1st Sunday of Lent B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2018

Immediately before the Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness, we had Mark’s account of the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist. This had concluded with the momentous pronouncement of the voice from heaven, You are my son, the beloved; my favour rests on you. We are not surprised – we have heard it before. But it is worth pausing a moment and pondering. That the voice came from heaven gives us the clue that it was God who was speaking. In Matthew’s Gospel, God spoke to the by-standers. What they heard was, This is my son, the beloved; my favour rests on him. But Mark had God speaking to Jesus, You are my son, the beloved; my favour rests on you. This was a message for Jesus. Why did God say this to Jesus? Did Jesus not know already that he was the son of God? If he did, why tell him?

We believe that Jesus was both divine and human – fully human, fully divine. We know what it is like to be human. We have no idea what it is like to be divine, no idea what it is like to be both divine and human at the same time. Sometimes, in our minds, we make Jesus a sort of mixture of divine and human, often at the expense of his humanness. The Epistle to the Hebrews said of Jesus that he was like us in all things, except sin. Like us in everything – growing in wisdom [as Luke’s gospel put it], as well as in age and grace. If he was like us, there must have been lots of things Jesus did not know. He could well have noticed that he seemed to be different in many ways from his contemporaries, but perhaps had never thought that there was much, much more to him, that the differences between them were profound, mysterious. The voice from Heaven may have astounded him. He needed time; he needed a lifetime to come to terms with it.

Immediately he felt impelled by the Spirit to go into the wilderness – not so much by choice, but driven [as Mark said] – and there he was tempted. The Epistle to the Hebrews said of Jesus that he was tempted in every way that we are – not to “Mickey Mouse” sins, but more likely to the really deep ones like loss of faith in a God of love, loss of hope in people, bitterness and unforgiveness, conformity rather than conversion. Mark said Jesus was there for forty days, an echo of the forty years the Hebrew people spent in the Sinai wilderness, where they were tempted – but also where they came to know God and to be formed as a people with a purpose. Mark also said that he was with the wild beasts. It sounds like some of the visions contained the Book of Revelation. In the apocalyptic literature of the time, wild beasts usually referred to the various foreign kingdoms that threatened the survival and integrity of the Jewish people. Mark may have been referring to the powerfully attractive, tempting, values of kingdoms or societies in general – consumerism, prestige, power. Do we ever think of Jesus tempted, as you and I are, to sacrifice mission and integrity for the sake of comfort, popularity and influence?

The Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse was something we did not choose, but found ourselves driven into. Might it have been the Spirit ultimately who drove us there? The Report has been presented, and the future lies before us. My fear is that we may be tempted to hope that it all dies down, that the rest of society over time forget about it, that we be able to get back to business as usual. My hope is that angels come and minister to us, calling us to deep conversion, particularly that they help us to recognize and to respond creatively, even enthusiastically, to the challenge confronting us in the clerical, patriarchal culture that quietly lay behind so much of why and what we so tragically did and failed to do.