Sunday 5th March 2006 Lent 1
Fr David Cherry
Genesis 9: 8 – 17; I Peter 3: 18 – 22; Mark 1: 9 – 15
Those closing words of today’s gospel:
“The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand:
repent ye, and believe the gospel”
+ In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
How good are you at conflict? Don’t you always want
to win? People talk about compromise, but I’m not
that good at it. Are you? I came away from drinks
one night rather shocked at the way I had taken on someone in defence
of traditional liturgy. It had developed into a furious row
and I found myself texting apologies the next day – some said
it had been fun; others that we had all behaved rather badly.
God is unlike other gods who punish and retaliate in anger. This is a God of love, and a God of love only.
It’s hard to lose – to lose out to
another. There are those terrifying words attributed to
Archbishop Robert Runcie: “at the heart of every
living church, is a dying priest.” I take it to
mean: someone who is willing to lose out to others.
Rivalry and having to win is written into the fibre of our beings and
described in four mythological accounts Genesis.
1. In the myth of Adam and Eve,
there’s a description of humanity’s envy of God
– the disordered to desire to be ‘as
God’;
2. the foundation of human society in
violence - fratricide - in Cain and Abel;
3. the attempt to achieve human unity in
the tower of Babel.
4. Today’s first lesson is from
the myth of Noah’s flood. Some scholars see in it a
Jewish editing of the many pagan stories of the flood. Out of the
violence a new society is born. And the second lesson from 1
Peter is relating Noah’s Flood to the death we are baptised
into at baptism and the rebirth into the new society of the
Church. Noah’s flood can also be read as a Jewish
myth about the Exodus from slavery through the waters of the Red Sea to
the Promised Land.
We will hear a fuller version of the flood in the Easter Vigil on
Easter eve. The story begins with a God who is really
indignant and retaliatory – he punishes all those filthy
sinners, saving only eight humans and an assortment of
creatures. By the end – today’s lesson
– we have a God who has repented of his anger and entering
into an everlasting Covenant with his people and all Creation.
There is a movement from a God of vengeance and violence to a God of
love who promises never to forget his covenant, his binding
oath. But the change is not in God – it is in the
writers. Something new has dawned on the Jewish editors which
they project onto God : the writers have come to understand that their
God is unlike other gods who punish and retaliate in anger.
This is a God of love, and a God of love only.
In a quote I put in the newsletter, Fr Timothy Radcliffe writes:
“We must get rid of the God who opposes our freedom, and
keeps us trapped in infantile submission. So many people's lives have
been crucified by worship of this alien idol. We must discover the God
who is the source of freedom bubbling up in the very core of our being,
and granting us existence in every moment.”
For you and I to come to this realisation is to come into a different
landscape, a longed-for promised land. To allow this truth to become
the climate of our lives, the atmosphere in which we live and function
is to live no longer by ducking and diving the wrath of God.
For that is life according to the old order. And this is what
Satan, the old Accuser, wants for us.
In the wilderness Satan tempts Jesus. With these ancient
myths of human violence and rivalry in our minds, we can begin to see
what Jesus is being tempted to do: to live by retaliation and violence;
to engage in the conflict of having to win at any price. But
Jesus has been baptised into the culture of his Father, a culture where
he is able to lose out to others in order to win us back by
love. Angels ministered to him; and on the cross he could
have called down legions of angels to assert his will, to win, and does
not. The cross is the ultimate baptism – undergoing
death, giving up power over others, to put an end to Satan’s
culture of inevitable conflict and violence.
Our repentance in Lent is an invitation to turn around and inhabit a
different climate, a different atmosphere: God’s climate of
love instead of inevitable conflict. The roots go
deep. We have learnt it from childhood. Perhaps we
were born with it. It is infectious at any rate and we learn it from
each other – that determination to win. It is
played out every night on the news and Football Wives and Eastenders
and Desperate Housewives.
Last night on television, Desmond Tutu hosted the meeting of two people
from the Northern Ireland troubles. When the man who had shot the
woman’s brother asked if she could forgive him, she
replied: I ask for forgiveness for myself as well.
God is greater than us. He will forgive us - a glimmer, to
me, of an altogether different climate, the culture of God’s
love.
As we journey through Lent and into Holy Week we see in Jesus one who
rejects the temptations to power and having to win; who really does
believe in who he is called to be: God’s Son, the
Father’s Beloved on whom his favour rests. He lives
who he really is: from God who is the source of freedom bubbling up in
the very core of his being, and granting him existence in every moment.
As we thought on Ash Wednesday, repentance is a joyful thing: the
departure from what leads to death, this insistence that we are right
which diminishes us for the freedom of becoming who we are created to
be. In the liturgies we say sorry: this is not who I want to
be, make me more.
We will sing at the offertory in the Lenten Prose: ‘Hear us O
Lord, have mercy upon us for we have sinned against thee’
– repeatedly – not to twist God’s arm,
not to change his mind, but because our hearts need to crack open, to
be broken so as to receive love. And we sing it to a loving
Father who will save us from being caught by the taunts of our enemy,
the conflicts we too easily get into; and we sing to a Father who wants
to save us from our worst selves.
May our prayer for mercy come from hearts being set free from sin by
the gift of repentance, as we hear our Saviour’s words
announcing the kingdom to his Church this Lent: “The time is
fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe
the gospel”
I’d like to end with the prayer on the mass paper by
Kierkegaard:
You have loved us first, help us never to forget that you are love so
that this sure conviction might triumph in our hearts over the
seduction of the world, over the inquietude of the soul, over the
anxiety for the future, over the fright of the past, over the distress
of the moment. But grant also that this conviction might
discipline our soul so that our heart might remain faithful and sincere
in the love which we bear to all whom you have commanded us to love as
we love ourselves.
Soren Kierkegaard, The Prayers of Kierkegaard,
University of Chicago Press, 1956