Jesus’ baptism and ends on the cross with the seeming abandonment of Jesus by his heavenly Father, “My God! My God! Why have you abandoned me?” In between Jesus is rejected or misunderstood by his human family, by his people, and ultimately even by his disciples. The “forty days” of temptation remind that Jesus represents his people. In their own wilderness experience of temptation, they failed miserably. Jesus, who represents them before God, shows the way as he gains victory over the tempter. The wild beasts are a premonition of his suffering on the cross, his last temptation. The reference is to Psalm 22, a Psalm which underlies the narrative of Jesus’ sufferings on the cross. In verses 12 and 16, “Many bulls surround me, strong bulls…. Yes, dogs are around about me, a company of evildoers.” Victory is however assured to the tempted one, “The angels ministered to him.” How does this gospel selection hold out to each of us an invitation to join Jesus’ victory over temptation? In Jesus first proclamation, “Repent, and believe in the Good News.
