Day: February 22, 2026

“Forty years long was I grieved with that generation and said. “It is a people that do err in their hearts, for they have not known my ways” (Ps. 95, Venite)

The words of the Venite allude to the forty days of Lent in scriptural terms. Theologically, it raises the question about God grieving but identifies that rather anthropomorphic idea with our hearts and minds. What is the cause of this apparent ‘divine’ grief? It is captured in the previous two verses. “Today, O that ye would hear his voice: ‘Harden not your hearts as in the Provocation, as in the day of Temptation in the wilderness; when your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw my works’.”

Wilderness, temptation, grieving. These are all interconnected. “Then was Jesus led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” John Hackett’s formidable, exhaustive, and comprehensive 17th c. treatise of 21 sermons on “Christ’s Tentation”[sic] begins with the observation that the purpose of his going into the wilderness was not to fast but to be tempted; the fasting was secondary, just as Moses’ fasting for forty days on Mount Horeb was not an end in itself but for the purpose of receiving the Law.

What do we understand by wilderness? It is an ambiguous concept for ancients and for moderns. The wilderness can be a place of fearfulness and uncertainty, of chaos, as in the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh, where it is not just the fear of the unknown but the fear of the unknowable. For others the wilderness is a place of pure nature, unsullied by human activity, a notion, perhaps, best seen in the 20th century phenomenon of national parks, and now, the idea of wilderness sanctuaries where human intervention is held to a minimum or even denied. There is, too, the idea of the wilderness as a place of sanctuary and escape; wilderness as a kind of paradise away from the wilderness of the urban jungle.

In short, the wilderness as barren and desolate, empty and dangerous; the wilderness as a place of solitude; the wilderness of nature; the wilderness of man; the wilderness within; the wilderness without; the urban wilderness of inner city life; the suburban wilderness of empty boredom; the wilderness as an image of purposelessness, aimlessness, and of violence born out of that sense of meaninglessness; thus, the wilderness as an image of man’s destructiveness of himself and our world. Yet, in the story that begins the journey of Lent, there is another idea, the idea of the wilderness as the place of learning and understanding, the place of testing.

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