Lesson For The First Sunday of Lent (B)

We Live in the "Time of Fulfillment"

My dear brothers and sisters, Jesus' first words in the Gospel of Mark are mysterious: "This is the time of fulfillment." What does he mean? With these words, Jesus is summing up the entire history of humanity, the fulcrum points of which is his own passion, death, and resurrection, as St Peter reminds us in the Second Reading.

With these words, Jesus Christ ushers in the third and final age in this history. First there was the age of creation when mankind lived in the unbroken communion with God. This ended with original sin, which drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and into the desert of fallen human nature.

Thus began the second age, the age of the promise. God promised Adam and Eve that he would send a savior, a holy king, to free the human family from domination by the devil that their sin had caused. In this second age, God gradually prepared the world, through the education of his chosen people Israel, for the arrival of that savior and king, Jesus Christ.

When Christ finally arrived, it was the "time of fulfilment," the fulfilment of God's promise to send that savior. In this third and final period of human history, God enters into time and space in order to rescue it from sin and destruction.

He does this through his incarnation, which is extended through all time and space through the life of his Church. The end of this third age will yield the new heavens and the new earth, the end of the Kingdom's beginning, and the beginning of its maturity.

Lent is a time to focus on essentials, and nothing is more essential, in a world obsessed with stock markets, political polls, and movie stars, than remembering where we came from and where we're going.

The Multiplication of the Goldfish

One advantage of living in the time of fulfilment is that we have the possibility of storing up our treasures in heaven. Because God's grace has made us his adopted children, all of our prayers and good actions have eternal value. Jesus has promised that he will reward them all, not forgetting even the smallest act of kindness done in his name.

It's like a family that suffered during the Bosnian war in the 1990s. This story I took from "Hot Illustrations," copyright Youth Specialties, Inc., 2001. Before the war, the Malkoc family lived next to a small lake in the village of Jezero. One day in 1990, the dad returned from a trip to Austria with an unusual gift for his teenage sons: an aquarium with two goldfish.

Two years passed and then Serb forces advanced on Jezero. The women and children fled, the men stayed back to fight, and the dad, Samjo, was killed. Later, his wife sneaked back into the destroyed village to bury her husband and rescue what belongings she could.

She let the two goldfish out into the nearby lake, saying to herself, "Maybe they'll be luckier than us." Five years later she and her sons returned. Nothing but ruins remained of their home and their village. Through misty eyes she looked toward the lake.

Glimpsing something strange, she walked over to the shore. "The whole lake was shining from the thousands of golden fish in it," she said. "It made me immediately think of my husband. This was something he left me that I never hoped for." During the war, life underwater had flourished. After their return, the Malkoc family began caring for and selling the goldfish, and soon it became a thriving, lucrative family business.

Christ's grace makes all of our prayers and good deeds alive, like those goldfish; it makes them multiply and spread beneath the surface of life's struggles and battles. Only when we come home to heaven will we see how much good even the smallest one produced.

Repenting and Believing

"This is the time of fulfilment." Through this history lesson, Jesus is reminding us of where we came from and, more importantly, where we're going: to eternal life with him in heaven. And his next sentence tells us how to get there: "Repent and believe in the gospel."

These two things should characterize our spiritual lives during Lent. First, repent; turn away from self-centered and selfish habits; break them! Jesus eagerly invites us to repent, and he also gives us the perfect way to do so: the sacrament of confession.

Jesus invented confession because he knew we would need it. The same devil that tempted Jesus in the desert is still in business, tempting us in the desert of our consumerist and relativistic culture. Repentance and confession give God a chance to pour his unconditional mercy into our thirsty souls.

Our second Lenten exercise is to "believe in the gospel." Believing in the gospel means trusting Jesus enough to do his will; it means saying with our decisions, not just our words: "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done."

We find his will in the Ten Commandments, the beatitudes, the teachings of his Church, and dictates of our conscience. Greed, lust, laziness, impatience, dishonesty - these are anti-gospel values. Believing in the gospel means leaving them aside in favor of generosity, faithfulness, responsibility, sincerity, and patient kindness. This is Christ's vision for our lives, one that he will help us live out if we give him the chance.

In this Mass he is coming among us to fill our hearts with the very strength that filled his heart, the strength which gave him the definitive victory over temptation, sin, and evil. As we continue with this Mass, then, let's thank him for allowing us to live in the time of fulfilment, and let's ask him to help us repent and believe in the gospel.