First Sunday of Lent
March 12, 2000
Year B
We find ourselves here on the first Sunday of Lent, in this all-too familiar
passage about Jesus’ baptism and his temptation in the desert. Most of
us know this story well—in fact, we know the details of this story because
of the writers of two other Gospels, Matthew and Luke, and not from the
very brief story we find in the Gospel of Mark that is before us today.
This story in Mark is very brief—we don’t get the details that we find in
Luke and Matthew—there is no conversation between Jesus and the
devil, there are none of the details you find elsewhere. All we are left
with is this intriguing, intriguing line—“and the Spirit immediately drove
him out into the wilderness.” And I think the most interesting word in this
whole passage is the word “drove”—Jesus was “driven” into the desert—
the Greek word that is used here is extremely powerful…this is not the
equivalent of saying that Jesus was “called” into the desert; it is not the
equivalent of saying Jesus was “told” to go to the wilderness, or that he
was “asked” to go to the wilderness. No, the Greek word that is used for
“drove” here is the exact same word that is used in the Gospel of Mark
for those moments when Jesus “drives” out demons from people. It
implies force, it implies the lack of choice, it implies being moved without
having much say in the whole matter. So, Jesus, after this incredible
moment of being recognized as the Messiah by God’s own voice, Jesus
is driven into the desert, “immediately” so says the writer of Mark. In this
passage, Jesus is being driven into the wilderness because there is
more to do than simply being recognized by a Divine voice, there is more
to do than simply being gifted with the Spirit—no, the Spirit is given to
Jesus for a reason, the Spirit is given to Jesus because there is
something that Jesus has been created for.
But before Jesus can do what he has been called to do, the Spirit drives
him into the wilderness, the Spirit takes him away from what he knows,
and he finds himself in a place where his only friends are found among
the wild animals that roam the parched, dry desert. God has driven
Jesus into the desert because he will need to find strength and wisdom in
that place, strength and wisdom that he will not be able to find anywhere
else but in that wilderness. It is in the desert where Jesus will find the
wisdom, the inner strength, the knowledge, to meet what lays ahead in
the years to come—years that will contain much joy, years that will
contain much pain. So too with us, I think, we too go through those
wilderness moments of our lives, where we too have been driven to the
desert, to the wilderness, because there is something to be learned
there, in that wilderness, in that dry, hot place, that cannot be learned
anywhere else. I think most of us have experienced that place—and I
suspect, that if we haven’t, we will. There are some things you can only
know, there are some things that only make sense, there are some
things you can only survive if you have been in the wilderness moments
of your life.
In last week’s sermon, I said that one of the great mysteries—and one of
the great frustrations—of our lives is that we cannot experience
resurrection without the cross—and that one of the things we are given
to get us through the cross is moments of wonder like we see in the
Transfiguration, that moment when Jesus visits the prophets while being
bathed in white light. This week, another mystery unfolds before us in
this passage—and that mystery is that we are sometimes driven, forced,
pushed, into the desert, into the wilderness moments of our lives so that
we can be given strength to do what we are created for. Last week, we
found out that God won’t let us go to the cross without the strength to
bear it—this week, we find out that God will use those moments at the
cross, those moments in the wilderness, to give us what we need to fulfill
the purpose for which we have been created. Most of us—if not all of
us—know what it means to be in the wilderness moments of our lives—
we have known moments when nothing has made sense, when joy
seemed to have been drained out of our lives, when our mouths seem
dry from the desert heat and all we wish for is some rest and some
water. We know what Jesus is experiencing here—and in the wilderness
here he is experiencing an emotional, spiritual, and physical hell. Who
hasn’t been where Jesus is at in this moment—who hasn’t known an
emotional wilderness, who hasn’t known a spiritual wilderness, who hasn’
t known a physical wilderness? All of us have found ourselves here, with
Jesus, in the wilderness, wondering when it would all end, wondering
when the emotional pain would finally end, when the spiritual dryness
would be erased, when the physical pain would simply cease. And yet,
and yet, it is God who drives Jesus into the wilderness, it is God who
pushes Christ into that lonely place, into that desert place, into that
lonely place in the wilderness. Why? Like I said last week about the
truth that we can only experience resurrection through the cross: I have
absolutely no idea. I’ll answer—if you want to call this an answer—that
question by quoting what one of my professors used to say—“hey, that’s
the way all things are”—its just the structure of creation. Is it a
satisfactory answer—no, at least not for me, but Dr. Green was still
right—it really is just the way things are. But I tell you—and I think you
know this—there are certain things we can only learn
while being in the desert, there are only certain things we can learn by
being
in the wilderness moments of our lives. There are certain things that
Jesus can only learn about what it means to be human by experiencing
this time of emotional, spiritual, and physical despair in the desert.
Christ needed the lessons, the truths, which only the wilderness, the
emotional, spiritual, and physical wilderness of our lives, can really teach
us. Sometimes those lessons are about patience, sometimes those
lessons are about trust, sometimes those lessons are about the
temptations that compete with our loyalty to God—all kinds of lessons
that can only be learned in this particular school, in this particular
environment. Why we must learn the hard way? I don’t know, but the
reality is that most of us have to go through many wilderness moments in
our lives to learn the same lessons over and over again. We’re fairly
stubborn, we humans, but we have a Creator that has created us for a
purpose, and we must learn what we must learn so that we can live into
that purpose. Actually, the story says that as soon as Jesus came out of
the wilderness, out of his forty days, he began to live out what he had
been created for—the teller of Good News of God’s love, the Savior of
the world, the God given a human heart—he came into his own, he came
into what he was created for after that time in the lonely, life changing
time in the wilderness.
What I love about Lent—and indeed the whole Christian story—is that it
reminds us that our lives matter—indeed, I said that very thing during
this past week’s Ash Wednesday service. What we DO matters, how we
LIVE our lives matters, what we LEARN in our wilderness times matters.
We are created for a purpose; we are created, each one of us, so that
we can do what God has created us to do. Our times in the wilderness,
our times of pain, times that we remember and honor during the season
of Lent, are part of that transforming work God is doing in this world, that
work of salvation that is happening in our lives, and, indeed, is
happening in ALL of God’s creation. God drives us, like God drove
Jesus into the desert, into that painful, lonely wilderness for a time, only
for a time, so that we can learn what we must learn—hard lessons,
indeed, very hard lessons to learn, but ones that must be painfully
learned so that we too can do what we have bean created for, just as our
Christ did what he had been created for after his time in the wilderness.
Even these times of being driven into our own wilderness, these too are
a sign of God’s passion for us—even our stubbornness will not get in the
way of our redemption, in the way of our transformation. It seems as if
we have a God who is as stubborn as we are, doesn’t it? Amen and
amen.
