Wilderness
Shrine in Russia to the late Alexei Navalny
The Judaean Wilderness
On this first Sunday of Lent, we are used to being taken into the wilderness with Jesus.
We are used also to thinking about certain times of our own lives in terms of ‘wilderness’ – those rugged, desolate and unpredictable times when we have only the feral animals of fear and heartache for company.
But in the context of this particular February week of 2024 with these particular readings, it seems essential to consider too the wildernesses of our contemporary world at large….
I wonder what you noticed as our first reading was read, for example. A great flood in which vast numbers have drowned has at last, after 40 days, subsided, dry land is finally seen and a covenant is made between God, Noah, his family and all living creatures. It is, then, a covenant which, uniquely in the biblical canon, applies equally to human and to other forms of life. Humanity’s ‘dominion’ over other living things is here nowhere to be seen. How different our relationship with the rest of the created order might have been if God’s covenant with Noah had had as much influence as the first chapter of Genesis… All this and those ancient life-threatening flood waters themselves, cannot but underline for us the precarious situation of our planet today, the metaphorical wilderness we and all living things have entered as the climate warms, eco-systems collapse and bio-diversity is savagely curtailed.
And did you also notice the figure of John the Baptist book-ending today’s gospel reading? In its first sentence we heard that it was John who baptised Jesus and then at the end, we heard that John had been arrested. John, the fearless prophet who flagged up the need for change, who confronted corruption head-on, who dared to speak truth to power and told the tyrant Herod exactly what he thought of his illicit sexual relationships. That tyrant, vexed by challenge, threw John into jail, beheading him some time later.
It is difficult to remember all that just two days after Alexei Navalny’s death and not see similarities. Things do not seem to have changed much in 2000 years – those who confront corruption and courageously speak truth to power are still liable to be brutally silenced. As the world reels from the snuffing out of Navalny’s extraordinary resolve and resilience, we perceive with clarity another wilderness in which our world sits just now – a wilderness of spin and fake news, of corruption and cruelty.
So, at a time when it may feel that wilderness is all around, what are we to do?
Well, we can first enter the wilderness with Jesus and see what we might learn there. Mark gives few details. Unlike Matthew and Luke, he does not flesh out Jesus’ wilderness experience. We aren’t told how he fared alone in the inhospitably rocky wastes of the Judaean desert, how he coped physically or mentally. We don’t learn in what ways he was ‘tempted’ or how he responded. All Mark gives are two terse sentences:
12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.
But the few details included there are telling and give us much to cling to when in the wilderness ourselves.
First, Mark makes it plain that Jesus didn’t choose the wilderness. He didn’t just wander into it, suspecting that some time on his own might be a good thing. That is not the sense of Mark’s Greek at all. Immediately after the seminal experience of water and dove-like Spirit and divine, affirming voice, comes another, says Mark. The same Spirit, dove-like no longer, ‘drove him out’ into the wilderness. The verb Mark uses - ekballo - is full of motion –and force. Jesus is expelled, thrown out into the wild. No, he does not choose the wilderness.
That’s rather comforting, I think. Why? Because it rings true. We don’t choose to enter the wilderness either. It isn’t usual to seek the wilderness states of isolation, discomfort, loss, danger or fear. But they happen, anyway. Whether it comes to us in the guise of a hospital waiting room, a thorny relationship, or precarious finances, devastating news from climate scientists or from an Arctic prison, the wilderness appears, unbidden and unwelcome, on all our doorsteps.
The second detail which Mark gives us about Jesus’ wilderness experience is that it was long. Forty days long.
Forty - a number bringing to mind for us this morning Noah’s watery wilderness, the rain lashing relentlessly down for 40 days and nights, but a number also designed to remind us of other wilderness experiences in the ancient past – the Hebrew people journeying through the wilderness for 40 years and Elijah spending 40 days on Mt. Horeb to name but two. And now here is Jesus undergoing his 40 day desert trial. Whatever else the number indicates, it speaks of an exacting ordeal that goes on and on… and on. Our wilderness journeys too can last a long time. Sometimes when illness takes hold, the months stretch into years, and every night feels endless. The wilderness of a country’s life under a despotic regime can extend for generations. Why, we ask, is this pain not ending? Why are our prayers unanswered? Where is God? Those are questions which Jesus must have asked in his wilderness too. He certainly asked them at other wilderness times in his life - at Gethsemane, on the cross.
A third detail which Mark gives is that there are angels in the wilderness. They waited on Jesus, Mark says. I wonder how he became aware of their help. As winged creatures from heaven? As soft breezes across the sun-scorched hills? As a trickle of water for his parched throat? As the swirl of constellations on a clear, cloudless night?
Somewhere, somehow, help came for Jesus, encouraging us too to open our eyes and look around when our wilderness threatens to overwhelm. Our deserts too can be holy places even when they remain dangerous. ‘Angels’ may not always arrive in the form we might want, but they come. What do your angels look like? What/who have they looked like in the past? That time when you felt held, when you didn’t know where you got the strength to go on, when you yourself knew afresh that, come what may, you were a beloved child of God?
It turns out that looking into Jesus’ wilderness experience has, more than anything, revealed what it had in common with our own wilderness experiences – he didn’t choose it, it felt endless at times but held glimmers of grace. We learn then that he understands, knows the wilderness through and through. He shares it with us.
A well-known painting comes to mind which might offer us something in addition. It’s by Stanley Spencer and is one of his ‘Christ in the Wilderness’ series. Exiled from his beloved Berkshire and living in a small London room, he wrote of strongly identifying with Jesus’ exile in the wilderness. In the painting, Jesus sits on desert rock cradling a fearsome scorpion. Perhaps it has already stung him (his fingers are certainly swollen) yet he looks at this thing which could kill him with compassion and acceptance. He could run away from it or even stamp on it. Perhaps he feels tempted to do so. But instead, he embraces it with tenderness, despite understanding its message that announcing God’s kingdom come will not end well for him. He lets it deepen his trust in God.
“Christ in the Wilderness – The Scorpion”, Stanley Spencer, 1939
There is such radical trust in Spencer’s Jesus. As another Lent opens up for us, its 40 days pregnant with possibility, may we too hold out our hands and trustingly cradle whatever threatens us most, whatever feels like the scorpion in whatever wilderness claims us most at this time. We may encounter angels along the way and, at Lent’s end, when we are standing the other side of the cross, we will discover afresh that God’s way of being is always to take the things of loss and pain and death, and wring from them resurrection.