God’s Beloved
First Sunday of Lent
One of the most enduring themes in the stories that people tell, and the great works of literature that enshrine these stories, is the theme of parentage. Numerous tales recount the dramatic consequences of being separated at birth from one’s mother or father, only for it to be revealed, years or decades later, who those parents are. This idea pops up in a number of ancient works, like Homer’s Odyssey. In that story, one of the most emotional and pivotal scenes occurs when Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, meets his father for the first time. Odysseus had gone off to fight the Trojan War twenty years prior, just before Telemachus was born, and now, as a young man, the son comes face to face with the father whose absence had shaped him so powerfully.
There are less happy reveals of this kind in Ancient Greek literature, as well. When Oedipus discovers who his parents are, and that he had unknowingly murdered his father years earlier and married his mother, it leads to the kind of horrifically tragic ending that the Greeks were famous for. And this theme continues to capture our imagination in the present day, with equally mixed emotions. For every story like the Christmas movie Elf, where Buddy travels through the Candy Cane Forest and the Lincoln Tunnel to be reunited with the father he never knew existed, there is a story like The Empire Strikes Back, where Luke Skywalker, as a young man trying to become a hero of a galactic rebellion, is less than thrilled to find out the identity of his father. This question of the connection, for good or bad, between parents and children continues to capture our attention and keeps us coming back to these stories again and again.
To be a child of someone, a son or a daughter, means something. To have a mother or a father means something. The bonds that exist between parents and children, is a reality that we understand from literature, from our life experiences, and from Scripture.
The Gospel of Mark gets to the point from the very first verse, which simply states that it is “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God.” Before he gets into the teaching, the miracles, the confrontations with the powerful and the prideful, and of course before he gets into the death and resurrection of Jesus, Mark starts with his identity as the Son, and begins to explore how that identity shapes everything else. In verse 9, Jesus makes his dramatic entrance onto the stage of Mark’s gospel, as he makes his way to the desert to be baptized by John. While we might puzzle over exactly why he does this—even John the Baptist is confounded by it according to other gospel accounts, where Jesus simply says it is necessary to do this to fulfill all righteousness—we can’t deny that what transpires in this moment is powerful.
When Jesus comes out of the waters of baptism, Mark says that heaven is torn open in a dramatic display of God’s power. And accompanying that sign is a voice, the voice of God, that speaks a message of sonship and a message of love. It’s a message meant to affirm Jesus’ identity as the one who came from the right hand of God, the one and only son of the father. It’s a message that is meant to sustain Jesus in what’s ahead, both the time of temptation in the wilderness and the long years of ministry. But most of all, it’s a message meant to make clear that, at the heart of this relationship between Jesus and the God of Israel we find a bond of love.
Everything else in Jesus’ life and work will flow out of this bond of love between him and his father. When he goes out into the wilderness with the wild animals, and is tested by the devil, he faces those challenges knowing that he is the Beloved Son of God. When he stands before massive crowds, pressing toward him in need of his healing touch, when he speaks hard truths to angry crowds, or when he calls out the Pharisees for their hypocritical posture toward God’s people, Jesus does all of not just as a Nazarene miracle worker, or a Galilean troublemaker, but as the Beloved Son of God.
Lent is a season of reflecting on our brokenness, on our frailties, on the fact that we are dust and to dust we will return, the reality that we are sinners in need of redemption. Like Jesus in the wilderness, we face trials and temptations on a daily basis, and unlike Jesus, we far too often stumble and fail. But even when we struggle—especially when we struggle—God calls us back with a word that reminds us of who we are, God’s beloved children, chosen and called by his name.
