First Sunday of Lent (B)

Gen 9:8-15; 1 Pet 3:18-22; Mark 1:12-15

Terrance Callan

This is the first Sunday of Lent, the season in which we prepare to celebrate Easter. This time can be seen as a retreat for the entire church. The Sunday readings propose themes for our meditation during this retreat.

The gospel reading for the first Sunday of Lent is always the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert. Before beginning his public ministry Jesus spent forty days in the desert being tempted. The forty days of Lent are patterned on this.

In the Gospel according to Mark, the story of Jesus’ temptation in the desert is very brief. The reading says that the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert, where Satan tempted him for forty days. The Spirit strongly moved Jesus to confront temptation. Before he could undertake his public ministry, Jesus needed to know and resist anything that would draw him away from serving God. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark does not tell us what these temptations were. Mark only says that Jesus was with the wild beasts and the angels ministered to him. Perhaps this means that by his struggle with temptation Jesus achieved peace with the subhuman and superhuman, both in himself and throughout creation.

Lent is a time to let the Holy Spirit lead us to confront our temptations and resist them, in preparation for another year of serving God. It is a time to become more conscious of the principal things that keep us from whole-hearted service of God, and to become free from them. The Spirit drove Jesus into the desert right after he had received the Spirit in his baptism. Reflection on our own baptism may help us to seize the power to resist evil given us by the Holy Spirit through baptism. The readings from the Book of Genesis and the first Letter of St. Peter present the flood in the time of Noah as a sign of baptism.

At first glance the flood in the time of Noah does not seem very similar to baptism. The flood was God’s destruction of the world after its sinfulness had multiplied; baptism is our incorporation into Christ. However, the flood can be seen as a "baptism" of the world in which all evil was destroyed, but the righteous, i.e., Noah and his family, were saved. In a somewhat similar way, baptism is a flood that destroys all unrighteousness in us and confers righteousness. This righteousness is the Holy Spirit who guides us. Thus the reading from the first letter of Peter can say that the salvation of Noah and his family from the flood prefigures baptism. For sins Christ was "put to death in the flesh" and "brought to life in the Spirit." In baptism we receive freedom from sin and new life in the Spirit.

The reading from Genesis tells of God’s covenant with Noah and his descendants never again to destroy all bodily creatures by a flood. The rainbow was a sign of this covenant. Just as the flood was definitive, never to be repeated, so baptism is a definitive conquest of evil in us. It has given us a power to resist evil on which we can depend thereafter. Lent is a time to recall and grasp the power we have been given in order to increase our freedom from sin.