NewCreation

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent 2021 Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this homily for the first Sunday of Lent. This year we have Mark's account of the temptation in the wilderness. It's a very, very brief account. And unlike Matthew or Luke, we don't get, if you like, the psychology of the temptations. In each of those Gospels we get given accounts of the sort of thing Jesus was going through while he was in the wilderness. Not in Mark. Everything is very, very parsimonious as always. Very brief hints of what is being recapitulated here and how we're to understand it. Furthermore, the Church this year gives us the reading concerning Noah and St. Peter's account of how Noah had something to do with our salvation as the background to this text. So I'm going to try and be obedient to that, to the linking of Noah and St. Peter with today's Gospel. There is certainly something there. Of course, remember in Mark's account of the baptism — the verse immediately before today's Gospel — it's stressed that the one who comes down, the Spirit who comes down upon Jesus, comes down in the form of a dove. So the memory of Noah and the making peaceful of the waters is already there. And the forty days spent in the wilderness refers to the couple of occasions in which the words "forty days" are applied to Noah and his family in the ark. In fact, if you read the complete account of Noah and the ark, "forty days" appears a couple of times. And to be honest, if you add up all the days, there are a lot more than forty. Things happen for a hundred and fifty days, things happen in the seventh week of the fourth month, and so on and so forth. In other words, "forty days" is clearly put in a couple of times as a way of recalling a particular kind of important time, which of course is exactly what Mark is doing here. And we'll look and see what that forty days is about in a second. But what I'd first like to do is to talk about, if you like, what takes Jesus into this forty-day period, because the Gospel account is very interesting: "and the Spirit immediately drove Jesus out into the wilderness" — cast Jesus out into the wilderness. So again we have the Spirit doing things which we don't normally associate with the Spirit. But here, what is the Spirit doing? The Spirit is causing Jesus to re-enact Adam. Adam was cast out, driven out — the Greek verb is almost exactly the same — of the garden after he had failed the testing from Satan. He failed. But here Jesus is driven out, so he undergoes the expulsion first, and then he's going to live into the period of the garden, so as to become Adam, and he's going to be getting right what Adam got wrong. That's very much what's in the background here. A little hint of that. And what is the link between this wilderness and the expulsion? Well, the wilderness is the route back… and it's the place of sifting, so that the one coming back can be sifted through from all the things that caused them to remain outside. One of the key texts concerning this is in the book of Numbers, where, if you remember, the people of Israel send spies into the promised land as they are told to do, who then come and give discouraging reports, saying it's not all that great, they're really not up to it, and the people complain against Moses and Aaron, and God gets very cross with them indeed and says the following: "But as for you, your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness, and your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness for forty years and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness. According to the number of the days in which you spied out the land — forty days — for every day a year you shall bear your iniquity forty years, and you shall know my displeasure." In fact, the only people who are allowed through are Joshua and Caleb the son of Jephunneh. These were the people who bore good testimony, and they were the ones who would be allowed to go through. Everyone else was going to be killed. Now, this is a terrible period of sifting. So that's part of what's in the background to those forty days: this period of sifting. Noah presumably also spent time working through what had happened to him and his family while they were in the ark. And let's remember this. The Noah story is the story about how the goodness of creation is brought into being as something reliable, trustable, able to be given thanks for, able to be a blessing in the midst of violent corruption and evil. It is in fact a reverse scapegoating story. By reverse scapegoating story I mean this: the kind of story in which the good people who have got together violently and thrown out someone whom they consider responsible for all their evil sit around afterwards and say how splendid it was that they got rid of that evil one, and now they're all okay and everything's going to be fine and their crops are going to grow again. This is absolutely classic of mythologies all over the world. And the Noah story is, let's remember, an inverted scapegoating story. It's a story about how the world was full of violence, and everyone was violent, and God was so cross with it that he decided to save Noah and his family in the midst of it, had them build an ark so that the violence then destroyed everything else. God destroyed everything with the flood. This was the evil of all people, if you like, and in the midst of that — out of the midst of that — he brought these people, Noah and his family, and one of every living thing, so that the goodness of creation could be shown and demonstrated forever. It's a reverse scapegoating myth, which is why it's so important that Peter, Saint Peter, is able to use it in exactly that sense later, as we'll see. But so what do we have here? We have Jesus being prepared to fulfill the role of Noah and Zac, to be the one who is going to become the innocent one whom the group of the violent are going to throw out together, and then he's going to be able to be the one who in fact brings peace and the order and stability of creation to everyone else. This is, if you like, what he is learning by going through the Noah scene. It's what he's learning by going through the Adam scene. It's what he's learning by going through the Numbers scene. And it's also what he's learning — and this is not to be underestimated — by going through the Moses scene, because this is another example of the forty years, the forty days rather. Remember: Moses, when he was on the mountain with the Lord, spent forty days waiting before he was given the oracles, the word, the Ten Commandments. So here what we have is Jesus going through the being sifted on behalf of all of us, on behalf of Adam, on behalf of the people of Israel, on behalf of the whole of humanity along with Noah. He's going through all of this being sifted so that he is able not just to receive the word but to be the word, which is what he is to be. He is to be the word, and it's him going to be speaking that into being and revealing through the whole of his life — being shown that he is the Holy One of God — the actual internal logic and structure of creation. That's what's hinted at in these stories. So Peter talks about this in the same way, makes the same apparent reading of the Noah story that I have just given you: that he refers to the baptism as a prefiguration of our baptism. Remember that baptism means undergoing the wrath of death in advance, so as to be able to live freely and openly as part of a son or daughter alive in an entirely peaceful, an entirely violence-free creation — one brought into being with that promise of covenant of peace for humans, for animals, learning how to live together as God's image, which was what God commanded Noah to do. So let's just think a little bit about this sifting, because sifting, if you like, is the work of Lent for us. The Spirit casts Jesus into this place of sifting. It's a question of working through all the ways in which we are involved in fight or flight, shame, gossip, violence, throwing out the good one, not trusting the goodness that is before us but complaining and wanting to shrink back into lesser selves. And the Lord alone knows each one of us has a history of this, a history of not having been able to stand up and become the human being we are called to be. This, I think, is what Lent is about: us accompanying our Lord as he goes through the sifting that will enable him to become the true Adam, the first high priest, one who shares his priesthood and thus his good conscience with us, so that we may have the conscience of sons and daughters of God. Being able to step out of the violence, the corruption, the hatred, the depression, the feeling of abandonment, the feeling of loss, all the ways in which those things grind us down, and start to become instead the bearers of the word, the livers of the word, the reflectors, if you like, the witnesses of the true dynamic of creation made utterly alive. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.