We get a very strong sense of Lent being a cosmic event from the Readings from Holy Scripture prescribed for today, the First Sunday of this Season. We hear of God’s covenant which establishes on a fresh footing the relationship of love and protection between God and the whole of creation. We hear of the resurrection of Jesus Christ who sits at the right hand of God with angels, authorities and powers made subject to him. We hear also of the testing and the trying of God’s love in the way in which the Son is driven by the Spirit out into the wilderness and, in his temptation, has for company the wild beasts and the angels is attendance on him. All of this is strange in the extreme for a modern audience. But we do see and feel God at work as God. Difficult Seasons like Lent are like this and somehow have to be, if we are to be brought beyond.
