“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”
Two phone calls, back to back; the one about the baptism of an eight-month old child, the other about the dying of a ninety-five year old lady – Helen Gibson. Birth and death, rebirth and the hope of the resurrection. “As dying and behold, we live,” as Paul puts it this morning (2 Cor.6.9). It is remarkable sometimes how the meaning of our lives is wonderfully concentrated and clarified in such seemingly serendipitous moments.
There is something wonderfully clarifying about the clear air of wilderness places, even about the air of the wilderness winters of February that have so beset us this year. “Jesus,” we are told, “was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the devil.” Mark is even more emphatic. He tells us that the Spirit drove him, literally threw him out, into the wilderness. “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by satan.”
The whole marvel of the stories of the temptation of Christ is partly about the significance of the wilderness. It is an important biblical concept found in the Scriptures time and time again: from the Fall to Moses; from Joshua to the Babylonian captivity, itself a kind of wilderness; from the prophets in exile to the ministry of John the Baptist. “What went ye out into the wilderness for to see?” Jesus asks the followers of John about John. Now Jesus is in the wilderness and so must we. There is something intriguing and complex about the wilderness both for the ancients and for us as moderns. That intriguing complexity and ambiguity about the theme of the wilderness is captured in the story of the temptations of Christ.
Somehow in the wilderness of human life we learn about the nature of our life with God, about life and death, rebirth and renewal.
The wilderness 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; something good about the wilderness.
What, then, do we understand by the wilderness?
There is the wilderness as a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, the wilderness of chaos that threatens all order and life, both the life of the gods and men as in the great Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, for example. There the wilderness is what lies outside the city and is unknowable. It cannot be grasped by reason and thought, it seems, and therefore is to be avoided. The wilderness is not always as seen as something good.
On the other hand, there is a kind of romantic attachment to the wilderness, perhaps in the face of the so-called nature deficit of the contemporary digital culture. It is the idea of the wilderness as a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a place of sanctuary and escape from the human community. It is the wilderness as a kind of paradise though we may not be exactly sure whether humans have any place in it except to “put up a parking lot” as the flower children of the sixties, like Joni Mitchell, once sang. There is at once a longing for a kind of harmony with nature at the same time as a profound sense of disconnect because of technocratic culture and its effects. It is something we have come to be even more aware so much so that there are wilderness areas which we seek to protect from almost all and any forms of human engagement. No humans here! They remain the wilderness places of our minds because we are so much aware of our exploitation and destruction of the environment.
At the risk of a generalization, Canadian literature is more about surviving the wilderness than American literature in its stories of the conquest and domination of nature. Canadian literature has no parallel to Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for example. A Canadian winter such as we seem to be having this year underscores this point. The effort is about how to get through it, recognizing clearly, I think, that you have to be very careful. The wilderness of winter is dangerous. The wilderness is above all to be respected whether it is the sea or the land.
But quite apart from the wilderness of nature as understood in various ways by our humanity, there is as well the wilderness of man himself whether it is the urban wilderness of inner city life or the suburban wilderness of the empty boredom of the middle-class. Violence and despair, fear and uncertainty belong to such wildernesses; the wilderness as an image of social and political disarray, the wilderness as an image of purposelessness and aimlessness that become the breeding grounds of nihilism both active and passive.
Yet all these senses of the wilderness are primarily external. There is a profounder sense of the wilderness to which the story of Christ’s temptations belongs. It is essentially something internal. There is the wilderness within our humanity itself, the wilderness of sin and despair.
Yet the wilderness within of sin and despair is also the place of learning and understanding. The idea is captured best by the great poet, Dante, who talks about awakening to find himself in the midst of a dark wood, selva oscura, where the right way was lost and gone, as he puts it. And while there is much that is frightening and fearful about such a selva selvaggia, a savage wood, as he names it, he emphasizes that “there I learned a great good.” The wilderness becomes the place of learning and salvation.
This is part and parcel of the biblical view. Wilderness is not seen primarily as something external but as something internal. It has to do with our relation to God and to one another. In the Old Testament, the world becomes a wilderness through our disobedience. We experience the world in our awareness of ourselves in opposition to God and to what God has made. The good order of creation has become a wilderness where we are no longer at one with God and nature. In Isaiah’s great image, the vineyard of the Lord has become a wilderness. God “looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes”. As he makes clear, “the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel” but instead of “justice, behold, bloodshed,” instead of “righteousness, behold, a cry!” The wilderness is within.
Yet, time and time again, the wilderness theme of the Old Testament Scriptures makes it abundantly clear that the wilderness is also the place of redemption, the place of being called back to God. How? Through learning. The Greek idea of learning through suffering, wonderfully captured for instance in the story of Odysseus whose wanderings give us one of the words for a journey, an odyssey, is complemented by the Hebrew idea of learning through obedience in The Book of Exodus that gives us another word for a journey, an exodus. That is par excellence the story of Israel in the wilderness, liberated from Egyptian slavery but also having to learn what that liberation truly means. It means learning the will of God for our humanity. The wilderness of Sinai becomes the place of the giving of the Law and the struggle of Israel to learn to live by the Law of God, to be the people of the Law. It remains fundamental to the Christian struggle, too.
The wilderness journey of the Exodus shapes the story of the wilderness temptations of Christ. It explicitly recalls the idea of the people of Israel being tempted in the wilderness, temptations which are clearly seen as putting God to the test whether it is about “manna in the wilderness” or “water from a stricken rock”. God’s provisions for us in the wilderness journey of our lives are set in the context of human temptation. They are all about demanding that God be accountable to us. All of that comes to fullest expression in the story of Christ’s temptations.
In other words, the temptations of Christ are our temptations with respect to “the flesh, the world and the devil” over and against what God seeks and wills for our good. Jesus goes into the wilderness with a purpose. That is the significance of him being led or thrown into the wilderness by the Spirit. The purpose is to do battle with satan, to be tempted by the devil, to take on the tempter, the one who puts God to the test. What is at issue? The truth of God.
To turn “stones into bread”; to “throw thyself down from the pinnacle of the temple”; to worship the devil in return for “all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them”, what is all of that except a denial of the truth of God and of your own creation? What is all of that except the colossal folly of all sin, namely, the presumption to think that it is all about us? To the contrary, we live and can only live “by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” the word that creates and recreates, the word that calls us into communion with God himself.
In the wilderness, Jesus is tempted by the devil. The temptations are our temptations and they are the ones to which we are so prone and susceptible in so many ways. And there is the profound biblical wisdom that we cannot overcome them ourselves through any power of our own. Why not? Sin. Our wills and our minds are affected by sin. We see “but in a glass darkly”. We do not do the good which we would do; we do the evil which we would not do. We confront the contradictions of our own hearts.
We confront our own temptations and our own sins in giving in to them. But the story of Christ’s temptations signals the whole meaning of the Lenten journey, the pageant of redemption. It is not just about our temptations but about the overcoming of them. Here his word counters and conquers the tempter’s subtle attempts to twist the scriptures to his purpose. On Good Friday we will see and hear the Word and Son of God bear the full and hideous reality of our sins; only so can sin and death be overcome.
The wilderness of Lent becomes the place of our learning the great goodness of God for our humanity. We can only go up to the Jerusalem of God with Jesus, going with the one who wills to overcome all that belongs to our disconnect with God and his redeemed people. What is the overcoming? Simply the love of the Son for the Father which is the deeper meaning of Christ’s last word to the tempter. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God and him only shalt thou serve”. The word ‘only’ is the New Testament addition to the Old Testament text.
The wilderness is the place of the restored relation of God and man but only through the Son. We learn something about ourselves in the one who suffers our sufferings, the one who overcomes our temptations. It all starts with the story of the temptations of Christ.
“Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness,
to be tempted by the devil”
Fr. David Curry
Lent 1, 2015