1st Sunday of Lent, B February 18, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
In 1363, King Edward III of England decreed that every able-bodied man in the country must practice archery every Sunday and Holy Day, extending to boys as young as 12, 8, or even 5 years old. The bow and arrow has long been a deadly weapon. The deadliest version in the Middle Ages, the English Longbow, required the ability to pull 150 pounds or more of force with one arm. Thus the training from childhood.
This lifelong training was so effective that a unit of English longbowmen became one of the most terrifying and legendary war assets in the world. In the 100-years War between France and England, it took Joan of Arc and God’s intervention for the French to stand a chance.
And God himself uses the bow as a symbol of deadly power in the first reading: “I set my bow in the clouds to serve as a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.” The rainbow represents the weapon we call a bow. Having struck most of the world dead, God symbolically “hangs up his bow” to say “I won’t kill the whole world again.”
But this doesn’t mean God was finished with war and death altogether. The Old Testament repeatedly refers to God as a mighty warrior long after the time of Noah and this promise. Indeed, any archer knows that you don’t store a bow strung and bent. So, the rainbow also resembles a bow fully drawn, and aiming upward, aiming at God. Thus it not only signifies God’s promise not to flood the world again, but foreshadows his plan to take death upon himself in order to save us.
This plan finally begins to come to fruition when a man from Galilee spends forty days in the desert battling the real enemy: Satan. Thinking him disarmed and vulnerable, the devil goes after Jesus with a weapon far deadlier than bow and arrow: temptation and sin. But he fails and Christ emerges victorious. Jesus returns from the desert declaring “the Kingdom of God is at hand,” gathers his disciples – his troops – and starts driving out demons. The Kingdom of God is an invading kingdom.
Rather than a battle between us and God, this a battle between God and the devil over us. Yet, we are more than the spoils of war, more than passive observers in this cosmic battle of good and evil. We ourselves have a part to play in the conflict, which is why the announcement of the kingdom is followed by a command: “repent, and believe in the gospel!” After all, there are indeed times when God strikes human beings down for their wickedness, not because we are the enemy but because we so often choose to side with the enemy.
This is why the psalm response is specific about its praise. “Your ways, O Lord, are love and truth” not to everyone, but only “to those who keep your covenant.” If we reject the covenant, his ways don’t seem like love at all. The world is baffled by our claim that God is love because our own scriptures show him “lovingly” flooding the world and slaughtering kings. He sometimes strikes down people even in the New Testament! If those are “God’s ways,” how can we say they are loving and true? Because they are… if you keep his covenant. But if you choose to ally with the enemy, if you choose sin, which destroys you and those around you, it is love to stop you even if it doesn’t feel like it.
But God doesn’t want to resort to that. That’s why he aimed the bow at himself! That’s why he says “repent!” The devil and his angels are irrevocably opposed to God, but we have a choice while we still live. If we choose to side with the enemy long enough, then we choose to share in their defeat. And it is defeat. Although I compare it to battle, the conflict between good and evil is not equal. Unlike England and France in the Hundred Years war, God and the devil aren’t even close to being on the same level. Victory is a foregone conclusion; the only thing that isn’t settled yet is how many of us wind up on which side.
This is why St. Peter – the 2nd reading – talks about Jesus “preaching” to the disobedient “spirits in prison.” He’s talking about demons. In Noah’s day, they thought they had won in corrupting the whole earth. Then God washed the earth clean and saved Noah and his family through water. Despite this, the demons still thought they had a chance to win because God tied his own hands with the promise of the rainbow.” They figured that all they had to do was corrupt the world again and God would either be forced to either break his promise about the flood or finally lose the whole world to sin. They did not realize that God had actually turned Satan’s ultimate weapon – death – back onto Satan. When Jesus rises from the dead, he actually goes to those demons to “preach,” to declare his final victory over death and demon.
Even better, we get to join Christ in striking the winning blow. Jesus is the one who actually takes the shot. We could never hope to earn salvation or overcome the devil ourselves. But, by repenting, believing in the gospel, and living out the gospel, we participate in this triumph as if God were holding our hands in his when he fires the arrow of salvation into the heart of death. Our involvement doesn’t change the end of the battle, but it does change us. And that’s the goal; not simply to watch the victory, but become it. Salvation is to become a certain kind of person, most truly yourself as the unique saint God made you to be.
English longbow training changed the very skeletons of medieval archers. It’s uncanny how easy it is to spot the difference. Imagine discipline so thorough that, 700 years after a person’s death, you can take one look at just their bones and tell who they were in life: an archer.
Lent, all of life is a time of training ourselves as Christians. That training – the Sacraments, almsgiving, prayer, fasting, growing in virtue and love, resisting sin, intimacy with Jesus Christ, proclaiming the kingdom to others – it can’t just be on Sundays and Holy days like Edward III’s archery decree. Our king commands us train every day, every breath, every heartbeat… training made possible only by grace that changes us down to our very bones so that 700, 10,000, ten million years later someone will be able to see what we’ve become.
That’s not just a metaphor. If we repent and live out the gospel, we will be raised from the dead like Christ, quite literally transforming our flesh and bone for all eternity into something far more legendary than any archer: a child of God, a Christian, a Saint. It is Lent of 2024. For every able soul, let the training begin.