And so we begin the forty days, or so, of Lent. As the gospel story indicates, our forty days is a shadow of His forty days, the period in which He prepared for his three-year mission of preaching and teaching and for His great Sacrifice with the retreat into the wilderness.
“At this time, Jesus came from Nazareth, and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And even as He came up out of the water he [John] saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit, like a dove, coming down and resting upon Him. There was a Voice, too, out of heaven, ‘Thou art My beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.’ Thereupon, the Spirit sent Him out into the desert: and in the desert He spent forty days and forty nights, tempted by the devil; there He lodged with the beasts, and there the angels ministered to Him. But when John had been put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God’s kingdom: ‘The appointed time has come,’ He said, ‘and the kingdom of God is near at hand; repent, and believe the gospel.'”
Gospel of S. Mark, 1: 9-15 [link]
Mark says that Christ was driven or sent into the wilderness – and here we must remember that Christ had two natures, one divine and the other human. And although the human nature of Christ was perfectly in tune with the divine, we know from the gospel stories, notably the story of the agony in the garden, that the human nature of our Lord had a (very human) struggle on its way to resignation to the divine Will. ‘If it be Your Will, Father,’ He said, on that occasion, ‘may this chalice pass Me by, but may Your Will be done.’ And there is the place where humanity (in Adam and Eve) failed in that first garden, and which Christ manages in this other garden, the garden of Gethsemane. The will of the Father, the will of God, must be done. But, long before Gethsemane, the humanity of Christ is on display in our gospel story today. Fasting is not easy; the small fastings that we attempt in this time are not quite like the forty days of our Lord. But in all fasting, we discover our fragility as mortal beings and we are led to reverse the sin of Adam and Eve, and declare that we are always dependent upon the Holy One, especially as human beings. If we get this right, and acknowledge that we cannot go the distance on our own – that we always need the providence of God – we are able to live through the difficulties of our lives, no matter how serious things get (that is, we are able to be with or lodge with the wild beasts) and we shall find heavenly assistance in living in the presence of God (that is, the angels will look after us). We shall have united ourselves to the Holy One in mind and heart, and we shall be ready to proclaim the Good News to a world that is far astray from her Maker. I don’t expect that most of us will achieve this union with the Holy One this Lent, but it is this union with God that every Christian soul must aspire to. And the Lenten fast helps. In making the small – or large – commitments that we make for Lent, we show ourselves faithful to the God Who calls us to union with Himself, and He in turn renews His covenant with us. He made that covenant with us on the Cross, but we can use the language of the first reading about the covenant He made with Noah, to express our own Covenant, our New Covenant, our New Testament.
“This, too, God said to Noe, and to Noe’s sons: ‘Here is a covenant I will observe with you and with your children after you, and with all living creatures, your companions, the birds and the beasts of burden and the cattle that came out of the Ark with you, and the wild beasts besides. Never more will the living creation be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again a flood to devastate the world.’
‘This,’ God said, ‘shall be the pledge of the promise I am making to you, and to all living creatures, your companions, eternally; I will set My bow in the clouds, to be a pledge of My covenant with creation. When I veil the sky with clouds, in those clouds My bow shall appear, to remind Me of My promise to you, and to all the life that quickens mortal things; never shall the waters rise in flood again, and destroy all living creatures. There, in the clouds, My bow shall stand, and as I look upon it, I will remember this eternal covenant; God’s covenant with all the life that beats in mortal creatures upon earth.'”
Book of Genesis, 9: 8-16 [link]
What does He say to Noah? The covenant is hereditary and also associated with creation, because of those birds and animals that were linked to the Noah in his survival and the survival of his family. So also, as S. Paul says somewhere, with respect to the New Covenant, all of creation is waiting to be restored, waiting for the revelation of the Children of God.
“Created nature has been condemned to frustration; not for some deliberate fault of its own, but for the sake of Him Who so condemned it, with a hope to look forward to; namely, that nature in its turn will be set free from the tyranny of corruption, to share in the glorious freedom of God’s sons. The whole of nature, as we know, groans in a common travail all the while. And not only do we see that, but we ourselves do the same; we ourselves, although we have already begun to reap our spiritual harvest, groan in our hearts, waiting for that adoption which is the ransoming of our bodies from their slavery.”
Letter of S. Paul to the Romans, 8: 20-23 [link]
In our covenant with God, Creation is raised with us. Our sign of the covenant is not a bow in the sky, it is that crucifix which adorns our churches and homes, which is (again in the words of S. Paul) a stumbling-black to Jews and a foolishness to non-Jews. Does God have to recall His covenant with us, as it says in the first reading? Probably, rather, it is we who must constantly recall it. We do so every time we make the sign of the cross, the sign we first received in baptism. The cross is a wooden instrument of redemption, not entirely unlike the wooden instrument that was Noah’s ark. And above all, we recall our Covenant every time we attend Holy Mass and the crucifix soars above us, literally in our churches and vividly in our memories, Love poured out. And that cross, drawn upon our foreheads in baptism, will remind God of the Covenant, when we stand before Him at the end of all things.
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 