Meditation on This Sunday's Gospel

The readings for Sunday, February 18, 2024:

First Reading: Genesis 9:8-17

Psalm: Psalm 25:1-9 (Psalm 25:1-10 NRSV)

Second Reading: 1 Peter 3:18-22

Gospel: Mark 1:9-15

We begin Lent back in the country of baptism. Once again, we hear the story of the baptism of Christ. Didn't we just cover this material a few weeks ago?  Indeed we did.  What a versatile Gospel text, suitable for both the early days of the Epiphany season and the early days of Lent.  There's a lesson here for us.

In today’s Gospel, we see Christ going through the stages of the life of a Christian, in a sort of fast-forward filmstrip: baptism, wilderness/desert time of desolation and doubt, temptation, death of mentors, carrying on with life’s work anyway. Why should we, thousands of years later, think that life will be any different for us?

Most Lutherans were baptized as babies.  Like Jesus, we too are welcomed into a larger context before we've done anything.  We can't prove ourselves; we can't even feed ourselves.

But we don't get to stay in the land of grace and good feelings very long.  Even Jesus faces a wilderness time, the kind of time that those of us who have been alive any amount of time at all will remember.  We feel the presence of Satan, of everything that could possibly go wrong going even more deeply wrong.  Surrounded by wild beasts, we despair.  But if we can come out of the other side of a wilderness time, we'll find ourselves in the company of angels, who minister to us in our time of need.  Maybe those angels are members of our family.  Maybe they're our church community.  Maybe it's something more clinical, a doctor or a therapist.  Or maybe, in the dark night of our souls, Divine beings care for us.

But here, too, the Gospel offers both solace and warning.  We may find ourselves put to death by the ruling authorities, the way that John and Jesus were.  Or maybe it's a more metaphorical death--the larger culture has many ways of killing us, our physical bodies and our souls.

We can't say we haven't been warned, just like Jesus must have known the forces that he would put into motion.  Still, the world has need of us, and God has need of us, to do the work of ministering to the world.  The Gospel closes with Jesus moving forward.

There is an urgency to this Gospel, a pace that seems appropriate to these days just after Ash Wednesday has reminded us that we're not here for very long.  We have lingered too long in the land of self-loathing, in the dark night of the soul with Satan's voice hissing in our ears, in the wilderness where beasts want to rip us apart.  Our Lenten journey is at hand.  It is time to do the work of discerning what is truly important.