Lectionary Commentaries for February 18, 2024
First Sunday in Lent (Year B)
from WorkingPreacher.org
Gospel
Commentary on Mark 1:9-15
David Schnasa Jacobsen
First Reading
Commentary on Genesis 9:8-17
Song-Mi Suzie Park
Genesis 9:8–17 describes how God, in the aftermath of the flood, blesses and makes a covenant—an agreement—with Noah, the one individual (and his family) who, for mysterious and unstated reasons, manages to survive the divine onslaught. In describing God’s offer of a new covenant, this episode functions as a tying up of—a conclusion to—the flood narrative. As such, this narrative depicts God reconciling and making up with the world, which God, mysteriously, tried to destroy wholesale in the preceding chapters.
Viewed in this light, this account raises questions about reconciliation and forgiveness. What do real reconciliation and forgiveness look like? Are there acts that are unforgivable or so horrible that reconciliation and forgiveness are impossible? Moreover, what might appropriate recompense entail? God, in this story, has nearly killed everything and everyone in the world. Is God’s promise to refrain from such a destructive activity in the future—at least using water (verse 11)—enough, or should God do or promise more?
Indeed, considering that God leaves out plenty of other ways to destroy—that is, any other means besides water—and also needs a physical reminder (the bow in verse 16), it is unclear whether God has learned anything or changed much as a result of the flood. Should you forgive someone who is unreformed and unapologetic—who refuses to take accountability for their action?
The problematic portrayal of God opens up space to discuss and think about issues of theodicy and the unfairness of the universe in general—one in which people, whether good or bad, are victimized or rescued at random. After all, though Genesis 6:9 states that Noah was righteous and good, there is no clear explanation as to why Noah, above everyone else (babies, animals, and plants, for example), was so good that he was saved while others died. How do we live responsibly in such an unfair world, one in which the difference between Noah and those killed in the flood is determined by whim and the luck of birth?
This problematic portrayal also intersects with questions about power and suffering. How do you make someone who has tremendous power behave ethically if they choose not to? And what should the world do when they refuse to behave appropriately? God appears to attempt to check Godself in Genesis 9 with the covenant and the sign. However, who will make sure God abides by this agreement, and what happens if God decides to use another means (not the flood) to destroy the world?
Indeed, though God never again tries to destroy the entire world in the Bible, God does allow God’s chosen group, the Israelites, to undergo tremendous suffering. God even allows their exile from their homeland. Should this count as reformation or improvement on the part of God?
In the case of the flood, the question about unchecked power overlaps easily with concerns about environmental degradation. The flood, according to the biblical text, insofar as it leads to the deaths of nearly all the animals and, though unmentioned, plant life, can be considered an environmental disaster. What happens when powerful forces—be it God as in the story here or companies and political leaders in the modern world—use their power to wreak havoc on the environment and, by extension, people’s lives? What do we do with autocratic and powerful forces that use their power to destroy places and cause suffering?
Finally, the problematic portrayal of God, which continues in the aftermath of the flood, also presents an opportunity to talk about issues of anger and trauma. God, in sending the flood, can be said to have an uncontrollable anger problem. Moreover, Noah’s muteness and that of his family, both throughout the flood and in its aftermath when God offers a covenant, look like someone gripped by terror and unprocessed trauma—someone who has just witnessed and barely survived an act of violence, rage, and destruction.
Indeed, considering that God just annihilated the entire world, do Noah and his family have any other option but to accept God’s covenant and gestures of reconciliation in the flood’s aftermath? Can they refuse and risk enraging this deity again?
Adding to the terror, the rainbow God uses as a reminder to refrain from similar destructive tendencies in the future can be interpreted as a threatening gesture, not as a peaceful, placating one. Bows, after all, are usually viewed as weapons. If so, the scene of God’s reconciliation and covenant might not be as nice as we might initially think or want to believe. Rather, this gesture can be read as one of silent threat and unmitigated terror.
As such, the story of the flood and its aftermath leads easily to discussions about acts of anger and violence, especially domestic abuse and gun violence, and the repercussions of such acts, such as trauma, silence, and terror.
Psalm
Commentary on Psalm 25:1-10
Matthew Stith
The first seven verses of Psalm 25 are, at the broadest level, a prayer for help.1 The psalmist calls upon God for relief from some sort of trouble involving unspecified “enemies” (verse 2). As such, the prayer is far from unique—this is one of the more common types of text found in the Psalter. The challenge for the preacher is to identify and highlight some of the distinctive features of this particular cry for help and consider how they might inform and enrich the lives of the congregation, especially when the members find themselves in a position to call for God’s aid.
The psalmist asks that God might “not let me be put to shame” (verse 2), that the “enemies might not exult over me” (verse 2), and that the enemies might “be ashamed” (verse 3). With no specific information about the identity or agenda of these enemies, there is little more to be said about the particulars of the psalmist’s situation.
As the prayer continues, additional requests—or perhaps clarifications of the original request—are added. God is asked to instruct (verses 4–5), to be merciful and forgive (verses 6–7), and to remember (verse 7). There are a number of potentially fruitful points of connection available here, and the preacher may choose to emphasize any of the elements of the prayer that seem congruent with the situation of the congregation. One such approach to the text could proceed along the following lines.
The psalmist’s prayer, like all the prayers of God’s people, is relational. When we pray for help, we are not merely summoning God to perform a service. Instead, we are placing our trust and hope in the relationship that exists between the Lord and us as his people.
As in all relationships, the relationship on which prayer is founded includes a role for both parties. In the case of the psalmist’s prayer for help, the role of God as the one who is to provide the help is obviously primary, but the role of the psalmist is also clearly defined: twice the psalmist claims to be one who waits for the Lord.
This waiting is not, and cannot be, simply a passive state of doing nothing until God takes care of everything. Instead, it might be compared to the state of an athlete waiting to catch a ball.
Such an athlete doesn’t just sit on the turf with closed eyes until the ball arrives. Instead, the player is attentively watching the ball and the deployment of the other players on the field and constantly adjusting position and stance, drawing on years of training and experience, all so that at the very instant that the awaited ball arrives, the athlete will be ready to explode into motion, making the very best possible use of the awaited opportunity.
Waiting for the Lord to manifest his power ought certainly to command as much careful preparation and attention, as much ordering of potential reactions, as fielding a ball. When the psalmist speaks of waiting on the Lord, it is a matter of preparing and being ready to act when the time of God’s deliverance comes. The element of preparation, according to the psalm, involves learning of the Lord’s ways and truth, under the instruction God gives. For the church, this is a clear invitation to the study of Scripture as a necessary adjunct to the life of prayer.
Waiting, in this context, is also different from merely hoping. There’s a big difference between saying “I’m waiting for my ride to pick me up” and saying “I hope my ride picks me up.” It is the difference between confidence and anxiety.
The difference between waiting for the Lord to answer prayer and merely hoping that the Lord will answer is of the same nature. It assumes confidence that God’s intervention on behalf of his people, while not entirely predictable in its timing, is inevitable. The classic cry of the psalmist is not “Are you there at all, Lord?” but “How long, O Lord?”
We are, of course, also very interested in knowing what sort of divine help the psalmist is asking (and waiting) for. As noted above, the language of the prayer notes several aspects of the desired divine action, each of which offers an avenue for interpretation and connection.
Perhaps the most interesting of these is the call for God to “remember” in verse 7. This divine remembering is not a matter of the Lord suddenly recalling that the psalmist exists, as if the fact has been forgotten. God’s remembering is more a calling to mind, a directing of the divine attention. The prayer of Psalm 25 asks God to call to mind not the psalmist’s imperfections and transgressions, but rather the psalmist as known only to God, the psalmist as claimed and loved in the primal moment of election as one of God’s people—one whose underlying relationship with God is sacred and unbreakable.
Connections here to the thief on the cross pleading with Jesus to remember (Luke 23:42) and to Noah adrift on the waters of the flood until God remembers (Genesis 8:1) may be fruitful. According to the psalm, God’s remembering is sufficiently powerful and effective to include forgiveness, rescue, and victory over the schemes of the enemy. Such remembering is well worth the wait.
Verses 8–10, if included by the preacher in the text for the service, represent a sort of coda or afterword to the prayer, asserting that God is indeed the sort of God who does the things the psalmist asks for. The prayer, however, stands on its own as a viable lesson in any congregational context.
Notes
- Commentary first published on this site on July 10, 2022.
Second Reading
Commentary on 1 Peter 3:18-22
Jeehei Park
On this First Sunday in Lent, we are invited to reflect upon water. The first reading takes us to the story of God’s covenant with Noah; the gospel reading recounts the baptism of Jesus in Mark; and this reading from 1 Peter may be read as a commentary on both. First Peter is addressed to “the exiles of the Dispersion in Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” (1:1). The author, being aware of the “fiery ordeal” that is taking place among the audience (4:12), writes this letter to provide pastoral guidance. It is unknown what kind of suffering the recipients of this letter are going through, but apparently, they are treated as outsiders (2:11).
The author comforts and encourages the audience in several ways. First, the author affirms their identity as God’s people. They are chosen ones: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (2:9), through Christ. Also, the readers are urged to live in a certain manner as God’s people, which, interestingly, includes conforming to social norms.
Today’s lesson is a part of the section where the author discusses Christian duties (2:11–3:22), and some teachings here are indisputably troubling. Slaves are asked to submit themselves to the authority of their masters (2:18–25) and wives to the authority of their husbands (3:1–6). They need to endure pain even when provoked by injustice (2:19). These might express the author’s hope that such conformity would keep the readers from graver perils.
The author also provides theological reasoning. Christ’s suffering makes Christians’ suffering meaningful because “Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps” (2:21). Suffering can even be a blessing when one suffers for doing what is right (3:14a).
The reading for today closes the section on Christian duties, and the emphasis on Christ’s suffering continues. The message that Christ suffered for sins is repeated. Yet it is noteworthy that this time, the author adds “once for all” (3:18; hapax in Greek, literally meaning “once” in a numeric sense). With this addition, the author makes it clear that Christ’s passion is not something imitable; the author is not asking the readers to accept their suffering simply as a way of emulating Christ. Instead, due to its distinctiveness, Christ’s suffering can be an encouragement for each and every Christian undergoing any kind of suffering. A brief description of Christ’s death and resurrection in verses 18–19 adds to the uniqueness of Christ’s suffering.
In verse 19, we see an early development of the doctrine regarding Christ’s descent to the dead. The author writes that in the interim between his death and resurrection, Christ “went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison.” This is restated in 4:6: “The gospel was proclaimed even to the dead.” The identity and location of the dead are unclear, as well as why it matters to the author and the audience (or doesn’t) that the good news is proclaimed to the dead. We see that the Apostles’ Creed contains a line in which such an interim activity of Christ is succinctly stated: “He descended to the dead.”
Noah’s story is recalled because those who disobeyed and died in the days of Noah are “the spirits in prison.” The author’s interpretation of this story is interesting for two reasons. First, the focus is on God’s salvation, not on God’s judgment—“a few, that is, eight persons, were saved,” and second, those eight were saved through water, not from water. Water has saving power as it saved those eight righteous from the unrighteous.
The author expands on the saving power of water: baptism “saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Christ” (3:21). How does baptism save? It allows believers to participate in the resurrection of Christ. This author explicitly associates baptism with salvation and resurrection, and this understanding of baptism is not commonly found in the New Testament.
We can compare this with Paul’s view on baptism found in Romans 6:1–11. He notes that when we were baptized, we were baptized into the death of Christ, and just as Christ was raised from the dead, “we might walk in the newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Paul may give the nod to the idea that baptism can save. But for Paul, baptism is not yet directly joined to Christ’s resurrection because the coming of Christ is still pending. For the author of 1 Peter, by contrast, baptism actualizes our participation in the resurrection of Christ, and therefore, baptism saves. Water actually has saving power as it saves Christians from the unrighteous.
It is also interesting that the author does not necessarily equate cleansing with saving; baptism saves us “not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience.” Baptism leads us to hold a good conscience. In 1 Peter, a clear or good conscience indicates the overall disposition of a believer, and this usage is found in the Pastoral Epistles (see 1 Timothy 1:5–6, 18–19). A good conscience characterizes a Christian way of living because it helps us discern that “it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil” (1 Peter 3:17).
This reading from 1 Peter gives us three inspirations on this first Sunday of our journey to the cross. First, we are invited to reflect on Christ’s suffering, especially its distinctiveness highlighted by hapax in verse 18. The uniqueness of Christ’s suffering is what empowers Christians to endure their own suffering, rather than justifying it. Second, we can reflect on the abundant meanings of water. Water can cleanse, water can save, and water can sustain. Third, baptism is a reminder for Christians to lead a life of good conscience, choosing to do good even if it may bring suffering.
Last week for Transfiguration Sunday we started by placing three key Markan texts side by side to understand what Mark’s narrative was aiming for overall: an apocalyptic vision of the gospel. We now turn to the first of those three texts, the baptism of Jesus in Mark 1:9–15, to understand how Mark aims to begin his Gospel in close relation to Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, a central text in the lectionary for this First Sunday of Lent. In doing so, we’ll understand Jesus’ temptation as the first skirmish of his vocation and a harbinger of the apocalyptic battle to come.
Temptation in an apocalyptic frame
We begin by noting the structure of Mark 1:9–15. The pericope for Lent 1 encapsulates in succession three quickly moving scenes at the beginning of Mark’s story of Jesus: Jesus’ baptism by John (1:9–11), Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness (1:12–13), and the beginning of Jesus’ ministry in Galilee (1:14–15).
Lent 1 typically focuses on a narrative of the temptation of Jesus, and in Years A and C there’s a lot to work with. Both the Lukan and the Matthean narratives are extended treatments of Jesus’ temptation, with ample Satanic dialogues to boot. Mark’s temptation is rather meager by comparison. It comprises essentially two verses. Once again, Mark’s brevity is revealed.
But another thing that is revealed in this six-verse pericope is the apocalyptic urgency of Mark’s writing and the way Mark situates the temptation in relation to Jesus’ baptism and ministry. Preachers need to consider that the uniqueness of Mark’s vision doesn’t come through dialogical sophistication (as in Matthew 4:1–11 and Luke 4:1–13 in years A and C respectively), but through its urgency and its apocalyptic framing in Jesus’ baptism and inaugural preaching.
A ripped, cosmic baptism
Once again, the general urgency of the text comes through Mark’s favorite word: “immediately” (euthus). In 1:10, Mark uses it when Jesus comes up out of the water (the New Revised Standard Version renders it as “just”). Mark wants to drive home the point: this event of the gospel in Jesus (1:1) is a world-shattering one. This is corroborated as well by the apocalyptic framing of the baptism itself.
By using a well-chosen participle, Mark describes the heavens as “ripped open” (schizomenous). The opening of the heavens is a recurring apocalyptic motif. Mark’s use of the word this way, however, is also reminiscent of the proto-apocalyptic desires of Third Isaiah, whose prophecy in 64:2 gives voice to the longing for an act of God that breaks through and accomplishes the justice so longed for:
O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
so that the mountains would quake at your presence—
as when fire kindles brushwood
and the fire causes water to boil—
to make your name known to your adversaries,
so that the nations might tremble at your presence!
Biblical scholar and preacher Brian Blount puts it well. In his sermon “On the Loose,” Blount aims to describe the unhinged scene of Jesus’ apocalyptic baptism and what it means:
Clouds tearing. Heavens ripping. Divine voice booming. Spirit descending. This is terrible, untamed tiger talk. It is the language of slashing and slicing, shredding and clawing until something once locked up on that safe and seldom seen heavenly side over there knifes its way free to this historical, human side we’re standing on over here.1
Jesus’ baptism in Mark is being portrayed as an act of apocalyptic cosmic disruption. And we’re just getting started!
Temptation as a struggle
By the time we get to the temptation proper (Mark 1:11–12), this cosmic apocalyptic frame has been set. Again, Mark aims for apocalyptic urgency. His word “immediately” (euthus) now describes the Spirit’s work in driving Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted. Mark puts it in a wild way: the Spirit “casts out” Jesus into the wilderness (this exorcistic-sounding word is ekballei in Greek).
Jesus’ temptation is not some theological conversation with the devil. Instead, it is a forty-day, life-or-death, Spirit-authorized struggle in a place of vulnerability. Wild animals show up. Angels wait upon him. The temptation in Mark is not words, but an apocalyptic struggle that Jesus survives.
Announcing the gospel of God as God’s reign
Yet out of that test and struggle instigated by the Spirit, Jesus finally comes forth to preach in Galilee. The funny thing is that the gospel he preaches is the gospel of God (1:14). Just 13 verses earlier, Mark was insisting that the gospel was Jesus Christ (Mark 1:1). But here, having now come through his Spirit-driven test by Satan, Jesus points not to himself but announces God’s ultimate purposes: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (New Revised Standard Version).
The apocalyptic battle with Satan has begun. Round 1 goes to Jesus in the wilderness. Now Jesus can announce what lies ahead: the inauguration of God’s purposes in the coming reign. Let the healings, the liberations from bondage to evil, the announcements of forgiveness, and the calls to transformation begin. It’s on.
Disrupting Lent with Mark’s Jesus
I think this Markan apocalyptic vision of the temptation of Jesus disrupts our meager Lenten practice, at least in the mainline, white churches I have both pastored and frequented. The Markan temptation is not just leading us from a chocolate to a temporary non-chocolate existence for seven weeks. It calls us, rather, to envision a kind of holy disruption grounded in the longing for God to set things right, just like Third Isaiah said centuries before.
As a post-Covid church, it may be tempting to minimize transformation, at least until we learn to manage hybrid worship and get the numbers in the pews back up again. But Mark’s Jesus won’t have it. He comes with the gospel of God, points away from himself, trusting that the longing for God to break through the heavens means both change for us and change with us.
I’ve taken a shine to the way God’s people keep playing with Martin Luther King Jr.’s paraphrase of Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”2 This expression is built on the notion that God has already built the principle of transformative justice in the created order. True enough, I suppose.
But the variation on that quote that has also broken forth of late changes the intransitive “bends” to the transitive “bend,” as in, our task is to “bend the arc.” Go figure. In those “breaking in” moments described in today’s lection, perhaps even “God’s work” is becoming “our hands.” Welcome to Lent! It’s on, church.
Notes