First Sunday of Lent This has got to be one of the shortest texts for a Gospel in the whole liturgical calendar. It is just four verses and only seventy words altogether. Mark’s account of the Temptation in the Desert takes just two verses and is about as succinct as you can get. It is just the bare facts. The other Evangelists give much more detail describing the various temptations at length accompanied by complex dialogue between Jesus and the Devil.
But Mark has none of this; it is just the bare facts, as far as he is concerned Jesus was in the desert for forty days and was tempted by the Devil. He mentions also that he was with the wild animals and also was ministered to by angels and that is it –nothing more. Like Matthew and Luke though, Mark is clear that it was the Spirit that took Jesus into the desert to be tempted. The words Mark uses are very strong. He says, “The Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness.” Matthew and Luke say that he was merely led by the Spirit. The use of the word ‘drove’ is no accident; it reflects the great dynamism present in the Gospel of Mark who frequently has Jesus doing this or that ‘immediately’.
His use of vocabulary means that there is a feeling of constant movement in this Gospel which is much shorter and therefore much more action-packed than the others. The point here though is that God is in charge and it is he who is the catalyst behind the actions of Jesus. It is the Spirit of God that forces Jesus into the wilderness and so inaugurates his public ministry. Mark is not so concerned with the struggle between Jesus and the Devil as with the fact that he resisted temptation and then begins his ministry. In the last couple of verses Jesus goes into Galilee and announces that, “The time has come and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the Good News.”
I am sure I have told you this before but in Greek there are two words for time Chronos and Kairos. Chronos means time that passes; we use it in this sense when we say someone has a chronic illness, meaning that it is an illness going on for a long time. The word Kairos which Mark is using here means a favourable time or a decisive moment. So when Jesus says that the time has come he means that the propitious moment has arrived for the proclamation of the Gospel to begin. He means that everything is now ready and that this is the time chosen by God for him to begin his ministry.
It is at this appointed time that the Kingdom of God begins to break in to our world. Mark certainly manages to pack a lot into a very few words: forty days in the wilderness, the temptation, wild beasts and angels, the arrest of John the Baptist, the journey into Galilee, the proclamation of the Gospel and the formal announcement that the time has come for God’s definitive intervention into our world. We are left breathless and amazed that all this is packed in to just four short verses of the Gospel of Mark. In the First Reading we are told about how after Noah and his family were saved by the Ark God made a covenant with him and gave the sign of the rainbow to act as a reminder of it. Then in the Second Reading St Peter recalls the Ark and tells us how those events so long ago are a foretaste of our Baptism. What we need to understand from this sequence of scriptural readings is that God makes decisive interventions in our world. He sent the rain after forewarning Noah to build the Ark.
His Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted and so launched his public ministry. And it is God too who decisively intervenes in our lives through Baptism making us members of his body and washing us free from original sin. The message is clear, it is God who is in charge of the world and he makes his interventions in our world at moments of his own choosing when, according to him, the time is right; when the Kairos or the propitious moment has arrived. We need to realise that God has not done this just a few times and then left us to it. No God is constantly intervening in our world. Of course, some of these interventions are more decisive than others and some of them might only concern us, though some are clearly much more significant than that. We can easily think about God’s many interventions in our own lives: we can think of our birth into our particular family, our Baptism, the choice of school, job, partner in life, children and all sorts of things that many people might describe as coincidences but that we know are actually crucial parts of God’s plan for us. God’s Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness but he is also constantly driving us. God is the unseen force behind all that happens to us as we go through our lives.
We know that he respects our free will and he gives us the choice as to whether to cooperate with him or not; but, make no mistake about it, he is deeply involved in everything that happens to us, everything that goes on around us. When Jesus announced that the time had arrived for the proclamation of the Gospel and invited us to repent and believe the Good News he was not suggesting that this moment had arrived and the next moment it would be gone. No what Jesus was saying is that from then on would be the favourable time to repent and to believe.
That special moment is not some fleeting thirty seconds that occurred two thousand years ago; no, that moment carries on until the very last day. That favourable moment is now. There is no better time for repentance and accepting the Gospel than this moment now. Conversion is something that is always going to be a good thing and we should embrace it now, this very minute. The Kingdom of God is truly very close at hand; it needs to be grasped by us now. We need to embrace it with all our hearts so that our lives are truly transformed and his salvation is made wonderfully present in our lives.