This Year Liturgical Cycle uses the Gospel of Mark as the Gospel Reading. One thing we can observe when we are reading the Gospel of Mark is that the writer is a masterpiece of understatement. Such a literary tech-nique allows readers, especially us, to activate our imagination. We don’t want to be told or shown every-thing. The imagination fills in the blanks and supplies the scenes when the paragraph ends and the visual fades. Reading and viewing are never meant to be passive activities or spectator sports. We are meant to be drawn into the process of storytelling.
The Season of Lent is an excellent time to activate our imagination, our religious imagination in particular. This is a crucial practice in our Spiritual Journey and Discipline. We are often told and shown, by religious and secular trend-setters, more than we want or need to see and know. We are too often oversold on the need for penance, sacrifice, and self-denial. High pressure salesmanship from preachers and writers leaves us all unsatisfied. Preachers feel ineffective because there are few “instant conversions.” The people sitting on the pews feel a bit angry that so much is being expected and so little help seems available. The American philos-opher George Santayana once said that when we lose sight of the goal, we double the effort. It is easy to lose sight of Lenten goals as we gear up for another season of strained and sour faces. Doubling the efforts of muscular Christianity leaves us tired and still searching for more. Consider the powerful simplicity of Marks Gospel:
And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him. (Mark 1:12-13).
There is no mention of what these temptations are. The interplay between wild beasts and angels allows us to do our own reflection and imagining. The wilderness is to be refilled by each one of us.
Each one of us as faithful followers of Christ face the wilderness with our own temptations and wild beasts. That is the first Christian Community at the beginning of Lent asked the question, “What kind of life without Christ in it?” Lent is a time of sobering reflection-on sins, on the death and decay of a world gone wrong, and on the hopeless condition we would be in without the intervention of God in Christ.
Lent is a time of transition, when we turn our eyes away from fading disappointments and toward the brilliant promises of God. We are invited to witness and experience death and resurrection, decay versus growth and life, frailty and weakness becoming strength, temptation and the power to overcome it, temporality versus eternity, the old genesis and the new creation, our helplessness and god’s provision, our gaults under his forgiveness and mercy, and humanity’s rebellion of pride versus Jesus’ victory of humility. In many cases, thee are more than a difference in perspective; they are issues we wrestle with every day.
This season is a special time on the calendar more than a ritual. It’s time to experience the wisdom and mercies of God.
This is the story that needs to be told.
Pastor Gideon
