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2/18/2024 - 1st Sunday of Lent
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Lent is a Loving Reminder about our True Identity
"Who are you?" the Caterpillar asks her. Alice replies in a negative, defensive, and tentative way: "I — I hardly know, Sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."
Throughout Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Alice is constantly confused about her identity. Her confusion begins after she becomes small and then big. She starts to question who she is. Alice struggles to maintain her identity during her adventures in the Wonderland, and it is only when she has fully established her identity that she is able to leave the wonderland and return to her home.
Like Alice in the Wonderland, we also oftentimes go through this kind of identity crisis in this world which is a fast fleeting of alluring and attractive images. Our identity seems to be getting sucked into this whirlpool of images, thereby creating a sense of self-disorientation.
As we are embroiled in our identity-turmoil, here comes Jesus Christ, on this First Lenten Sunday, reminding us lovingly and tenderly about our true identity that We are the Beloved Children of a Loving God, as St.Peter reveals in today’s second reading (I Pet 3:18-22), by referring to ‘Waters of the Ark’ as the prefiguration of the Baptism which saves us now, by making God as our Father and we in turn becoming his children.
When we look at the life of Jesus, throughout his life, we find that he was grounded and centered in his identity as the Son of God. When his mother Mary expressed her anxiety at not finding the child Jesus in their company (Lk 2:48), Jesus would give us a glimpse of the knowledge of his self-identity as the Son of God: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" (Lk 2:49). It is during his baptism at the Jordan river that he was confirmed by the Father (“You are my beloved son with whom I am well pleased” – Mk 1:11) and testified by the Spirit, in the form of a dove, descending upon him.
With this confirmation of his identity as the Son of God, the Spirit drove him into the desert where he was tempted. The Satan targets his identity, through the temptations: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones into loaves of bread” (Mt 4:3). But Jesus is completely centered in his identity. He knows who he is. He does not have to prove his identity to Satan. This same trap was used by the Satan in the book of Genesis against Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit (“You will not die for God knows that when you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God…” Gen 3:5). Tragically Adam and Eve were not centered in their identity as the children of God. So they easily yielded to the temptation, by listening to the false voice of the devil, consequently losing their status as children of God, by being driven out of the garden of Eden. On the contrary, here we have Jesus in the desert, being tempted in the same way about his identity. But this time, no success for the devil’s tricks! Where Adam and Eve failed and where the Israelites failed against the temptations, Jesus triumphed because of his certainty of his status as the Son of God.
There are so many false and ephemeral identities in the world based on money, gender, power, position, race, language, nation and recognition, clamouring for our attention and attempting to take over our true identity as the beloved children of the God of love, thereby leading us astray from God and leading us towards emptiness and void in life, not allowing us to live together as brothers and sisters, as God’s family.
Like an anchor which steadies the ship against the turbulent waves which try to drag it into the sea, so also your strong and assured sense of identity as the beloved child of the God of love is crucial to be a disciple of Christ in this desert of false and fake voices which stifle you from being an authentic child of God. Therefore, as Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “to be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you to be something else is truly a remarkable accomplishment.”
On the First Sunday of the Lent, Jesus invites you and me to define ourselves radically as the people beloved by God. This is our true self. Every other identity is an illusion. In today’s reading from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus invites you and me to repent of our false identities and believe in the Gospel which declares that our identity is the beloved children of God of Love. Fr P. Anil