When I was working at St. Paul's Kingsport, before I came up here, that church had a thriving Godly Play curriculum designed for young children. I remember the kids' favorite thing was to play with the sandbox. The teachers tell them stories of Biblical characters in the desert as they tried to follow God. Heat, jagged rocks, wild animals, sunburn, hunger, thirst. And the teachers are supposed to say, “The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.”
I bet Mark wishes he'd said that.
Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark doesn't give us all the cool details about Jesus in the wilderness. We don’t hear about the temptations or have that scene with the devil. All he gives us are two sentences: “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.”
For those of you who attend Friday Morning Prayer with Fr. Brooks and me you can probably guess that a short passage like that is going to leave me with a ton of questions. If Mark isn't going to give me details, well, I'm going to start speculating!
How exactly did Jesus spend his time? Did he walk for miles each day, or camp out in one spot? Where did he sleep? What was the silence like, hour after hour after hour? Did he break it up by singing and laughing, running around and shouting? Did he star gaze? Chase lizards? Did he wish he'd listened to his cousin, John the Baptist, when he was showing him how to fry up a tasty locust?
As the days stretched on and on, did he fear for his life? Worry about his sanity? Wish he would die?
Mark leaves all of these questions unanswered. And yet, when I sit with this reading for a while, I realize that we actually are shown so much about Jesus here.
First off, Jesus didn’t just saunter into the wilderness. He didn't have his mail halted for the long trip. He didn’t do his research about local deserts. He didn't make sure his Fitbit was charged and ready to go. Instead, the Spirit “drove” Jesus into the wilderness.
“You only go there if you have to.”
In a way, I find this comforting. It sounds about right and jives with what I would expect from a wilderness. We don’t choose to enter the wilderness. We usually don’t volunteer for pain and loss, danger and terror. But the wilderness happens, anyway. Whether it comes to us in an isolated hospital bed, a bad relationship, a child in trouble, a sudden loss of a job, or death, the wilderness appears in our lives, always unasked for.
It insists on itself, and has rules of its own. And sometimes it is God’s own Spirit who drives us into the barren landscape amidst the wild beasts.
So often, at times like this, we are so “tempted” to wonder if God wants bad things to happen to us. That he wants us to suffer for some reason. That God brings us pain and suffering for some greater good of his own devising.
I don’t buy this. I just don't believe that God takes some visceral pleasure in causing us pain.
But we live in a broken world and that includes deserts. And God's grace is to take the things of death and redeem them. God can redeem even the most barren wildernesses of our lives. And even our dangerous deserts can become holy temples. Sometimes our journeys with God include dark and desolate places because that's where God finds us and comes to us there. And waits with us there, abides with us there.
Wilderness journeys sometimes last a long, long time. I’ve never spent forty days in solitude and silence, but I'm willing to be that Jesus’s time in the wilderness didn't pass by quickly. Mark gives me the feeling that Jesus struggled and wrestled. That every day was a battle. Maybe the hours seemed to stretch into years, and the nights felt like the sun would never rise again.
And after a time, Jesus begins to wonder who he is and why he is even here doing this...whatever. And it is then that temptation comes.
Lutheran minister Nadia Bolz Weber suggests that temptation is always about identity— about who we are and whose we are. She writes, “Identity. It’s always God’s first move. Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God’s own. But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong: capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school— they all have a go at telling us who we are. But only God can do that. Everything else is temptation.”
We began this gospel reading with a baptism, Jesus's baptism. Mark tells us the heavens were torn open, and God announced Jesus’s identity loud and clear: "You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased." God naming and claiming Jesus as God's own. Those are good words to hear for sure because in those words, Jesus heard the truth about who he was.
That was the easy part. The hard part came in the wilderness, when he had to face down Satan's temptation to deny that truth.
What happened around week two in the wilderness, around week three, week four? Did Jesus begin to forget? Did the Son of God have to keep reminding himself of who he was? When the memory of his Father’s voice from heaven faded, did Jesus have to learn how to be God’s beloved in a lonely wasteland.
I dunno. But maybe we, like Jesus, need long stints in the wilderness to learn what it really means to be God’s beloved. Because the thing is, in the wilderness, we can be loved and uncomfortable at the same time. We can be loved and unsafe at the same time, in the wilderness.
But then Mark tells us something else, something grace-filled. There were angels in the wilderness. Somehow, somewhere, in the wilderness, help comes. Rest comes. Relief comes. Our angels don't always appear in the forms we think of as angelic, but they come. They always come for us in the wilderness. Always remember that.
We started on Ash Wednesday, acknowledging that we will surely die, that our bodies will fail us no matter how hard we try to keep them going them with drugs, surgery, exercise, or healthy living. From there, every Lent, and this Lent is no exception, we are driven into the wilderness like Jesus and with Jesus.
And that's where we are meant to be in this season. It is here where we encounter ourselves, and it is here where we encounter God. It is here where we encounter the humanity of Jesus, and the divinity. It is here where we encounter the suffering of Jesus and the grace. It is here were we encounter the truth of our baptisms and our faith. It is here where we begin the rest of our journey with Jesus, to the cross and beyond.
“The wilderness is a dangerous place. You only go there if you have to.” And y'all...we have to.