We have begun our Lenten journey for 2024! Perhaps we could take as a theme for this First Sunday of Lent: From the rainbow to the Cross: Renewing our covenant with God.
If there is one thread that runs through the entire fabric of Sacred Scripture, it is that of COVENANT. The biblical notion of covenant entails much more than a mere legal contract with clearly spelled out rights and responsibilities. Covenant is profoundly and intimately relational in nature and implies the total and irrevocable commitment of the whole of oneself to another. Everything in salvation history is related to covenant – God calling us to relationship, human faithfulness and unfaithfulness, and the continual need to return to fidelity.
In today’s fuzzy moral landscape, it is quite unpopular even to speak of sin, let alone to try to condemn it. It would be even more politically incorrect to talk about God taking stern action against sin and those who promote it. But that is exactly what the story of Noah and the flood is all about. The Great Flood is a testament to God’s hatred for sin and his determination to wipe it from the face of the earth. He offers a way to escape the waters of destruction by instructing Noah to build an ark which carries Noah’s family and a pair of every animal to safety. With these, God provides the earth and the human race with a new beginning. As a sign of his covenant of friendship with the newly re-created world, he places a rainbow in the sky, a sign which in a sense joins heaven and earth. How unfortunate that this revered biblical symbol has taken on other connotations in our society today.
From the beginning, Christians have seen in this story a hint, a foreshadowing of a greater work of God that would come later. The first flood swept away the evil from the surface of the earth, but not from the hearts of the ark’s human passengers. So an even greater act of salvation was needed, one that was more radical, that penetrated to the very root of evil. God himself enters into our world in the form of a man named Jesus of Nazareth and engages in hand-to-hand combat with Satan.
First, Jesus himself is immersed in the waters of baptism, a sign of the destruction of sin, although he himself has no sin. Next, he goes into the wilderness to strike at sin’s patron. Jesus has to confront his own demons, his own temptations, his own “wild beasts” – just as we do – and he comes out of this wrestling match the winner.
However, Mark’s gospel is a gospel of few words and he does not note what Luke tells us in his gospel account of the same interaction, that Satan left Jesus to await another opportunity. That opportunity came later, brokered by Judas Iscariot and Pontius Pilate. On the cross, the sign of the new and eternal covenant between God and his people, the new rainbow which joins heaven and earth, Jesus decisively vanquished sin and its patron, letting loose from his own pierced side a stream that was infinitely more powerful than the ancient waters of the days of Noah.
Through faith and immersion in these mighty waters of baptism, sin can finally be scoured not just from the skin but from the heart. Baptism puts to death not people, but the old humanity, separated from God and infected with the disease of pride and disobedience. In today’s second reading Saint Peter draws on the Noah theme in pointing to baptismal water as the saving element of God’s new covenant. Peter tells us that we are saved by a baptismal bath that corresponds to Noah and his family being saved from the flood.
In today’s reading from Peter, we also hear something else that is noteworthy: there were eight people in Noah’s ark. Jesus rose on the day after the Sabbath, the “eighth day.” God created the world in six days, rested on the seventh, and performed the new creation of Christ’s resurrection on the eighth. The number eight carried over into the sacrament of baptism in the early Church when baptisteries were constructed with eight sides. This was done to emphasize the point that baptism means burying the old self with Christ and emerging from the womb of the Church as a new creation, sharing in Christ’s resurrection.
Lent is a time intimately linked with baptism. Since the earliest of times Lent has been the season when catechumens have prepared themselves by prayer and fasting for their paschal journey to the waters of baptism. The faithful prayed and fasted with them, accompanying them and encouraging them on this journey. Lent has also traditionally been the time when those who have soiled the white garments of their baptism through sin prepared for reconciliation in anticipation of Easter.
If we’re really honest with ourselves, all of us fall to some degree into this category. It is often difficult to keep a healthy balance between admitting our sinfulness and also recognizing our goodness. The key is that Christ loves us even though we are sinners. We are not loved because we are perfect, but we are forgiven because we are loved.
In the words of today’s psalm response, we must strive to be among those who keep God’s covenant if we wish to know God’s ways which are always love and truth.
So let us determine here and now, at the beginning of Lent 2024, through prayer, fasting, and works of charity, to intercede for the catechumens and candidates of the Church this year, especially the catechumens of our own parish, and at the same time, to scour compromise and any lukewarm spirit from our own hearts. Only in this way can we move from the rainbow to the cross, only in this way can we seek to renew our covenant with God, only in this way can we heed the words of our Lord and Savior as he exhorts us to “Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
With a brother’s love in the Lord and Mary Immaculate, Deacon Dave, O.F.S. T In Persona Christi Servi