Lent! We Catholics like Lent. We may not always admit it but we do. We
like the ashes of Ash Wednesday and we even like sacrifice and
self-denial. We don’t always do them so well, but we like the thought of
them! We like Lent. But Lent is more than ashes, sacrifice and
self-denial. In the early Church, Lent was about preparing for baptism.
It still is. And for those of us who are already baptized, Lent is the
ideal time for us to get in touch with the meaning of our baptism.
The readings today help us do just that. In
both the reading from Genesis and the reading from the First Letter of
Peter, Noah is center stage - Noah whose ark brought him, his family,
and all that great array of amazing creatures over the swirling waters
of death to a place of freedom and safety. Noah, with whom God made a
covenant of life and hope, signified by a great rainbow in the sky.
The Church didn’t give us those readings just
because the Noah story is a great story (although it is); no, we got the
Genesis reading because the Noah story prefigures the sacrament of
baptism, and we got the reading from the Letter of Peter because it uses
the Noah story to explain baptism. The waters of baptism are, like the
waters of the Great Flood, about death and about life - Christ’s death,
Christ’s life, and it is through the sacramental waters that we share in
Christ’s death and life.
I’ve always thought that we Pacific
Northwesterners have a head start on understanding baptism. We know a
lot about water. We have beautiful lakes, raging rivers and
majestic waterfalls. Green trees and the greenest of fields. And we have
rain! We have destructive floods, too, and landslides, and soggy days
and leaky roofs. We know from experience that water has two meanings:
water means death but it also means life. And that gives us a head-start
on understanding baptism.
In the gospel reading, it’s Jesus who speaks to
us of baptism. Well, almost. The gospel actually began right after the
baptism of Jesus. No sooner had he come up out of the waters, than the
Spirit sent him out into the desert where for forty days, he was put to
the test by Satan. I think of this time in the desert as Jesus’
preparation – his conditioning, if you will - for his second baptism,
the one he spoke of when he said, “There is a baptism with which I must
be baptized, and how great is my anguish until it is accomplished.” The
baptism Jesus was talking about there was, of course, his death, and his
long days in the desert wrestling with the power of evil could only have
steeled him for the great battle that awaited him on Calvary.
My friends, the Church wants us to think
of these things during Lent. The Church gives us six full weeks to think
long and hard about our baptism - and not just to think about it: to
wake up to our baptism, for the church knows that, viewed with the eyes
of faith, nothing more important has ever happened to us than our
baptism.
The Church also, as you know, focuses during
these grace-filled days of Lent on those who are preparing for baptism.
They are full of excitement and anticipation because their Lenten
journey will culminate when they walk into the baptismal pool at the
great Easter Vigil.
Baptism. Preparing for it or waking up to it -
that's what Lent is all about. We may more typically think of Lent in
terms of ashes and abstinence, of desserts denied or drinks declined,
and that's OK - in fact it's good - as long as those penitential
practices bring us in touch with our baptism. Think of them as the dying
part of baptism - the drowning waters, if you will, the death to sin and
selfishness.
Baptism! It is important to remember what we
heard in today’s gospel: the same Jesus who one minute found himself
basking in the baptismal glory of being God's beloved son, in another
minute found himself in the desert wrestling with the forces of evil,
struggling mightily against Satan's enticements to sin - insidious
temptations that could have seemed quite sensible at the time -
struggling mightily but never giving in.
That was Jesus' story. Is it our story? I
believe it is the story of each one of us - the story of every follower
of Christ. With this difference: all too often, we part company with
Jesus by forsaking the struggle and taking the easy way out. We would
like our baptism to be some sort of inoculation against sin and life’s
painful struggles. It isn’t, of course. Our baptism is a passport to
glory but it is no shortcut to glory. What baptism gives us is the
church: this community of believers to walk with us and support us on
our journey and, of course, it gives us the assurance of God's grace,
more powerful by far than even the most discouraging of human
weaknesses.
My friends, water does tell the story. Water
that drowns and destroys, water that cleanses, refreshes and gives life.
The story told by water is our story - the story of good mixed with
evil, of sin washed by grace, of failure and triumph, of life and death.
No, I should have said "death and life" because in this particular
story, no matter how it may seem to us now, in this particular story
it’s life - not death - that gets the last word!
Father Michael G. Ryan
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