Lent – the story begins (Mark 1:9-15)
Today’s life is lived at speed – we expect things to happen quickly: next day delivery, quickfire comedy shows, no need for prolonged concentration on anything. The Reduced Shakespeare Company performs all Shakespeare’s 37 plays in just over two and a half hours. That’s less than three minutes per play.
So they might have this as their plot:
The scene is medieval Italy, and our story concerns two families who are sworn enemies. One has a son, the other a daughter, who meet, fall in love and are married in secret. The Priest hopes this will reconcile the families, but they continue to feud. Her cousin kills his best friend, he kills her cousin, and the long arm of the law exiles him to another town.
Meanwhile, her father doesn’t know she’s married, and arranges a marriage for her. Now she’s desperate, and visits the priest, who promises to fix everything.
On the eve of her second wedding she takes poison and falls down dead. Her disconsolate family have a funeral instead of a wedding. Fortunately the guests are already invited and the food’s all arranged. She is placed at rest in the family vault, but she’s not really dead.
The priest sends the son in exile a message explaining everything. ‘She’ll be right as rain in day or two’. The message goes astray, and when he hears of her death, the young husband arrives in haste, goes to the tomb, takes poison and dies beside her. She wakes and finding him dead, stabs herself. Now they’re both dead.
In their shared grief the families are reconciled.
I expect you recognise Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare tells it much better, but he takes two and a half hours. Rushing doesn’t usually improve a story, does it?
As we read Mark’s gospel, he comes across like the Reduced Shakespeare Company – he’s a man in a hurry, inspired and excited by the story he has to tell, and rushing at it at breakneck speed. He knows the ending, he can see the climax of Passion Week ahead and he’s headed towards it like a runaway train. Everything is focused on getting the reader to Easter Sunday as soon as possible.
This, then, is a story reduced to bare essentials, with anything superficial stripped away. Everything we read is important, because everything else is omitted. In this passage, there are just three short episodes: Jesus is baptised, goes into the desert for forty days and is tested, then returns to Galilee to preach the good news.
The first episode is baptism. Nowadays baptism is a rite of passage, joining the church of Christ, turning away from our sin and turning towards Christ, to live a life following him. John the Baptist preached a baptism of repentance, a cleansing and a new and godly beginning. We might wonder why Jesus chose to be baptised. He was fully human, yet a man without sin; he was fully divine, and therefore without any need to commit himself to God. It appears to be a pointless act, to repent of sin which has never been committed, to commit to a godly life which could hardly have been in question.
The Greek word for repentance means a change of mind or a change of heart. In the baptism service, we speak of turning (I turn to Christ, I reject the devil), and when we turn it is away from something, and towards something else. Away from sin, towards God. For Jesus too this was a rite of passage, a turning towards his destiny. He was aiming himself, like an arrow, towards the cross, and beyond it to Easter Sunday. This marked the beginning of his mission, and if we doubt this, look who turned up at his baptism. At the baptism of Jesus, God spoke and the Holy Spirit descended, yet Jesus remained firmly at the centre of proceedings. They’re all in this together – it must be something very important.
So this was the time for Jesus to turn and set out purposefully towards Easter Sunday. Strangely, his first move is not towards Jerusalem, the scene of the Passion, but out into the wilderness, the barren place which Jewish history tells us is the place where we meet God. First, however, we fall into temptation, so it is no surprise that Jesus meets Satan, the master of temptation, in this wilderness. Jesus’s forty days here mirror Israel’s forty years in the desert – where they constantly fell into temptation and failed, but after a difficult journey still reached the promised land. Unlike them, Jesus sets out to the fulfilment of God’s promises without falling prey to temptation. His aim is the defeat of Satan, and in this preliminary skirmish he brushes him aside.
This time of temptation also mirrors our lives. When we stray into life’s wilderness, falling on barren times and struggling to resist the temptations surrounding us, we know that Christ himself was not without temptation, and can identify with us in our human frailty.
In the third episode, Jesus sets out on that journey to Easter Sunday; John the Baptist’s imprisonment reminds him that suffering lies along the way – the only way to Easter Sunday is via Good Friday. His journey involves preaching the good news, announcing that the Kingdom of God is near. Jesus holds out to humanity the promise of entering the kingdom, of taking part in the everlasting life of the coming age. A promise held out, waiting to be seized; not imposed, but offered, obtained by turning to Christ, and still on offer should we refuse, as many did on that first journey to Easter Sunday.
Now, nearly two thousand years later, we set out on our own journey to Easter Sunday, through the forty days of Lent. Lent, which is taken from the Anglo-Saxon Lengten, which meant Spring, the time of lengthening days and new beginnings. So as we journey through these forty days, let’s do what Mark did, and what Jesus did. Let us turn and focus upon the goal which lies at the end of Lent, and set our faces towards Easter Sunday, knowing that Good Friday lies along the way.
To help capture that excitement, why not set aside an hour – I think that will be enough – to read through Mark’s gospel and feel his excitement as he looks forward to Easter Sunday, through the gateway of Good Friday.
March 2009
