Today’s readings: Genesis 9, 8-15; 1 Peter 3, 18-22; Mark 1, 12-15.
For the desert monks of early Christianity, the wilderness was “the country of madness” and “the refuge of the devil”. Thus the desert is the place of temptation, a place where we journey to confront our true selves and end up wrestling with the demonic.
Without sounding too negative, the many facets of the world today seem to make it for us a place of temptation. We are tempted to believe less in God. But Lent urges us to focus more on God.
The goal of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises is “to gain self-mastery and to order one’s life”. Lent is a time of re-ordering or re-visioning in life, of re-establishing harmony after the chaos.
From Genesis we read today about the aftermath of a destructive flood. We all have vivid images of the devastation of a tsunami. In spiritual terms that devastation can be metaphorically applied to what we all need to go through in order to experience stability in the life of the spirit.
Abraham Heschel writes that “God is not nice. God is not an uncle. God is an earthquake.” He is an earthquake because to really experience harmony in the spirit, chaos must precede it.
The sign of God’s covenant will triumph at the end of the day, but we need first to be destabilised. It is the destabilisation that comes through the wilderness temptation and which Jesus himself experienced precisely at a point when “the time had come”.
When is it that the time comes for us? Surely this is not referring to our deathbed.
The ‘hour’ of Jesus was the time of his glorification; for us it is the moment when things start falling into place, when believing is also seeing. Because it is more than natural that we need to ‘see’ in life.
Lent brings us every year to the celebration of the Easter Vigil that guides us from darkness to light, from the account of our creation to our becoming a new creation in the risen Christ.
When the kingdom of God is close at hand, compromises are no longer possible, radical choices need to be made, and in Christian living that can be a point of no return. The wilderness for Israel stands for the journey from bondage to freedom, to the promised inheritance which awaited them.
As we enter the Lenten season it would make sense for us to ask ourselves what it is that has been promised to us and whether we still have expectations from God.
What can we still hope for today? In our fast-changing world, things are getting quite tough and we very often speak of the need to re-vision the world as it is and as we see it.
But is there still hope? This is a question that can be posed with regard to the world at large and on a very personal level. When the going gets tough and we feel dry, exhausted, and discouraged, is there hope to emerge from bondage to freedom?
Lent is the time to give us the right perspective of things. Jesus’ words “Repent and believe the Good News” mark a turning-point, a fresh beginning under the sign of God’s covenant. The worst temptation we can experience in our deserts today is not to have hope.
In his book Making the Future, Noam Chomsky, one of the most vital and provocative voices of political dissent, recalls how even in dark times, the expectation was that progress would continue. But “now there’s a sense of hopelessness, sometimes despair”.
The yearly Lenten rewind about the promise of God in Jesus does not mean that ahead there lies a life of easy confidence and surface peace. Quite the opposite. As Ruth Burrows writes in her book Love Unknown, it means that our dry and dull inner life, the brick walls we face, the sense of getting nowhere, are all acknowledged without panic because the focus is God’s action, not ours.