21 February 2021 - Sermon for the first Sunday of Lent

Genesis 9.8-17; 1 Peter 3.18-end; Mark 1.9-15. 

We have reached the first Sunday of real Lent, after a whole year that everyone is saying has felt like a sort of Lent all the way through. Now in this actual Lent, our readings give us some real optimism and promise. Jesus going into the wilderness in Mark’s Gospel after his baptism, is the earliest and shortest of the Gospel accounts of Jesus being tested and tempted for 40 days: ‘he was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him’.   

In the Genesis reading, we had the encouraging end of Noah’s 40 days and 40 nights in the ark – the rainbow of promise that would stand for ever as a sign of God’s commitment and covenant with all people. The link between these two readings is helpfully given by the middle reading from the first letter of Peter: Noah’s ark is a pattern, a prefiguring, of our baptism - since in baptism God promises to guide us through the storms of life and bring us safely to heaven, as he brought Noah’s family and all the animals safely through the flood. Baptism sets us on a journey, guided and inspired by Jesus, which will bring us when the flood is past to the kingdom of God, to rejoice in the eternal Easter after the Lent of this life is past. The pledge of baptism is sure: in it we were made children of God, members of Christ and inheritors of the kingdom of heaven, as the Prayer Book catechism puts it. Baptism doesn’t promise us an easy voyage through life; it won’t all be plain sailing. But in baptism, God has called each of us his own beloved child, just as the voice from heaven proclaimed of Jesus: You are my Son, my beloved.’ God pours out his Spirit and his love for us, as the water was poured out on us, to sustain and steer us through all that lies ahead for us in this life. 

For all of us who have been baptised, and for those who may be thinking about baptism or preparing for confirmation, we start Lent with a reminder that in baptism we are marked with the sign of the cross, and if we are to be faithful to Christ, we cannot avoid following in the way of the cross. The Gospel tells us that Jesus was led into the wilderness immediately after his baptism. Even Jesus is not spared the testing times: the forty days of trial and temptation follow on straight after the high point of assurance and closeness to God the Father that his baptism represents. We are told that it is the Spirit that leads Jesus into the wilderness; indeed in Mark’s account it is even stronger than in Matthew and Luke’s versions – the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. That same Spirit, which had descended upon him in baptism, urges him onwards to a period of challenge. Mark doesn’t dramatize any of the temptations that Jesus faced, unlike Matthew and Luke who tell us that three times Jesus has his relationship with God tested: to satisfy his own needs, to demand God’s help and to worship something besides God. In Mark’s telling, the time Jesus spent in the wilderness is described with almost the stillness of a calm retreat: ‘he was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him’.  

It is striking that the wild beasts as well as the angels are portrayed as co-existing peacefully with Jesus in the wilderness during these days. There is a sense of balance and poise, relaxation and wonder: he was with the wild beasts, the primeval harmony of creation restored. There is no sense of danger. Christ spending time simply enjoying the creatures of God’s manifold creation, even the less cuddly ones you find in a desert.   

So Lent gives us a chance perhaps to get something of a perspective on what might otherwise trouble us, the things that we might otherwise try to avoid or hide from. In Lent we can maybe seek for some stillness and find some moments of peace in which to focus on both our creatureliness, our dependence on God, and also on our vocation as God’s adopted children, to reflect God’s praise and minister God’s glory as do the angels. 

The wild beasts and the physical co-existence that Mark depicts, even as Jesus is tested spiritually, takes us back to the creatures of Noah’s ark from the Genesis reading. We have to assume, although of course we’re not told about on-board conditions the ship’s company enjoyed, there was some sort of peaceful co-existence over those 40 days even between the animals that would normally have fought, between predator and prey. Vastly differing species together, like Jesus and the wild beasts and the angels: the harmony of the ark is taken to pre-figure the reconciling of our human impulses to violence and greed and power and persecution, and the realising of our human potential for redemption by God’s loving-kindness and unqualified acceptance of us. There is nothing about us that God cannot restore and mend and heal, and Lent takes us back to the good news of our first love for God, or, rather, our first real recognition of God’s love for us.  

That perspective, of all those animals and people being shut up together in the ark for forty days, may also resonate with us at this time when we have been shut in by lockdown for a great number of days during this past year. We have had to face up to mortality and limitation and loss in ways we probably couldn’t have imagined at the start of Lent last year. As we begin real Lent, we are asked to trust in God’s providence and good purposes once again, to turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ once again. But we have the reassurance of just how far God’s promises reach out towards us in our need and helplessness. From the cross, as the letter of Peter says, Jesus descended to the depths, to make a proclamation to the spirits in prison – to bring all things, all beings, all creatures, all of God’s creation out of captivity to evil and death. So in this life and beyond this life, there is a freedom and a bigger horizon possible for us, a greater dimension to existence that God invites us to share. Sometimes, the opportunities for fulfilment are hidden around and within, like the secret signs of life in a desert when you look closely at what first seemed arid and empty. At other times, like the rainbow which comes at the end of the Noah’s ark story, we must wait for the blessing and the promise.  

The rainbow has become quite a universal secular sign in recent years, and since lockdown it has featured in pictures everywhere giving thanks to NHS and other keyworkers. Originally in Genesis, the rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant with humanity and every living creature. God’s promise, symbolised in the rainbow, is to spare creation and not destroy it – however sinful it may be. But there is a rabbinic tradition that we only see in a rainbow half a circle, and the other half is missing: the circle isn’t complete. This reminds us that God has pledged not to destroy humanity but, since God has given us freedom of choice, God cannot guarantee that humanity won’t destroy itself. So to see a rainbow, on this interpretation, reminds us of our responsibility for the other half of the rainbow we don’t see, which is ours to make happen. Alongside God’s promise, we have to do our part in caring for the world and the environment so that we don’t destroy it ourselves. Through Lent, the Spirit of discipline and obedience that guided Jesus in the wilderness can guide us also in the choices we make.   

At the end of Jesus’ 40 days, he began his ministry and mission to proclaim the good news and tell that the kingdom of heaven has come near.  At the end of Noah’s 40 days, there was freedom and a new future, and the rainbow to remind all people of God’s enduring goodness and the beauty of a world made new. At the end of our Lent, we have the promise of all of this: the good news is for us also, we too can be inheritors of that freedom, sharers of that new creation, that beauty and that joy; at Easter, now and eternally, we will walk with Christ into that new future – and we will know, now and eternally, the kingdom of heaven.  Amen.