1st Sunday of Lent; Year B ....2018

As you participate in this Sunday’s Eucharistic celebration, may the good Lord nourish you with graces enough to sustain your baptismal vows and also maintain a rapport of filia love and profound friendship with him. Happy Sunday! +John I. Okoye

DOCTRINE AND FAITH

(Genesis 9, 8-15; 1 Peter 3, 18-22; Mark 1, 12-15:  1st Sunday of Lent; Year B)

Each year Lent begins on Ash Wednesday. Lent which dates back to the 4th century after Christ is the period devoted to an intensive preparation for the great feast of Easter (the celebration of the Paschal Mysteries of death and resurrection of Christ), the Mother of all Liturgical Feasts. Lent was instituted for two purposes: firstly to prepare catechumens (persons who are receiving instructions in preparation for Christian baptism or confirmation) that is conferred on Easter Vigil of Holy Saturday Night. Secondly, Lent is instituted to prepare all the faithful to celebrate worthily the paschal mystery by remembering their baptism whose vows and commitments they renew on Easter Vigil. The Church through the liturgy of the Easter Vigil brings us to live anew our belongingness /adherence and allegiance to Christ because it is through baptism we are grafted into Christ and made to participate in the mystery of his death and resurrection.

Peter makes an explicit reference to Baptism in the second reading of today. He sees in the flood water of Genesis the figure and symbol of baptism. He reasons that just as the water of the flood served as purification for the sinful humanity and the beginning of a new covenant between God and his people, in the same way baptism signals the beginning of a new humanity redeemed by Christ who died once and forever for our sins and rose from the dead. This is a new humanity purified in his blood with which he ratified not only a new but also eternal and definitive/irrevocable covenant between God and the people. For Peter, Baptism is not merely a simple cleansing. Rather it is a transformative experience, just as the resurrection was a transformative experience for Christ. It would be very opportune to refresh our minds on the depth of the significance of baptism on this Sunday in order to be in tune with the spirit of Lent in order to live this period in baptismal dimension. 

All the sacraments, as we know, draw their efficacy of sanctifying the souls of people from the merits of Christ especially from his passion, death and resurrection. The efficacy proper to baptism is the conferring of the sanctifying grace to the soul, the greatest of all gifts God could give his creature. In fact, sanctifying grace is the divine life as lived by a soul. It is a divine engraftation in the substance of the soul which elevates it to the supernatural level; it is a regeneration, it is precisely a new birth to supernatural life. In a nutshell, it is the same as eternal life as St. Thomas explains: Grace is nothing else than the beginning of glory in us. He goes on to expatiate: The minimal grade of sanctifying grace (supernatural life) worths more than all the goods of the entire universe. Elevating us to divine and supernatural life baptism makes us really the children of God. As John asserts: we are already up to this time children of God and we are really so (1 John 3,2). We are adopted children of God through our participation in the divine life. God the Father bestows on us this supreme good and makes us his children through his only Son, the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ, because in his holy humanity united in his divine person we have the plenitude of divinity and from this fullness we have received grace after grace (John 1,16). In baptism we are immersed in the paschal mystery of the dead and resurrected Christ to the extent that the sinful body is destroyed and we can rise and walk in a new life (Romans 6, 4-11). With the Sacrament of Baptism, we are united with Christ just as a branch of vine is grafted to the stem of the vine and we receive from him divine nourishment. United all in Christ, baptism makes us members of his Mystical Body. He as head and we as members become like a Church or the People of God, like the family of the children of God, like the community of brothers and sisters who share the same life of grace, the same mission in the world and the same final destiny.

From the above as premises we derive very important and practical conclusions and consequences.

(a) If baptism communicates life of grace and is the highest good, a treasure which is more precious than all the ones we have, then we have to do all that is possible to preserve it and if unfortunately we momentary loose it through grave sin, we have to do all that is possible and, as soon as possible, to regain it through the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

(b) If baptism makes us children of God it means that we have to make effort to live out this supreme dignity, and manifest in our conduct the comportment of the Father and maintain a rapport of filial love and profound friendship with him. If God is the Father of all of us why do we regard and threat our brothers and sisters as outcasts (Osu, Ohu etc), discriminate against them as non indigene or marginalise them and refer to the as underdeveloped?

(c) If baptism has engrafted us to Christ and has made us members of his Mystical Body, the Church, this means that we have to faithfully follow him who is the perfect image of the Father and our way to the Father; we have to always draw from him, his Word and his Sacraments the vital sap of grace. It is in the Church, particularly in the parish ambient that we have to make effort to be active members who are deeply inserted in her human and divine realities, where we participate in her mission of salvation. It is in the parish environment that we shall involve ourselves in the initiatives of doing good and not simply stay there as spectators who live in the margins of the community of faith who wait to enjoy the services of the community.

(d) As we have heard from the Gospel of Mark that it was after Jesus has stayed 40 days in the desert, continually, tempted by Satan that he began his public ministry proclaiming the gospel of God, that is, the Good-news, that God loves his people and that he would bring all to salvation. The Evangelist Mark condensed his proclamation in three brief affirmations: The time is fulfilled and the reign of God is near; repent and believe the gospel. The church our mother and teacher repeats to us today, at the beginning of Lent, this urgent invitation to pay attention to the words of Jesus because the reign of God not only that it is near, but that is already in us. This is because from our Baptism, as we saw above, God is already reigning in us with his grace in the intimacy of our hearts. The exhortation, repent which the Church directs to us in the name of Jesus means that we have to be coherent with our baptism to become in a more perfect manner that what we are radically are by virtue of our baptism, developing those potentialities of graces we are gifted with.  Our Lent should, therefore, be a spiritual exercise of 40 days, a period of training specially of the soul through more intense prayer, more docile reading of and listening to the word of God, the practice of mortifications, doing works of charity so as to celebrate with renewed spirit and heart the holy feast of Easter and make our lives become a continual conversion to God. Happy Sunday! +John I. Okoye

pictures  by chukwubike