The Greatest Story Ever Told
Sermon at Parish Mass Lent 1 2021
The Threefold Temptation of Christ at the St. Wolfgang Altarpiece of the Catholic parish- and pilgrimage church St. Wolfgang im Salzkammergut, Upper Austria. Michael Pacher, 1471–79. (Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Day, 21/2/21)
Here are a couple of possibly familiar stories, reimagined.
"With a last glance back at his comfortable home, Frodo shouldered his pack and set his foot resolutely to the road. He knew what he had to do. He had to go down to the shops and buy some buns for his tea. The end."
"Luke Skywalker had long
been troubled by rumours of his unknown ancestry. At last, after years of his
quest through ancient scrolls in distant lands, he had the answer. His
great-grandfather had indeed been a piano tuner in Shoreditch. The end."
Somehow, I don’t think the stories of Frodo Baggins or Luke Skywalker would have taken off if they had been so lacking in high purpose and noble deeds, adventure and peril. The stories that stick in our minds are those where we can feel the excitement, share in the suspense, the thrills, the fear, where we can rejoice at the hero winning through in the end against all odds.
Five hundred years ago, this year, a knight called Iñigo had his leg shattered by a cannonball whilst defending the citadel of Pamplona, in Spain. Now Iñigo was addicted to romantic novels, I don’t mean Mills and Boon, but stories of high adventure, knights in shining armour performing heroic feats on quests against impossible odds. But he was taken to recuperate at a castle whose only reading matter was rather pious lives of Christ and the saints.
So, he read those. But he read them in the same way as he did his favourite novels, as adventure stories full of high hopes and daring deeds. This sparked his imagination, and he began to see the Christian life in the same way. He envisaged Christians as knights risking all in the service of a great King, whose purpose was nothing less than to save the world.
Iñigo became known to history as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and a spiritual guide whose new imagination of Christian life transformed spirituality in the West. If we read the scriptures, not as dry academic texts, but as stories into which we can imagine ourselves, stories of excitement and high adventure, then we read them with fresh eyes and receive new insights.
One of Ignatius’ great insights was about how God calls people in the scriptures. Very often God’s call to someone begins with great affirmation and assurance that they are indeed beloved children of God, called by God for some special purpose, that nothing and nobody can take that identity away. Ignatius called this “consolation”.
But then, afterwards, there comes a time of testing, of darkness and doubt and wrestling with fears and foes, when those called by God have to hold firm to their original purpose, and persevere in their struggle. This can lead to a state of getting caught up in ourselves and losing sight of our purpose, a state that Ignatius called “desolation”.
Perseverance, however, brings a person through desolation to a reaffirmation of their vocation, or even its discovery for the first time. Ignatius wrote his classic work, the Spiritual Exercises, around these principles, the movement of the soul to find its true vocation. Discover who you truly are, and what you are truly meant to do, in a time of consolation, then hold firm to your purpose through times of desolation.
It is the pattern, too, for heroes in the great stories, people like Frodo and Luke Skywalker. And it is a similar pattern that we see in today’s Gospel reading, in the greatest vocation of all, that of Jesus.
At his baptism Jesus’s identity is revealed: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased”. Here is the Messiah, the one who will save the world, the fulfilment of the hopes and prophecies of old. Consolation. But immediately the Spirit drives him into the wilderness to be tested, to fast and pray and do battle with the power of the devil, who wants to draw him into desolation. Both are parts of the same movement of the Spirit. That’s very clear in Mark, the Spirit comes down at his baptism, the Spirit drives him into the wilderness, it’s the same movement. And, then, his purpose reaffirmed, as he comes to Galilee and proclaims the good news of God, calling on people to repent and believe.
Read as a story, Mark’s Gospel is dynamic and compelling. It is a story into which we can imagine ourselves. Indeed, when Jesus is baptised we are baptised in him. What he is revealed to be by nature, we become by grace, through the sacrament of baptism. Adopted in him, our identity becomes that of God’s beloved Son, with whom he is well pleased.
His story becomes our story. We can read it as an adventure, with high purpose and daring deeds. Jesus’s vocation becomes our vocation. We are knights enlisted in the army of a great King, whose purpose is to save the world. We are the people who know and keep alive the secret of the Kingdom of God – a secret which is not indeed hidden, except to the power structures of this world that cannot see any point in a Kingdom of justice, mercy and peace. We are those granted the help of power from on high at the times of our greatest need, through the Holy Spirit, given to us.
In our own story there will be, as with Jesus, times when we rest secure, resting in our Father’s love and his irrevocable call to us as his children. And there will be times of testing, of darkness and struggle and spiritual dryness, when we are called to persevere, to keep on going, remembering our fundamental identity as Children of God.
That might seem nearer to us at the moment. As a church and as individuals we have been through a time of desolation in this past year. As Father Simon said last week, we almost don’t need the symbolic forty days of Lent this year, as we have been through a real wilderness of testing and endurance.
But this too is part of our story. And the Gospel reminds us that it is not the whole story. All the great stories have times of struggle, dark moments when the heroes are tempted to give up, when they have to hold on and endure. But they are framed by the stories of consolation and vocation, the call of the hero to persevere and win through to the end.
This Lent, we can return again to the scriptures, and see in them our story, a story we can imagine ourselves into, for they describe the call and movement of the Spirit that is ours too. In Bible Book Club in this parish we will be reading Mark’s Gospel like that, as a story, an exercise of imagination. A story in which we discover once again that even our times of desolation, of trial and endurance, those too are part of the story, but not the whole story, part of the way in which good will triumph over evil in the end.
You might not be able to join in the online sessions of Bible Book Club, but even if you can’t I do recommend doing the reading. Reading Mark, or other books of the Bible, as books, not as dry academic texts, but as stories of high purpose and daring deeds that we can imagine ourselves into. For in them we can recover a fresh vision of our identity and our calling. Of the part that we have to play in the greatest story ever told.
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