Ash Wednesday – Joel 2.1-2, 12-17; 2 Corinthians 5.20b – 6.10; John 8.1-11
A day of repentance. The priest traces the cross in ashes upon our foreheads, and reminds us of our own mortality, calling us to repent of our sins. It is a rather solemn day, ushering in a rather solemn Lenten season. We are called to think of the cross, to be sorry for sin, to worship in bare churches and sing hymns in minor keys. All this is to be true to a large part of human life, a part which prefers darkness to light, which is turned in on ourselves and turned away from God.
And life has been ever thus. So the prophet Joel, speaking centuries before Christ, calls the people to repent of the evil in their lives. ‘Rend your hearts, not your garments’, he calls. The trouble with repentance is that it can become automatic. We can receive the ashen cross and then go on as before. In Joel’s day rending clothing was a sign of sorrow for sin, but all too often it was an outward and visible sign with no inner significance. God looks for repentance of the heart (rend your hearts) not an outward show which will not last 5 minutes after we leave the church.
The Corinthians reading repays much careful thought and study. But at its heart is the call to live differently. To live by the Gospel requires a complete re-orientation of our lives. Lives should change, not remain the same. Read again what Paul writes and how he describes his own way of life. Notice the words that begin the description of his way of life – as servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way (v4) To live as servants of God – how many of us consciously do that!
The Gospel reading from John is both comforting and challenging. It brings comfort in the sense that the woman who had sinned badly (as had the man she was with who is strangely absent!) is not condemned, even by Jesus who is indeed ‘without sin’. But it is challenging also. It is not enough for the woman to go off as if nothing had happened. Now she is commanded ‘to sin no more’ – in other words to change radically. Again and again we might resolve to sin no more, but find ourselves slipping back to our old ways of life. Lent is a long time – it gives us a chance to so discipline our lives that we actually change. And to repent means to change – and to change for the better.
Lent 1 – Day 1
Genesis 9.8-17
The story of the ark is familiar to everyone and is still often to be found in books for children. But in fact it is of course an adult story. It can be frightening, portraying a vision of a God who is prepared to annihilate every living thing in a great flood. But this is to miss the point, or maybe the two points, of the story. First of all it says that human sin is hugely significant. It causes God to regret creating humans and leads him into an action of which he later repents. Sin is not something we can easily dismiss and say ‘It doesn’t matter.’ The story tells us it matters hugely.
But it is also a story of hope. Despite the awfulness of human sin, God promises not to go into destruction mode. The rainbow becomes a vivid symbol of this promise. Indeed it is more than just a promise; it is a covenant – so important a Biblical word – and covenants made by God last forever. So while we must face up to how terrible human sin really is, in fact God promises to give us hope even in the face of evil. That hope, of course, is founded in God’s love and in Jesus.
Why do we ever say ‘Sin doesn’t matter’? A small lie can have terrible consequences; the selfishness of adult parents can ruin a child and cause problems throughout that person’s life; a small act of weakness – a couple of drinks too many before driving – can kill. But we continue to make excuses, as if only sins like murder are really important. Anyone who looks at the cross should be able to see there the true nature of human sin.
We might note also that this story can have an environmental explanation. The covenant God makes is not just with humanity, but also with the birds and animals. Human sin can result in terrible floods – global warming, the destruction of the rain forests, the melting of the ice caps – all caused through our selfishness and disregard for the wonder of all that God has created.
So a story we probably learnt in childhood has so much to ponder as we go into Lent.
Lent 1 – Day 2
1 Peter 3.18-22
This is one of those passages which might at first reading make little sense. Many in church, hearing this read on Sunday, will wonder what on earth they are to make of it. It is indeed a passage over which scholars may debate, and the learned reach different conclusions about its meaning.
Which does not mean we ignore it. Peter is obviously talking about Baptism. He expects Baptism to make a difference, for the person to be baptised to begin a new life, a life probably symbolised in Baptism at this time by the person baptised donning a fresh white gown, showing their newly acquired purity. But this is not just a symbolic washing in water and a mental note to try and do better! Peter tells us how Christ suffered in order to bring us to God. He suffered ‘the righteous for the unrighteous’ unleashing the power of innocent suffering. This suffering of Christ is so powerful it even brings hope to those long dead, the spirits in prison, such as those whose evil in the days of Noah caused the flood to envelope the world. But it is no wonder it is so powerful. For having suffered the cross, Jesus has ‘gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities and powers made subject to him.’ What a wonderful vision here of the sheer glory of the resurrection.
So Baptism brings hope of freedom from sin, or as Peter calls it ‘an appeal to God for a good conscience.’ But this comes as God’s gift, a gift given us not by a smiling benevolent God but by a suffering but triumphant Jesus. Baptism is of such power and authority that we only get baptised once in our lives – however weak our discipleship, God does not need to re-do what he has done with such power in the waters of Baptism. But no wonder we need constantly to be reminded of how important it is to be baptised into Christ. We might begin by remembering (or finding out) the date of our own baptism and keeping it year by year as a special day of thanksgiving and celebration
Lent 1 – Day 3
Mark 1.9-15
Mark does not have the detailed description of Jesus’ time in the wilderness and of his temptations that we know from Matthew and Luke – and which we probably expect to be the Gospel reading for the first Sunday in Lent. But this does not mean at all that for Mark it is unimportant. Mark begins with Jesus emerging from Nazareth where he has been all his life since the birth stories (and of course Mark does not record Jesus’ birth, so Jesus suddenly bursts onto the scene without preamble.) He immediately goes to be baptised, and the Holy Spirit, no less, descends on him like a dove. The voice from heaven proclaims him ‘You are my Son, my Beloved.’ This is indeed dramatic stuff, full of heady excitement. So what is Jesus to do now he has so suddenly emerged from obscurity, been anointed by the Spirit and proclaimed by the voice of God himself? We might expect a great burst of divine energy, rushing round preaching and healing. Instead something else happens. The Spirit drives Jesus into the wilderness, literally throws him there. And there for 40 days, a very considerable period, he does battle with Satan. This is a battle so dramatic that wild beasts share his company and angels are his attendants. How dramatic and important this battle is, will be the subject of the whole Gospel. Jesus may have stood firm against Satan, but again and again we see evil welling up against Jesus, so that the loving Saviour ends up dying alone on the cross, crying ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ the only word in Mark that Jesus utters from the cross.
A foretaste of this evil comes immediately – John is taken from his valuable ministry and cast into prison, from which we will later find he never emerges. Even so there is a note of triumph in Jesus’ first words – ‘The time is fulfilled’! What a wonderful message this is. For centuries the people have looked for the Saviour to come, prophets have prophesied, the oppressed have looked for freedom, the holy for redemption, – and now is the time! The demand is given starkly -repent! This struggle with evil involves all of us, and the humblest follower must put away evil, repent and change. But this is not to be a burden which God lays on his people – it is Good News from a loving Father.
Lent 1 – Day 4, Sunday
The wilderness is a most demanding place. The sun beats down relentlessly in the day, and there is little water or shade. And it can be a very cold place indeed during the night. The wilderness into which Jesus withdrew for 40 days and nights was a wilderness of rock, barren hills on which nothing could grow, upon which nothing could be built. In this wilderness Jesus faced temptation and overcame it.
There are of course many sorts of wilderness. Many people face a spiritual wilderness in their hearts and souls. We can try to ignore this sort of wilderness under the banner of ‘Eat, Drink and be Merry,’ or we can try and pacify it by ‘spiritual’ exercises, sitting with candles, relaxing music and pleasing aromas. But it remains there and we need to enter it, as Jesus did. Maybe this could be a task for us all in Lent, to enter our internal wilderness.
And what will we find there? Without doubt we shall find temptation, just as Jesus did. If asked what tempts us most, people tend to answer ‘Chocolate, alcohol, food.’ In fact the biggest temptation is to try and push God away. Jesus was tempted to push God away by making food appear by miracle, by courting popularity by throwing himself off the temple and surviving, by exercising power over the kingdoms of the world. All these things, you remember, were backed up by quotes from Scripture to make them all the more believable. It took prayer, courage and determination for Jesus to reject these and to embrace so fully the way of love. So we enter our wilderness and watch out for the temptation to push God to one side. Being over busy, saying ‘I always put my family first’, persuading ourselves we don’t have time or energy for prayer and bible – these are common ways we push God away. Lent is a time for facing this temptation more honestly.
Mark, unlike Matthew and Luke, does not describe the temptations Jesus underwent. But he shows how deeply they were felt and how difficult they were in his verse ‘Jesus was with the wild beasts’. What beasts accompany us in Lent? The beasts of selfishness, laziness, self-indulgence, lust – all stalk the wildernesses we can choose to enter. But how blessed are those who overcome in the name of Christ!
Lent 1 – Day 5 - Covenant (Genesis 9.15)
In the OT God makes a covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, with Jacob and most importantly with the Jewish people through Moses. A covenant is a solemn agreement between two parties. The word ‘testament’ is another word for covenant, so in Scripture we have the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.
The Old Covenant was based round the idea of the people keeping God’s laws. The law was given to Moses and written down in the first five books of the Bible so all could read and all could obey. The trouble was – and still is – that people do not find it in them to keep their side of this agreement. The laws are broken, the covenant rendered useless. Look at the 10 commandments – how many are broken every day – all of them. How many have you broken in the past week – almost all of them! It is almost, as Paul saw clearly, better not to know the law because when we know it we can be made aware of how often we break it.
But the law is not an intolerable yoke laid upon us by a malevolent God, but his gift in love. The more we accept this gift the more we learn about and experience the wonder of God. See what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5.17-20.
So God was faithful but the people were not. What was to be done? Jeremiah was among those who began to see that a New Covenant would be made, this time with the law written on people’s hearts. (Jeremiah 31,31) A very similar hope occurs in Ezekiel 36.24-29. The prophets began to sense that God was to do something.
What God did, of course, was to send Jesus. Through his cross and resurrection a New Covenant was made. The agreement now between us is that God will remain faithful to us, and we should trust him and have faith in Jesus. Having faith is very different from obeying impossible laws. Sometimes our faith and trust will be stronger than at other times, but always we can reach out in hope to God. Now we do not so often break the Covenant, though the New Law – love God and your neighbour – still stretches us and challenges us.
Jesus said,’ This is my blood of the New Covenant’. Every time we receive Communion God gives us Jesus and we simply need to receive in faith to renew the New Covenant with our Father.
Lent 1 – Day 6‘ - And Baptism – which this prefigured – saves you’ 1 Peter 3.21
Some of those who study the Bible believe that 1Peter was written as a sermon at a Baptism. Whether this is correct or not, there is much in this letter that teaches us about that sacrament. Baptism has become a rather disputed and controversial area – should we baptise everyone who asks for it, what do we do about those who make promises they show no sign of keeping and so on. All this will be familiar to anyone in a parish. And because so many Christians are baptised as a tiny baby, our baptism can mean little to us when we get older. But here is Peter saying that baptism has saved us – so it must be worth a bit more thought!
In the passage set for the first Sunday of Lent, baptism is put in the context of Jesus’ suffering (1 Peter 3.18) and his resurrection (1 Peter 3.21). St Paul tells us that when we are baptised, we are baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the events of Good Friday and Easter, Jesus wins a great victory over the forces of sin and evil, as well as the forces of death. The Good News, the Gospel, is that this victory is shared with us. It is shared with us through the waters of Baptism. When someone is baptised by going under the water – total immersion – as in a river or a baptism tank, we can see how this is vividly symbolised. The person goes under the water – dies with Christ – and comes up out cleansed and renewed – rises with Christ.
Of course this does not make baptism a sort of magic, a rite which we undergo to make everything in life ok. There is a human as well as a divine side to baptism – God will be faithful but we also have to receive with thanks and live out our faith with joy. But God does do something amazing in the water of this sacrament, he gives us all that Jesus won for us on the cross.
And so Peter is able to talk about being saved by baptism. What are we saved from? We are saved from being dead eternally, we are saved from being cut off from God by our sin, we are saved from evil being the last word for humanity. Now we can live with God’s new life, we can find a closeness to God as our perfect Father in Heaven, and the last word for humanity will be the love of God himself. No wonder Peter writes with such passion! Lent began originally as a preparation for baptism. We can use it now as a thanksgiving for our baptism and for the salvation it brings.
Lent 1 – Day 5 - ‘And Baptism – which this prefigured – saves you’ 1 Peter 3.21
Some of those who study the Bible believe that 1Peter was written as a sermon at a Baptism. Whether this is correct or not, there is much in this letter that teaches us about that sacrament. Baptism has become a rather disputed and controversial area – should we baptise everyone who asks for it, what do we do about those who make promises they show no sign of keeping and so on. All this will be familiar to anyone in a parish. And because so many Christians are baptised as a tiny baby, our baptism can mean little to us when we get older. But here is Peter saying that baptism has saved us – so it must be worth a bit more thought!
In the passage set for the first Sunday of Lent, baptism is put in the context of Jesus’ suffering (1 Peter 3.18) and his resurrection (1 Peter 3.21). St Paul tells us that when we are baptised, we are baptised into the death and resurrection of Jesus. In the events of Good Friday and Easter, Jesus wins a great victory over the forces of sin and evil, as well as the forces of death. The Good News, the Gospel, is that this victory is shared with us. It is shared with us through the waters of Baptism. When someone is baptised by going under the water – total immersion – as in a river or a baptism tank, we can see how this is vividly symbolised. The person goes under the water – dies with Christ – and comes up out cleansed and renewed – rises with Christ.
Of course this does not make baptism a sort of magic, a rite which we undergo to make everything in life ok. There is a human as well as a divine side to baptism – God will be faithful but we also have to receive with thanks and live out our faith with joy. But God does do something amazing in the water of this sacrament, he gives us all that Jesus won for us on the cross.
And so Peter is able to talk about being saved by baptism. What are we saved from? We are saved from being dead eternally, we are saved from being cut off from God by our sin, we are saved from evil being the last word for humanity. Now we can live with God’s new life, we can find a closeness to God as our perfect Father in Heaven, and the last word for humanity will be the love of God himself. No wonder Peter writes with such passion! Lent began originally as a preparation for baptism. We can use it now as a thanksgiving for our baptism and for the salvation it brings.
Lent 1 – Day 7 ‘At that time Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee…’ Mark 1.9
This is the first appearance of Jesus in Mark’s Gospel. He has not written any stories about Jesus’ birth, as Matthew and Luke did, nor has he had any sort of introductory prologue to his Gospel, as John provided. Instead Jesus suddenly appears. By this time he was 30 years old, obviously not an old man but not a youth either. What of his first 30 years?
We would not be the first to ask such a question. Some early writings about Jesus in fact filled in this remarkably blank period of Jesus’ life with miraculous stories about his childhood. In these, for example, Jesus would make a clay model of a bird which would then come to life and fly away. Not surprisingly these stories have never thought to have any value. But it does seem remarkable that the divine Son of God lived for 30 years without leaving any mark on history.
Another way of looking at this is to say that Jesus was not the Son of God until his baptism. Then he was adopted by the Father who at this moment bestowed upon him divine power. But this is to contradict so much else about Jesus (including making nonsense of the birth stories and of John’s prologue) so that such a view must be rejected.
So what was Jesus doing in Nazareth? The only possible answer is that the Son of God was content to live in obscurity, sharing our life in poverty. More than that, we can say that this sharing of our human existence was an important part of what it is was God to be born among us. We would love to know more about Jesus’ childhood, about Mary’s influence upon him as mother, and about what happened to Joseph. But it is enough to know that the most mundane moments of human existence were shared by Jesus and given value and worth because the Son of God was content to share them.
So when we next think our lives are of no importance; that our day to day existence can have no worth in the eyes of God; that perhaps what we do cannot matter in God’s mind; then it is good to think that Jesus shared the humdrum of day to day human life and gave it importance simply by sharing it. Yet all the while he was without sin, for he was no less Son of God as a growing lad in Nazareth as he was as a man preaching and healing.
