Throughout the Lenten season, we will post reflections for holy days and Sundays from this year’s Lenten reflection booklet, A Fast That Matters, written by Frida Berrigan, and excerpts from past booklets, like the one posted below, written by M. Shawn Copeland in 2003. Click here to see all reflections as they are posted as well as links to other Lenten resources on our Lent 2024 webpage.
If you are looking for a daily reflection booklet specially curated for Lent, you can still purchase and download this year’s e-booklet, A Fast That Matters: Reflections for Lent 2024. Click here to order and download now.
REFLECTION FOR Sunday, February 18, 2024
by M. Shawn Copeland, PhD.
from the 2003 Lenten reflection guide, “To live the passion and compassion of Jesus”
Genesis 9:8-15 | 1 Peter 3:18-22 | Mark 1:12-15
The lectionary reading for the first Sunday of Lent always refers to the time Jesus spent in the wilderness. Over time, Christians have come to associate the Lenten season with wilderness and, in many parts of the world, the weather conditions reinforce this symbolism. Winter snow and ice scour the trees, their bark and branches become brittle, the sap barely stirs. Everything about winter’s slow release suggests the not-yet, impatience, yearning. Author Parker Palmer gets it right when he says, “Before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck.”*
Unlike the writers of the gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Markan writer gives little narrative space to Jesus’ wilderness experience. Jesus seeks and accepts baptism from the prophet John, thereby acknowledging the Baptist’s moral and spiritual authority and the attractiveness of his example. The Markan writer tells us that as Jesus came out of the waters of the Jordan, he received a sign that confirmed his identity – God’s beloved child. Then, perhaps before he can fully grasp the significance of who he is, Jesus is drawn into the bleak and dangerous wilderness. He remains there for 40 days and undergoes some test or trial. Finally Jesus emerges. The wilderness has served as the conditions for a kind of rebirth. Jesus knows who he is, whose he is, and the mission God has entrusted to him. Centered in and on his God, he preaches what he has gained in prayer, fasting and struggle – the realm of God is the realization of compassionate solidarity; the realm of God is now; the time is fulfilled.
Good and gracious God, help us to allow this Lenten observance to work in us as a season of rebirth. Like Jesus, may we come to the knowledge of who and whose we are; and, like him, may we be conformed to your desires for us so that your realm may grow in us and among us to your glory and honor.
*Quotation from Parker J Palmer, Let your life speak: Listening for the voice of vocation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 103.
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M. Shawn Copeland, PhD. is professor emerita of systematic theology at Boston College and has written extensively on theological anthropology, political theology, and African American Catholicism. In 2018, she became the first African American theologian honored with the prestigious John Courtney Murray Award, the Catholic Theological Society of America’s highest honor.
Just curious why you did not consider that the wilderness might not have been such a bleak and dark place for a radical at this time.
Does the text say it was a barren landscape? Does it say Jesus was completely out of his element? Isn’t it possible John and Jesus and at least their closest followers were more comfortable in the countryside than we modern folks can imagine? Isn’t that, especially true when you consider that all the forests of Palestine had not been cut down by Rome and would not be cut down by Rome until after the rebellions decades later?
I imagine the people of jesus’ time were more comfortable in the desert than we, modern city dwellers, are.
I am certain of that. But why do we keep insisting it was a desert? The eastern coast of the Mediterranean was heavily forested. That was the resource the Greeks and Romans wanted from the area. And they took it. and built fleets of ships with it. Josephus describes the deforestation. Notes from Senators make it clear that Palestine will compensate Rome for the costs of being subdued through timber for ships. There were forests. Jesus almost certainly went to a forest to retreat with God. Why is that so hard for us – modern city dwellers or not – to get our minds around? How does that change our sense of what Jesus experienced? Of how we talk about retreat and renewal?