First reading Genesis 9:8-15
Responsorial Psalm Psalm 24(25):4-6,7b-9
Second reading 1 Peter 3:18-22
Gospel Mark 1:12-15
When I was a boy, I remember, much to my mother’s dismay, playing in the garden and pretending to be a knight, chopping up some of her best plants with a stick. When the battle was won, my Mum was left with a trail of flowers hanging from their stems, with branches and leaves littering the ground. Thankfully, after cleaning up the garden and pruning the plants, the flowers would eventually grow back.
Unfortunately for us, however, when sin was first brought into the garden of Paradise, things weren’t able to just grow back to the way they were before. The trail of destruction left behind by the human being’s rejection of God could not be remedied so easily. For man, the garden became the desert; the place where he once walked with God became the place where the demons roam. And this is where we find ourselves with today’s Gospel. We heard that after his baptism, The Holy Spirit “drove” Jesus out into the desert to be tempted by Satan. Now, this is an important detail. Mark’s Gospel says that Jesus was “driven” or “casted out” into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit. There’s a certain violence to it and it has the sense of “banishment”. In fact, the Greek verb used here is the same word (ἐκβάλλω) used to depict Jesus “casting out” demons. Why does St Mark describe the event in this way, while St Matthew and St Luke put it much more gently, saying that the Holy Spirit “led” him into the desert? (see Matt 4:1; Lk 4:1).
Well, St Mark is making an important connection for us. In the book of Genesis, after sin comes into the world, we’re told that the Lord “drove out the man” from the Garden of Eden (Gen 3:24). We also recall that, in the garden, a river flowed out to water the garden (Gen 2:10). St Mark narrates that Jesus, who was baptised in the river Jordan, was then “driven out” into the desert where He spent forty days with the wild beasts, being tempted by Satan. These are also important details. We must remember, Genesis says that before He made woman, God made all the beasts of the field for Adam. In his original solitude, Adam dwelt among the wild beasts. So here Jesus comes as a kind of new Adam, a new man who enters our desert wasteland of alienation from God, the result of our sins, and goes through all that we and the first Adam go through, but He does not sin.
On the contrary, Jesus shows us that the desert, in which the dark powers roam, can once again become the garden in which God and human beings abide together. How so? What does He do next? He preaches a very specific message: “The Kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent and believe the Good News.” Repent! Believe! These are the two imperatives here. To live a life of repentance means a radical change of heart, to turn away from ourselves, to free our minds from the ideologies of this world, and to completely reorient our lives towards God.
To believe, that is, to put our faith in the Good News, means not just the acceptance of an idea, like we believe that two plus two equals four. To have faith is to hang one’s life on the reality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is a work of complete entrustment of ourselves to the Good News, such that our lives are transformed by it.
And this is something we must remember: The Gospel of Jesus that calls us to repentance and faith is Good News! Lent is indeed a time of austerity and penitence, but it is not sad or negative! When you read the various Gospel accounts of people being called by Jesus from their lives of sin, they are strikingly joyful. They find real happiness and freedom in ditching their old way of life and turning to Him wholeheartedly. In God alone do we find real rest. Let us not be fooled by the initial difficulty and pinch of penitence. It can be uncomfortable and even painful to break with our attachments. But when done with love for God, even the pinch is pervaded with joy.
Now, the final thing about transforming a desert into a garden, is that it takes a flood to do so. St Paul in our second reading today says that the Great Flood which wiped out all the wickedness of the earth was a type or foreshadowing of the Sacrament of Baptism, by which the Lord floods our souls with his Grace. Faith and repentance are necessary, but they can affect nothing without God’s Grace. This is why, more than just brute effort, we need the Sacraments. The Sacraments are the only means through which we can be sure of God’s Grace; they are the ordinary means by which Jesus touches us directly and personally, bestowing his own divine life upon us.
Dear brothers and sisters, during this Lenten season, which is truly a wonderful season, let us be generous. Generous in our commitment to repentance through prayer, fasting and almsgiving; generous in our commitment to the Sacraments through which we may obtain the flood of Grace for our souls, and generous in our commitment to the Lord, who asks us to break with our attachments and reorient ourselves to Him alone.