Each week, we look at one of the lectionary passages for the upcoming Sunday. This week for the first Sunday of Lent, we're going to look at the Gospel Passage: Mark 1:9-15.
In my mind, Lent is this slow and quiet time of reflection. It's the liturgical equivalent of a Seven Swans-era Sufjan Stevens song: emotional nakedness backed by a plaintively plucking banjo. After all, this is a forty day buildup to Easter. It's a marathon and not a sprint.
Then I read this passage and I get whiplash. Seven verses. Three major events: Jesus' baptism, his temptation in the wilderness, and the beginning of his ministry. Each is something on which we could reflect and discuss by itself. But the lectionary crams all of these together.
Our guide through the gospels this year is Mark and Mark does not do slow and reflective. Mark's favorite word is "immediately" (it appears twice in just this passage). There is an urgency to the entire story. It hurtles forward pregnant with purpose and momentum. Future weeks may adjust my view, but Mark's Lent is the liturgical equivalent of an Arcade Fire song: frenetic, an equal mixture of world-weariness and hope.
I read these passages and I have to hold together these seemingly disparate threads. We start with the joy of Jesus' baptism. He hears that he is the Beloved and that he brings God great pleasure.
And then he is immediately driven into the wilderness to be tested, to feel hunger, and to feel God's absence. He goes from hearing God's voice to being thrust into a place where he likely could have wondered if he was making the whole thing up.
Then he comes out of the wilderness. Things are not much better. John has been arrested. Yet Jesus preaches and it is a message of hope: "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe the good news."
It makes my head spin, but I feel like those are the elements that we often have to hold together as we follow Jesus. Though there is an ebb and flow to the elements, we constantly feel the joy of our salvation, the wrestling in the wilderness, and the hope of God's salvation. It is our past, our present, and our future all here, but somehow not quite yet.
In this passage, we see Jesus running through the peaks, valleys, and plains that make up our lives. In Lent and in life, we will experience these moments. We hold them together in tension. We will rejoice in God's love, we will struggle with feeling lost, we will sing, we will repent, we will point towards the kingdom of God.
I believe that most of us experience an internal tug-of-war between the past and the future. In The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’ titular demon supervisor advises his underling Wormwood that one of best ways to keep a human from doing good is to keep them ping-ponging between those two times that are not the present. One keeps trying to recapture or reach towards moments that are mist. It can keep a person from doing something.
The quote above resonates with me because it harnesses the past and unfinished future into a catalyst that animates our present. We remember the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus because it means something today and compels us to presently work for the Good that is already here, but also not yet. We remember the hope and pain of the past to do something that help us take some sort of step each and every day. We realize that the hope which exists within the gospel story is not yet fully realized. Many people are still being left behind and forgotten. The realization, as the theologian Metz states, puts pressure and questions on the present.