Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the First Sunday of Lent 2024

Well, what about the details? The stones which might become bread, the conversations between Jesus and the tempter? Surely on the first Sunday of Lent, we are supposed to hear those familiar details of Jesus’s time in the wilderness where he does battle with the forces of evil. From there, we hear the familiar lines, ‘one does not live by bread alone’, ‘worship the Lord and worship only him.’ We can all relate to those warnings. Armed with these, and with the overwhelming example of Jesus’s heroic victory over temptation, we enter the Sundays of Lent. We know exactly where we are.

And yet, not this year. In the three-year lectionary cycle which the Church sets before us, this year we hear St Mark’s account. No detail of Jesus’s hunger, no conversations with the devil, no whisking of Jesus up to the roof of the Jerusalem Temple, but two solitary, sparse verses which simply tell us that he was driven into the wilderness where he was tempted, and where angels waited upon him. Of all the gospel writers, Mark is a man in a hurry, and he does not give us any further information (if indeed he knew it). Because Mark is intent on simply setting out what he calls the Good News, the Gospel, the message about Jesus Christ. This is scene-setting for the rest of the Gospel, and in particular for the public ministry of Jesus which begins immediately after he arrives in Galilee: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’

So, in Mark’s Gospel, the account of Jesus’s forty days in the wilderness has a noticeably sharper context than in Matthew and Luke. It is sandwiched in-between an account of Jesus’s baptism, and Jesus’s first proclamation of his messianic mission. Baptism, testing, mission. Arguably that is a punchier, more energising trio of themes for the Church to engage with at the beginning of Lent, than the details of the desert temptation story itself. Of course we shall consider temptation, self-denial, idolatry and discipline in Lent, but let’s get the context right first. Baptism, testing, mission. The shortest of the four gospels immediately and ironically spreads out for us the widest canvas.

In order to understand this fully, we need to go elsewhere in scripture, in fact to our other readings this morning. The passage we heard from the book Genesis takes us right the way back to the end of the story of Noah’s flood. The early Christian imagination saw this watery story, of the emergence of a new creation after the death and destruction of the deluge, as a precursor of baptism. From the deep waters of sin and chaos emerge new possibilities, and an eternal reconciliation between creator and creation is symbolised by the rainbow set in the sky. Jesus’s own baptism in the Jordan is itself an act of humility and acceptance of his own vocation, which is ‘for us, and for our salvation.’ As he emerges from the waters of the Jordan, the waters of chaos, something else happens in the sky. Jesus is given more than the rainbow (which is the symbol of the covenant) and sees his own divine context in the life of the Trinity, acclaimed as the Beloved Son of the Father. This is the context of the Gospel, and this is the context in which everything that follows operates. The rainbow of Genesis and the baptismal revelation of Jesus act in similar ways; they are signs of God’s eternal and absolute promise of the victory of love over sin and chaos. In the tradition of German Lutheran piety, Christ’s wounds shine like that rainbow in the heavens – some of you will know the aria Erwäge from Bach’s St John Passion where the direct comparison is made. We are saved through the waters of baptism, which are the waters of new birth, prefigured in the waters of Noah’s Flood. The rainbow prefigures the wounds of the risen Christ, which shine victoriously redeeming the rocky graveyards of our sin. The Lenten story, one of repentance and restoration, reaches further back than the story of Jesus in the wilderness. It forces us to look directly at the patterns of human fallenness and divine grace throughout history, in every age and in every place. The Good News for us – the Good News which St Mark’s Gospel gives us in short, loud, staccato blasts – is that Jesus’s life, ministry, death and resurrection offer a final and absolute assurance of reconciliation and peace.

So, the baptism of Jesus and its association with the rainbow promise of God’s new creation is the first essential context of our keeping of Lent. It is this baptism which we share as Christians in the life of the Church, when at the font we first encountered this truth for ourselves. Even before we knew the trials and choices of temptation and fallenness, the violence of sin that tears apart and fragments our relationships with God and each other, we are first given the truth of God’s unbreakable promise of peace. It is only thus that we can ponder the desert of our own lives, and the greed of the world. Without that primary promise, we would be overwhelmed, we would sink in the watery deluge of the flood.

The desert is not just a place of temptation, it is a place of purification and preparation. Mark tells us that it is in the desert that the angels ‘wait upon Jesus.’ What a comfort that image might be to us this Lent, in our journey towards greater self-awareness, proper penitence, and better discipleship. The desert is a place which can equip us, as we are stripped back to our Christian core. Because from the desert we will emerge strengthened in our inner selves for the work of discipleship in everyday life, as we allow the promise of God’s peace to reshape us.

The second context set out for us in today’s Gospel, is the beginning of Jesus’s ministry in Galilee, as he proclaims the Good News of the fulfilment of the ages and the proximity of the Kingdom. ‘Repent’ – metanoia – have a conversion of heart, he tells us. Not just ‘feel sorrow for the bad things you’ve done or the good you’ve failed to do!’ We can’t stay there. That underestimates the depth of the resources we are given in baptism. Rather, turn it around! Changed lives are possible, through the proclamation of the message we have been given, not just our own lives, but the lives of our societies, families, workplaces. To paraphrase the great Dominican Fr Timothy Radcliffe, if we lived a little bit as if we believed what we preach, people might start to ask us what our secret is!

So, this Lent: baptism, testing, mission. That is a pattern we can all relate to, because this story is also our story.