First Sunday in Lent; 18 February 2024; Lent 1B (RCL); Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15.
We always hear the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness on the First Sunday in Lent. Mark’s account is the shortest and most cryptic. All we’re told is that the Spirit drove him into the wilderness, and he was there for 40 days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him. The forty days, of course, recalls the forty years that Israel wandered in the wilderness, but also Elijah’s journey to Horeb after his contest with the prophets of Ba’al (1 Kings 18-19).
Elijah fled into the wilderness and sat under a broom tree and prayed for death. He fell asleep, and an angel woke him, and he saw a cake and a jug of water, which the angel instructed him to consume. He fell asleep again, and again the angel awoke him and order him to eat. On the strength of that food, he journeyed 40 days to Mount Horeb, where he encountered God in the voice of sheer silence. The angels in Mark’s account strengthen the association.
But what of the wild beasts? In the ritual of the Great Day of Atonement, the scapegoat is driven out into the wilderness, to Azazel — or returned to the wild, it’s domestication undone. Is Mark here portraying Jesus as the scapegoat? Certainly, later Christian forensic understandings of the atonement make use of that idea, but err because the scapegoat doesn’t die. It is simply returned to the wild. If Jesus is the scapegoat, Mark gets it right — he is with the wild beasts in the wilderness, a sign of everything that threatens human community.
Presumably he overcomes the threat, because he returns to Galilee, proclaiming that the time has been fulfilled, and the new Empire of God has arrived. The contest in the wilderness allows him to embark on his tour of power, casting out demons and healing those suffering from illness, restoring them to the kingdom of God. That kingdom, of course, ends up looking very different from the one James and John expected when they asked to be seated at Jesus’ right and left hand, or that Peter expected allowing him to chide Jesus for his prediction of his passion and death.
That is why Jesus includes the directive to repent in his announcement of the new Empire of God. We have to rethink (the Greek verb means to change one’s mind, to relearn) what God is up to. To live in this new kingdom requires learning a different way of living under the old structures of power, not intimidated by them, victorious over them, even in the face of violent death.
Baptism makes us citizens of this new empire, and according to Paul, does in fact require (and accomplish) our death under the old regime of sin, but gives us victory over it. The passage we hear from 1 Peter may also suggest something similar. Commentators debate what the bit about Jesus preaching to the spirits in prison might mean. Some suggest that those disobedient spirits are the miscreant sons of heaven of Genesis 6:1-4, who misled humanity into wickedness which brought on the flood. Jesus’ proclamation to them, then, would have been his proclamation of victory over them. Baptism, then, achieves our victory over those same forces of evil, just as it rescued Noah’s family from the flood.
Others suggest that Jesus descended to the dead (or hell, as the Apostles’ Creed has it), and preached to those imprisoned there to free them from their prison. Either scenario suggests Jesus’ victory over the forces that imprison us. I suspect that is also the meaning of Peter’s phrase, “He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.” Flesh is the arena (postmodern scholars would call it the social imaginary) in which the current regime of powers holds sway, while Spirit is the social imaginary in which those things are vanquished.
Baptism begins our movement from one world to the other, one social imaginary to another, and Lent gives us the opportunity to practice living in the new one, by bringing the terrors of the current into sharper focus.