General. The First Sunday of Lent introduces a period of forty days when we recall the Passion, Death and Resurrecton of Our Lord Jesus. It is somewhat of a chronology of our Salvation intertwined with the history and salvific events of the Jewish people from under the Phaorah’s clutches (the evil one who seeks money and power) that pass us through a period when we can understand the more fully the nature of Thanksgiving underlying the Eucharistic sacrifice we are about to celebrate. We can also be given enough grace and inner light to understand the mystery of Christ, the Anointed one, who as Priest, Prophet and Prince delivers man from sin and passes him from death to life, slavery to freedom, the yeastless bread of hard work to the sweet wine of the joy of life.

Genesis. The First Testament is a book of God’s pacts with man and the ways He led the Jewish people through, as representing man, up to the fulfilment of time when He sent His Son Jesus for the salvation of humanuty. The pact God made with Noah, his sons and the living beings which had been saved from the deluge was somwhat of a "recognition" that man is a sinful and often disloyal creature who needs constant individual redemption, no matter how big his sins are. Yet there also had to be one general redemption in the history of mankind, to be achieved by the intervention of His Son Jesus through the Incarnation.

Psalm 24. The Psalm is a joyful reply to the First Reading showing there is hope for all those who, bad and hard times notwithstanding, still follow the Lord’s parth. Goodness and faithfulness are key-words which bestow trust on a person who has blindfold faith in the Lord.

First Epistle of St Peter. This excerpt is a throw-back to Noah’s saving from the deluge and the significance of water as a sign of purification and salvation. Just like Jesus did, we humans can achieve life in the spirit if only we die to the flesh. Accoring to St Peter, the baptismal waters represent a constant prayer to God to obtain a clean conscience by virtue of the resurrection of Jesus and His constant intercession for us on the right hand of the Father. As it is, though this is Lent, we cannot do but start thinking of this period as one with the Paschal period, solidly linking the Passion and Death of Christ with His resurrection.

St Mark. The evangelist here gives a short recount of the period Jesus spent in the desert, focussing on His prayer and fasting for forty days and the temptations He underwent at the hands of the evil one. This also reminds us of the time we have now entered in Lent when we are given an opportunity to turn our hearts to God (convert) with compunction. What is needed of us is to repent and to believe in the Gospel Word which, of its own and with faith in the healing and saving powers of Jesus, has the power to save.

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