Lent! We Catholics like Lent. We may not say so, 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 North Westerners 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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