A Sermon for the First Sunday in Lent
Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15
Unlike the other Evangelists, Mark recounts Jesus’ baptism and his temptation as one story, not two. And he tells it in a single breath, forcing us to witness these experiences both-at-once as twinned movements in the unfolding of a single event. So, half-awed, half-horrified, we watch as Jesus is driven out into the wilderness with his clothes still sopping and the divine blessing still ringing in his ears. The temptation he undergoes is not described. He suffers it alone. We see him, but only in the distance. And we hear nothing. We’re told only that he is with the wild beasts, and that when it is finished angels minister to him.
Once we’ve caught our breath, we find that the details of Mark’s account, quick as they are, call up for us the defining moments of Israel’s past: the Exodus and the Wandering, obviously, but also the Conquest, the Kingdoms, and the Exile. Mark reveals that Jesus re-lives these experiences in such a way that they are revealed in their true light. In his baptism, Jesus does not pass through on dry ground as his fathers, Moses and Joshua, had done. He descends, instead, into the muddy depths, going down with Pharaoh and his armies, damned with the damned. Rising from the waters under the rent heavens, he does not exult or celebrate as his mother Miriam and the daughters of Israel celebrated. Instead, in solidarity with the Canaanites, he is driven out from the Promised Land into the wild wastes. Finally, in the throes of his conflict with the Enemy, he does what even David could not: he resists evil without violence, without bloodshed, and so truly defeats it.
In these and other ways, Mark’s Gospel shows us how Jesus enters into our existence so completely, so unconditionally that his reality and ours become forever mutually determinative. Thanks to that bond, which the Spirit creates, what happens to us happens in him, and what happens in him happens to us. As St. Athanasius said, the Word (becomingly!) became what we are so that we might become what he is. As we move through this Lenten season, then, we should remember not so much that we are mortal as that we share in God’s mortality—Christ’s death lives in us for sake of the life of the world (2 Cor. 4:7-12). And we should remember not that we are tempted but that our temptations take place with and within his. This is the teaching of the Fathers: he was baptized not to wash away his sins but to sanctify the waters; he was tempted not to prove his sinlessness but to hallow the wilderness.
The forty days, the water, the dove, the angels, the wild beasts, the judgment of God—these details draw our attention to the story of Noah, a story that takes us back behind the stories of Abraham, Moses, David, and Elijah, back to the beginning that made Israel’s election necessary. And this story, which Jesus re-enacts in his baptism/temptation, both plots for us the risks inherent in being God’s people and doing God’s work, and casts a vision of the life lived faithfully to the end, a life made possible by the love of the God who raises the dead but does not keep us from dying.
When Noah is first introduced (in Genesis 6), he is likened to Abel: he finds favor in God’s eyes because he is righteous, blameless, and faithful. After the flood, as soon as he steps from the ark, he builds an altar and his sacrifices are pleasing to God, as Abel’s had been. But then, abruptly, Noah is likened to Cain. Without explanation, he is said to be, exactly as Cain was, “a man of the soil.” And after he drinks some of the wine from his vineyard, he is left “uncovered” in his tent—naked and ashamed, like Adam after the fall. What are we to make of this sudden ruin? If Noah was righteous and blameless and faithful before the flood, and if after the flood the earth had been renewed, freed from the wicked and their wickedness, how does he fall into sin? How does anyone who for so long lived like Abel suddenly turn out to be like Cain? Especially in a new Eden?
We should not be surprised by how Noah’s story ends. But for whatever reason, the more we’ve talked about Scripture, the less we’ve bothered to read it. It seems that the more we’ve praised its virtues and insisted on its authority, the less we’ve given Scripture the careful, discerning attention it demands. As a result, we’ve convinced ourselves we know the sacred text much better than we actually do. And if we were honest, we’d have to admit that our knowledge is fragmentary, at best, and that our understanding, as a rule, is vanishingly thin. We’re familiar with the story of Noah’s ark, of course. But we do not know the arc of Noah’s story. And the same goes for more or less all the stories in Scripture.
The parable of the prodigal son, for example, is not a story of restoration and reconciliation. In spite of the way we read it, it does not end happily. In the end, the sons are even more estranged from each other and from their father than they were in the beginning. And this same sad pattern appears again and again in Scripture. Abraham spends the last years of his life estranged from all his children, including Isaac. Moses, after everything, is kept from entering the Promised Land. David dies in bitterness, his family in shambles, his nation at war, and his mouth filled with curses. Solomon asks for wisdom from God, and receives it; but it is this very wisdom that leads him to misery and despair. Elijah confronts the false prophets and calls fire down from heaven—only to find that it makes no difference at all to anyone. Even God’s own works seem not to matter, at least his works of judgment. He consumes Sodom and Gomorrah in the fires of judgment, but while the smoke still rises from the plain Lot’s daughters rape their father. He opens up the earth to swallow Korah and the others who rebelled, but the following morning the entire nation rebels against Moses and Aaron.
Why do we misread these stories so badly? Why can’t we follow their arcs to their ends? Ultimately, because we are committed to misreading Jesus’ story. We read his story so that it ends on Easter, not Good Friday. We insist on reading it this way, because we want his death to be felt as only a temporary interruption in the flow of his life. Whether we can admit it to ourselves or not, we want to speak of his death in ways that allow us to think optimistically about the future: “It’s Friday,” we say, “but Sunday’s coming.” So, this misreading of his story allows us to think we will survive our deaths as he survived his, and that the arc of history bends toward justice. But that is wishful thinking; it has less than nothing to do with the hope of the Gospel.
Not long ago, someone asked me what I thought Jesus was doing while he was dead. I knew what he expected me to say, of course. But the right answer is that Jesus wasn’t doing anything while he was dead. That’s what it means to say he died! What is not assumed is not healed. And that includes dying and being dead. So, it is good that Jesus did not merely seem to die. We confess it each week: he died; he was buried; he descended into hell. He did not survive his death. He did not go on with his saving work “in the spirit realm” while his body lay in the ground. He was, in the language of the Psalms, “forsaken among the dead” (Ps. 88:5). Scripture is clear: Jesus feared death—and not without reason. In the garden, he cried out “to the one who was able to save him from death” (Heb. 5:7). And he was heard! We know he was heard because he was not kept from dying but was kept in death—so he might be raised from the dead.
We need to face those facts. And we also need to face the even harder truth: Jesus’ life did not end happily. He died gracefully, to be sure. But he also died in agony, mostly forsaken by those he loved. And so far as anyone could see, he died a failure. Of course, we believe he rose from the dead on the third day! But we do not believe that he “came back to life.” His death was final, conclusive, definitive—as yours will be, and mine. Yes, as today’s epistle says, “he was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the Spirit.” But the making alive did not follow the putting to death as one damned thing follows another. When we speak of resurrection, we’re not speaking about “the next thing” that happened to Jesus after he died. Death and resurrection are not two points on the same timeline. No, when we speak of resurrection, we’re referring to something that happened to Jesus in his fulness. And that fulness necessarily includes the end of his life, the completion of his work. So, to confess that Christ has died and that Christ is risen is to confess that his entire life, including his dying and his being dead, has been taken up into God as the source, guide, and goal of all things. Raised from the dead, the entirety of his life, including his death, was revealed in its fullness as the life of God with us and for us. Theologically speaking, therefore, Sunday does not follow Friday: it fulfills it.
Jesus’ arc is different from Noah’s and Abraham’s and David’s and Solomon’s and Elijah’s not only because he remained faithful to the end, but also because he remained faithful to the end for their sake and ours. That is why his life is the ark, the only vessel in which Noah and Abraham and David and Solomon and Elijah—and everyone and everything else, besides—can be borne through death into God. Karl Rahner saw this clearly:
Jesus has accepted death. Therefore, this must be more than merely a descent into empty meaninglessness. He has accepted the state of being forsaken. Therefore, the overpowering sense of loneliness must still contain hidden within itself the promise of God’s blessed nearness. He has accepted total failure. Therefore, defeat can be a victory. He has accepted abandonment by God. Therefore, God is near even when we believe ourselves to have been abandoned by him. He has accepted all things. Therefore, all things are redeemed.
As St Paul says, nothing can separate me from the love of God only because God has already taken even the experience of separation as his own. He has descended to the depths, and claimed even the lowest rungs of hell for his own. “The death he died, he died … once for all” (Rom. 6:11). “One has died for all; therefore, all have died (2 Cor. 5:14).
I learned this song when I was a child: “Because he lives, I can face tomorrow; because he lives, all fear is gone.” But it is closer to the truth to say that I can face tomorrow because he died. Yes, he lives! But not in the sense that he survived his death. The crucifix does not lie: he did not escape death; he led captivity itself captive. And he did so precisely by accepting the finality of death, yielding up his life to God in such a way that death itself died and his death was made alive. Believe it or not, it is precisely in his death that he harrows hell. As with us, so with him: God’s strength is made perfect in weakness and God’s life is manifested in death. Jesus is worshipped as “more than a conqueror” because he triumphed in his defeat. Dead, capable of nothing, he accomplished everything. And is this not the truth of my baptism, the truth I pray I do not forget in my temptations? My life is his because his death is mine. I share God’s mortality. In his death I live and move and have my being. And because he died, once for all, life is worth the living—even if not all the fear is gone.
