First Sunday of Lent, Year B
First Reading: Gn 9:8-15
Second Reading: 1 Pt 3:18-22
Gospel Reading: Mk 1:12-15
This Sunday’s readings show God’s use of water. First, he used it to “destroy all flesh.” However, by instructing Noah to build an ark, God used water to save him and his family, thus prefiguring baptism. Finally, God used a rainbow, formed by sunlight reflecting from drops of water in the air, to signify his covenant with Noah.
How can mere water bear this load of significance? The answer is that God likes material things. He delights in them. As the Book of Wisdom says, he loves all that is; he loathes nothing of the things he has made. In fact, he looked at each thing as it came to be and “saw that it was good.” Matter is not ambivalent or bad, as Hinduism and other major Eastern religions hold.
Moreover, God has taken up this world’s material elements into himself. By his Incarnation, or “enfleshment,” he took a material human body like ours and made it one with himself, so we have to say that Jesus is both God and man. His Resurrection and Ascension, which carried that material body to the heart of the Godhead, are the ultimate proof of the goodness of all material things.
Humans are body and soul, and it is this strange material-spiritual composite that God loves. Because he made us, he never forgets the sort of composite creatures we are, even if we do. Accordingly, he gives us the greatest of his spiritual gifts through material means. Our share in his divine life is spiritual beyond any human notion of spirituality, but it is given to us in the sacraments through concrete, material things like water, bread, and wine.
For example, baptism involves immersing a person in a pool or tank of water, though it is often reduced to pouring water over the person’s head. Consider what water symbolizes.
Universally, it symbolizes life, for every living thing needs water. In Noah’s case, it was water that lifted his ark and saved him. However, water also symbolizes death, because if we are totally immersed in it, we drown. In Noah’s case, God used water to purify the world of evildoers.
Immersion, then, symbolizes death, while coming up out of water is life. In baptism, our plunge into the water symbolizes our death to the world, the death of our old selves with Christ on the cross. Our rising from the water symbolizes our being raised to a new life in him through his resurrection.
Christ chose water to present to our senses what happens spiritually and supernaturally in baptism. Everything God has created can be said to symbolize his love for us, but the water of baptism is more than an ordinary symbol. We call it a sacramental symbol because, although it is material, it actually brings about, through the power of God, the spiritual realities it symbolizes.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says Jesus himself submitted to baptism, a rite intended for sinners, “as a manifestation of his self-emptying. “The Spirit who had hovered over the waters of the first creation” in the Book of Genesis descended on Christ “as a prelude of the new creation.” This event revealed Christ as the Messiah, for at this solemn moment, God the Father called Jesus his “beloved Son.”
After that, as we hear in the Gospel Reading, Jesus fasted and prayed in the wilderness for 40 days before starting to proclaim that “the time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near.”
Finally, by his passion, which he called a baptism, he opened “the fountain of baptism” to all humans, the Catechism says. The water and blood that flowed from his side on the cross are symbols “of baptism and the Eucharist, the sacraments of new life.” From now on, through baptism, we can be born again of water and the Spirit; through water, we can enter the Kingdom of God.
Father Hawkswell is again teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English with new insights, in both print and YouTube form, at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. He is also teaching the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. Next week’s topic is God’s Will. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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