First Sunday of Lent, Cycle B. Today’s readings: Genesis 9:8-15; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:12-15.
Life has become so busy that we crave for a time to retreat. Often this is not simply a reaction to too much work and the desire to rest. Deep down it might also indicate the need to stop, to find one’s bearings, to re-evaluate ones’ own life. Lent offers us this opportunity.
Lent, therefore, is a time of pilgrimage from the state of slavery to sin towards a state of renewed life and freedom in the promised land.
This is the covenant that we read about in the first reading on this first Sunday of Lent. At the conclusion of celebrated Great Flood narrative, God promises Noah that never again will the land be destroyed by the waters. How can we possibly believe these words when all around us we see natural catastrophes, floods or desertification of entire lands, and man-made disasters that threaten the existence of creatures on this planet? Is this covenant real?
As the late anthropologist and medical doctor Paul Farmer insisted, natural disasters are a fact of life. However, whether human lives are lost because they do not afford to build houses in areas that can withstand such natural conditions, or if climate change is due to our greed, then it ends up becoming a question about our moral responsibility.
God makes this covenant with his people freely and generously, but then there is also our cooperation and our response. Lent can therefore be seen as a time that trains us to receive the fullness of this promise.
In today’s gospel, we read about Jesus withdrawing into the wilderness where he stayed for 40 days before beginning his mission on Earth, reminiscent of the 40 years that the Israelites spent wandering in the desert. In so doing, Jesus models for us how we are to live this privileged time.
The words of the prophet Hosea come to mind: “Thus said the Lord: I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. She shall respond there as in the days of her youth when she came up from Egypt.”
Lent is the perfect opportunity for this spiritual awakening, to allow ourselves to be taken to the desert, to hearken to God’s word and to put it into practice
Pope Benedict had once spoken of a different kind of desert. The external deserts, he claimed, have become so vast because the internal deserts are growing larger. In other words, the deterioration of the environment can be traced back to the impoverishment of our internal attitudes.
A profound interior conversion, or what Pope Francis calls an “ecological conversion” is therefore needed. This is only possible through an encounter with Jesus Christ and that becomes evident in our relationship with the world around us. Through the practice of caring for the environment we restore our relationship with God and with one another. This can take the shape of living a lifestyle marked by communion. While making an effort to care for creation we steer away from the vices of indifference and individualism.
The Art of Purifying the Heart, by Czech Cardinal Tomáš ŠpidlíkIt is therefore a question of overcoming the vices of greed and avarice that seem rampant around us to the extent that they are sometimes mistaken for admirable traits. In his book The Art of Purifying the Heart, which incidentally would make for excellent Lenten spiritual reading, the late Czech Cardinal Tomáš Špidlík writes how avaricious people place too much trust in money, forget God, are hardened towards their neighbour, and in the long run, they even suffer the negative repercussions in their own life.
In the desert of our lives we can heed Jesus’s invitation in today’s gospel on his return to Galilee after 40 days in the desert: “Repent and believe in the good news”.
Lent is the perfect opportunity for this spiritual awakening, to allow ourselves to be taken to the desert, to hearken to God’s word and to put it into practice. Caring for the whole of creation can be a way of making this desert fecund again.