“Never again,” God said to Noah and his family, “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[1] The story of the flood, a story from our mythic past, was never meant to be a children’s story, but that’s how many churches have treated it in recent years, sanitized and illustrated. The story is a very serious and disturbing reflection on humanity’s capacity for evil and the challenge this presents to the Creator. It’s a story of heartbreak and regret.
The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”[2]
And the Lord brought a mighty flood upon the earth, and with it came death and devastation. Flood waters have a way of wiping out everything—homes and businesses, roads and bridges, animals of every kind, gardens, fields, forests and orchards. The rain doesn’t stop, the rivers roll out of their ancient beds, the oceans rise—the flood strips us of everything, even the land to stand on. Everything is washed away, goes under, disappears in a violent undoing of creation.
The only reason we get to hear and tell the story is that in the midst of that raging chaos was a small vessel, and on it were a family and animals, two of every kind—and God remembered them. God made a wind blow over the earth, the waters subsided, and the pioneers of a new beginning stepped out of the ark: Noah and his family, and every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth.[3] That’s when God made a promise never to commit that kind of global destruction again, never again to look away and allow chaos to take over.
The Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.”[4]
What had changed? The inclination of the human heart still was and is as evil as it had been before the flood. But the devastating flood effected an irreversible change in God’s commitment to humanity and the rest of creation. Ever since the flood, God’s relationship with humanity has been marked by patience and forbearance. Nothing about the inclination of the human heart has changed; what has changed is God, and that alone is why the post-flood situation is decisively different. Walter Brueggemann calls it “a revolution in the heart of God,” a revolution that changes everything.[5] Evil has not been eradicated from creation, but the relation of Creator to creature is now defined by committed compassion and unqualified grace:
“I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[6]
Nothing is said that would explain what might have evoked that conversion in the heart of God—and nothing is said about what human beings should promise to do as part of some kind of mutual post-flood agreement. In this covenant, all of the obligation rests with God. God saw that the wickedness of humankind was great on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart—and this covenant, this revolution in the heart of God, meant that such divine suffering would continue. Terence Fretheim says,
This kind of divine response means that God has chosen to take the route of suffering relative to sin and evil rather than [destructive] power. For God to decide to endure a wicked world, while continuing to open up the divine heart to that world, means that God’s grief is ongoing. God thus determines to take suffering into God’s own heart and bear it there for the sake of the future of the world. The cross of Jesus Christ is on the same trajectory of divine promise.[7]
We begin this season of Lent by remembering the first covenant which redefines humanity’s relationship with God. And we remember that this covenant includes all living creatures and the earth itself. We remember that God’s commitment to the flourishing of creation is unshakeable—while we struggle, continue to struggle, to know how to live well, how to be fully alive without robbing neighbors and fellow creatures of fullness of life. And this is where Mark draws our attention away from ourselves and toward Jesus who was baptized by John in the Jordan. A scene by the river, a scene in the wilderness, and a scene in Galilee, and in each of them, all the attention is on Jesus. One moment we see him coming up out of the water, and we hear the heavenly voice call Jesus “my son” and “beloved”—and suddenly we see him, still wet, driven by the Spirit, walking into the wilderness.
Mark tells the story with urgency. Wilderness. Forty days. Satan. Wild beasts. Angels. Forty days in five quick strokes. We hear “wilderness” and memories flood in of Hebrew slaves stumbling toward the promised land, of Isaiah singing of a highway for the exiles to come home from Babylon. We hear “forty days” and our imagination takes us to Moses on the mountain and to Elijah on the way to Mount Horeb. “Wild beasts”—that sounds ominous, a little dangerous even, and perhaps you imagine hyenas laughing in anticipation of a good meal or lions prowling around the solitary man in ever closer circles. But perhaps you can also hear echoes of Isaiah’s prophetic poetry of peace, of days when the wolf lives with the lamb and the leopard lies down with the kid. Perhaps you remember Adam and Eve in the garden, surrounded by animals, delighting in naming them, unafraid. Perhaps you sense a promise of peace in this forty-day communion of human being, wild animals, and angels.
Mark tells the story with urgency, but let’s linger a little where the angels wait on Jesus. The story of Elijah comes to mind, the prophet who had fled into the wilderness from the fury of Queen Jezebel. Elijah who was tired of calling God’s people to repentance, tired of feeling like he was the only voice of resistance in an idolatrous culture, tired of fighting. “It is enough,” he said, exhausted in body and soul, before he fell asleep under a tree. He woke up when an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” There was a bread and a jar of water. Elijah ate and drank and went back to sleep. The angel of the Lord came a second time and waited on him, saying, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”[8] Mark shows us Jesus alone in the wilderness, and by mentioning that “the angels waited on him” he lets us know that Jesus is being nourished for a long, demanding journey.
In the wilderness, it’s only you and the great silence; you and your thoughts and all that gets stirred up by the great silence. Wendell Berry wrote,
True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible.
The forty days are about those “inner voices.” For Jesus, the forty days were about remembering and completely trusting the voice from heaven calling him my son and beloved. In Scripture, Satan is the name given to voices that can whisper with seductive charm, scream with blunt intimidation, or argue with chilly reason—but, regardless of tone or volume, voices that only speak in order to silence the voice from heaven that calls God’s children beloved. In the wilderness, says Berry,
One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures. [9]
We do struggle to know how to live well, how to be fully alive without robbing neighbors and fellow creatures of fullness of life—but we are not alone. We are in the company of Jesus who faced all that we face in our loneliest, hungriest, and most exhausted moments, who unfailingly responded to other lives with clarity and love, and who lovingly draws us into the communion of all creatures that life is meant to be. Mark doesn’t tell us how Jesus stopped Satan’s chatter, but in the very next of the Gospel’s fast-paced scenes we see Jesus back in Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”
We enter the season of Lent remembering the revolution in the heart of God: In the covenant made with the descendants of Noah and all living creatures,
God has chosen to take the route of suffering relative to sin and evil rather than [destructive] power … to endure a wicked world, while continuing to open up the divine heart to that world, [and thus] to take suffering into God’s own heart and bear it there for the sake of the future of the world.[10]
We recognize this revolution in its full depth in Jesus on his way from the wilderness to Jerusalem. We recognize this revolution in its full depth in Jesus, and we step into the wide space he opens for us to repent, and we let ourselves be made whole in his image and likeness.
[1] Gen 9:11
[2] Gen 6:5-7
[3] Gen 8:1, 18-19
[4] Gen 8:21
[5] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 84.
[6] Gen 9:9-11
[7] Terence Fretheim https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-genesis-98-17-2
[8] 1 Kings 19:1-8
[9] Wendell Berry, “Healing” (1977) in What are people for? (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 11.
[10] Fretheim, see note 7.