Day: March 13, 2011

“Take heart, my son; your sins are forgiven”

The land is the place of worship. Abram comes into the land which God has given him and builds there “an altar to the Lord.” Jesus comes to his own city. And there is healing and forgiveness. The land is the place of forgiveness and new life.

This morning’s first lesson is part of a whole theology of the land that unfolds in the witness of the Scriptures. That theology of the land begins first with the story of Creation and the Fall. Creation is the paradise in which God has planted us but has become the wilderness of our disobedience in which we have to learn the truth of God and his will through suffering and work, through the forms of our wilfulness made visible to us, and through the forms of divine love revealed to us.

In way, the Book of Genesis is the story of brothers and of brothers that are often at odds with one another and often about land. There is the story of Cain and Abel, the story of the first murder and one in which “your brother’s blood,” God says to Cain, “is crying to me from the ground,” from the land. It marks the beginning of the blood-soaked ground of our world and day, a world of wars and destruction. There are the stories of Abram and Lot, such as we have this morning in the separating out of who is going to have what land and where. Just as importantly, that story unveils part of the divine covenant for our humanity transacted by God to Abram – the idea of a promised land. What exactly is that promised land remains a much vexed problem politically. But, perhaps, that is to miss the point theologically. Abram builds an altar to the Lord under the oaks of Mamre. It will be the scene for God’s promise to Abram and Sarah of a Son through whom all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, though not without a most grievous and difficult trial of Abram’s faith. Ultimately, the land is the good land where God is acknowledged, where God is honoured and worshipped. “There he built an altar to the Lord.”

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“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”

Everything in this gospel must disquiet us. There is, first, the idea of Jesus being led “by the Spirit to be tempted by the devil”; secondly, there is the idea of the wilderness itself, an image which disturbs as much as it attracts.

Wilderness here is the place of temptation but under the guiding force of the Holy Spirit. This implies a kind of necessity about the wilderness in the understanding of the Christian pilgrimage. Somehow there is something good about temptation.

Wilderness. It is an intriguing term. What do we understand by the wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns.

The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, the wilderness of chaos as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh. Alternatively, we might think of the wilderness as a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best captured in the twentieth century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum. There is as well the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the greater wildness of the urban jungle.

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