Year B / Lent / Week 1 / Sunday
Readings: Genesis 9:8-15/ Responsorial Psalm: 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9 (R/v cf 10) / 1 Peter 3:18-22/ Mark 1:12-15
“I establish my Covenant with you… There shall be no flood to destroy the earth again.”
Here is God promising Noah and his sons that He would never again destroy anything He created. This is Good News. We need to hear this loud and clear now. It matters because we are making our Lenten observances amidst continuing contagion and sickness, uncertainty and fear.
Those battling floods and struggling through deserts have similar experiences. Many fear floodwaters overwhelming and drowning us. Many fear getting lost in deserts and suffering dehydration. We pray not to experience these.
Today’s readings however invite us into these very experiences of dread, particularly of death we cannot escape. Such is how human life ends.
Yet God is with us in life. Noah, his family, the animals on the Ark struggled through the Great Flood and its devastation. Its waters stripped everything away. They still experienced God’s fidelity and care. After the flood, God expressed this love fully in the covenant He made – never to destroy life again.
And God keeps his promise using water itself. Water gives life and sustains it. It purifies, cleans, and refreshes. “The rains are showers of blessings,” we say.
Scripture and liturgy remind us how true this grace is in Baptism. Jesus submerged himself in the water at his own baptism and rose from it. He did not drown; he lived. We celebrate this truth with every baptism.
Jesus’s action also prefigures the Paschal Mystery Lent prepares us for. Jesus entered into suffering and death on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and through it, he rose to life again at Easter. We participate in this same movement with Jesus on those holy days. This should remind us that God’s covenant is true. Death, where is your sting? Truly, life in God abounds.
Going through to the other side helps one survive the desert. Death comes to those who stand still. One needs to find water and a path out.
Scripture tells of the Hebrews who spent 40 years in the desert. After being led out of Egypt, they had to make it through the desert to get to the Promised Land. They had to keep on moving forward to get to this other side and life there. Through it all, God kept faith with them: He led, nourished, and protected them to arrive there.
In today’s gospel reading, God’s Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness for forty days. There he was with the wild beasts. He prayed, fasted, and prepared for ministry. There he was tempted by Satan and overcame him. There he was looked after by angels. Through it all, God remained faithful and present in Jesus’s life.
What if God is inviting us this Lent to enter into the wilderness of our lives – into those spaces of spiritual emptiness, of sinful habits, of needed conversion — to meet him there? Will we trust God and enter — not just to repent and change our lives but to let God really love us first of all?
Floods. Deserts. A Pandemic. Each a space of dread and death. Each also real in our everyday life. Like facing floods, we may be drowning in work, stress, and anxiety. Like getting lost in deserts, we may be parched of prayer and dried up without enough generosity to share and care. Like struggling with this pandemic, we may be infected with sinful habits and addictions.
Will we enter these spaces in our lives this Lent — to stare death itself in the face – and to pass through them, transformed, to Easter on the other side?
We can for it is Jesus himself who makes this invitation. Let us permit him to lead us onward because, as Paul teaches, he has taken on our sins, wrestled with evil and death, and overcoming them, he has gained for us the fullness of life with God.
Indeed, “the time has come,” Jesus says. We should heed his call today. All Jesus wants is to walk with us into these spaces and get us through to God’s side.
Will we let Jesus?
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
Photo: ‘crossing the bay of mont saint-michel, normandy’ by thierry seni
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