The story of Noah is the story of a society gone wrong. The flood was a collective event, a response to the collective evil of the time. Collective also was the covenant made by God with the survivors of the flood, and collective was the redemption by Christ, a just man for the sake of the unjust.

The challenge to reform our lives and change our lives expresses a call to change ourselves individually and to change ourselves as a society. The good news spoken of in the Gospel is the announcement of the kingdom, a world where God rules.

Jesus’s victory over Satan represents a victory over the powers of evil, those forces that cause us to sin. The evil we struggle against in Lent is personal as well as social.

Profound and rapid changes make it particularly urgent that no one, ignoring the trend of events or drugged by laziness, content himself with a merely individualistic morality.

It grows increasingly true that the obligations of justice and love are fulfilled only if each person, contributing to the common good, according to his own abilities and the needs of others, also promotes and assists the public and private institutions dedicated to bettering the conditions of human life.

Vatican II, Constitution on the Church
in the Modern World, 1965:30