The annual Lenten journey toward Holy Week and Easter is marked by the dynamics of covenantal life—mostly God’s own life of covenantal promise, not ours.
Covenant is one of those religious words so easily mistaken for something else, for the familiar and comfortable world of contractual obligations on which we rely nearly every day—mortgages, credit card agreements, utilities, even ordering food in a restaurant where we are expected to pay the bill after enjoying a meal. All of these “contracts” involve at least two parties promising to do something, the failure of which comes with consequences. In that sense, contracts are fundamentally transactional—I will do this for you if you do that for me; and that is not a covenant.
Yesterday, on the first Sunday in Lent, the biblical texts from the lectionary invited a rather direct, even startling engagement with the character of covenantal relationship. That sounds quite uninspiring, frankly, and a bit dry, but I think it might very well be life-changing.
Consider the iconic story in Genesis about Noah and the flood—or rather, what many of us heard yesterday, the post-flood mountaintop experience Noah had with a penitent God.
After forty days and forty nights of rain, and still many more weeks for the waters to recede from the Earth, Noah once again stands on dry ground, surrounded by all the animals he had harbored on the ark.
Upon seeing this, God says, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind…nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (8:20–21).
This is a remarkable vow from Creator God. Remarkable and then startling when we hear the unmistakable tones of regret echoing in God’s voice, the God who doesn’t want to forget the promise (and presumably neither the regret, either) and creates a rainbow as a reminder.
I never heard of such a remorseful God growing up, or if I did, I quickly lost sight of that God who shares more with me and my human foibles than I have dared to imagine. I stumbled back upon that very God lurking around in the lectionary, where those verses from Genesis sounded like a baptismal covenant—I don’t mean ours but God’s.
The first Letter of Peter (3:18-22) frames that ancient flood endured by Noah and his family sacramentally, a story that “prefigured” the saving waters of baptism—the whole Earth becomes the baptismal font!
There are at least two astonishing things to notice when reading the story that way. First, the emphasis in the story falls on God’s covenantal promise never again to destroy the earth; Noah makes no promise whatsoever. There’s nothing transactional about this moment; the penitent God alone makes the vow for the sake of flourishing life.
The second astonishing thing is the mistake Peter makes; that ancient letter-writer got the math wrong. There were not just “eight persons” saved on that ark, as Peter writes, not just Noah and his family of humans—there were also all the other animals. That’s a pretty big oversight!
God makes a covenantal promise to the ground, the soil, the trees and plants, and to every living creature on Earth—to the whole creation. God makes this promise without asking for anything in return, not one thing. That’s what makes this a “covenant.”
This covenantal God is the one who drives Jesus into the wilderness, where he is tempted by Satan. Most Christians always hear this story on the first Lenten Sunday, and yesterday the lectionary gave us Mark’s version (1:9-15). Mark is the only one of the gospel writers who mentions that Jesus was accompanied by “wild beasts” in that desert.
These are the “beasts” God promised never again to destroy. But these beasts could, presumably, destroy Jesus if they chose to. That risk makes this story something like the classic “hero’s journey” found in so many of the world’s literary traditions: Jesus not only bravely resists the devil but faces the fearsome specter of untamable beasts.
I had just a tiny glimpse of this on my recent trip to southern Africa, when I discovered what it’s like to be in the wilderness with wild animals. Standing in the middle of a broad, wide-open savannah—buffalo herds on the horizon, the sound of baboon alarms warning of possible lions, the cackling of nearby jackals and a few hyenas, lumbering clusters of elephants—I suddenly felt smaller than ever before; I finally understood, viscerally, what the word “vulnerable” really means; I wondered why anyone ever thought “dominion” was the word to use for our role on a planet that has never been under our control, not for one single minute.
Placing ourselves at the apex of all the animal kingdoms on Earth is at best delusional, and it’s often a desperate ploy to boost fragile egos. Choosing a path of domination and violence just to feel good about ourselves leaves unspeakable destruction in its wake, and the results are now visible nearly everywhere on this precious Earth today.
We know, of course, how the rest of the Gospel story turns out, and that makes the account of Jesus in the wilderness a different kind of “hero’s journey” entirely. Religion scholar Paul Weinfield reminded me of this rather pointedly just recently. We’ve been taught, he says, to imagine heroes overcoming their fears, slaying the dragon, and winning a world-wide audience on social media.
But in the journeys that truly matter, Weinfield says, the dragon slays you—your tidy plans for success unravel; the image of yourself you had hoped to cultivate crumbles; you return to your village shattered, but you do return, and you are humbled, unmade and ready to be remade.
That’s the journey of Lent toward Easter, and something like this happened to me in southern Africa. When I left for that trip, I was like a child, picking up a pebble from a beach and thinking I knew the ocean; when we look up and notice the vastness of the sea, in that humbling moment we’re on the path toward what poet Mary Oliver calls our “place in the family of things.”
Knowing our place and residing there, living in what Christian traditions call communion, this is the source of our healing and our thriving, and not only for us, but for all the other creatures with whom we share this precious Earth.
As the season of Lent begins once more, now is the time to recall that this life of communion comes with a cost, which we learn by following Jesus into the wilderness. We learn along that desert path what must be left behind: money, property, status, privilege. We leave these behind not merely because they aren’t “useful” anymore but because everything we use to protect ourselves from vulnerability, all those things we suppose will keep us safe, actually betray us in the end and keep us afraid.
We live with that tragic irony nearly every day: all things we do for the sake of security—building walls around gated communities, and erecting fences along borders, and fortifying all sorts of boundaries—this quite literally creates lifeless islands of isolation.
Lent invites us to entertain the great paradox of Christian faith. When we let go of what we thought would keep us safe, we are then free to pursue the only thing that can: intimate communion with God and each other.
Like anything worth pursuing, this life of communion comes with risk and it’s scary; but when we follow Jesus into the wilderness, the penitent God of promise is with us—the covenantal God who promises life, even in the desert.
