“Into the Wilderness”
Psalm 106:1, 6-14b
Mark 1:9-15
Allen Huff
Jonesborough Presbyterian Church
2/18/24
1Praise the Lord!
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good,
for his steadfast love endures forever.
6 Both we and our ancestors have sinned;
we have committed iniquity, have done wickedly.
7 Our ancestors, when they were in Egypt,
did not consider your wonderful works;
they did not remember the abundance of your steadfast love
but rebelled against the Most High at the Red Sea.
8 Yet he saved them for his name’s sake,
so that he might make known his mighty power.
9 He rebuked the Red Sea, and it became dry;
he led them through the deep as through a desert.
10 So he saved them from the hand of the foe
and delivered them from the hand of the enemy.
11 The waters covered their adversaries;
not one of them was left.
12 Then they believed his words;
they sang his praise.
13 But they soon forgot his works;
they did not wait for his counsel.
14 But they had a wanton craving in the wilderness
and put God to the test in the desert. (NRSV)
9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10 And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove upon him.11 And a voice came from the heavens, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13 He was in the wilderness forty days, tested by Satan, and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him.
14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God 15 and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.” (NRSV)
“And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.”
As a metaphor, wilderness compares with mountains and seas, light and darkness. It evokes wonder, awe, and even fear. And as creatures made in God’s image, while there’s always something holy and bright about us, there’s also something wild and feral within us. Wilderness speaks to both aspects of this image.
John the Baptist crawls out of the wilderness like some sort of primordial life form. His prophetic passion is the gift of his intimate connection to the holy wildness that is God. And John comes not to tame and control the wilderness around and within all things, but to prepare the way for God’s Christ within it.
When Jesus arrives, he receives John’s baptism. And when he rises from the water, he sees the heavens crack open above him.
You! says a voice, you are my beloved son.
Then, using the same verb he uses to describe Jesus casting out demons, Mark says that the Spirit “drove [Jesus] out” into the wilderness. So, after his baptism, Jesus gets cast out. He gets exorcised, by the Spirit, into the wilderness where his companions are wild beasts, angels, and his own swirling thoughts.
If you’ve ever spent time in some remote place, especially alone, you may have experienced how quickly your own civilized mind can become as wild and terrifying as the beasts you’re afraid to encounter. But remember, we’re using wilderness as a descriptive metaphor. So, it doesn’t have to be a forest, or a desert, or a swamp. The boundary of spiritual wilderness lies along that ever-shifting line between who we are and who we’re becoming in God.
For forty days, Jesus consciously walks that line, discovering what is true for all of us: His life is not his own. Within him there stirs a wildness that surpasses even that of his locust-eating, thunder-voiced cousin John. Jesus’ wildness is the life and death kind. It is resurrection wildness.
When God reveals this inherent wildness to Jesus at his baptism, a door to unprecedented possibility opens. He may be Joseph and Mary’s boy, but things lie at his fingertips that the greatest prophets and kings never knew. Out in his wilderness, Jesus realizes that he’s a man on whom God has laid a sanctifying call, a call that demands exceptional holiness. And God has given him remarkable gifts with which to be faithful to that calling. Uniquely called and empowered, what will he do?
Mark’s quick, two-verse account of Jesus’ temptation seems rather anticlimactic. Still, wandering in the wilderness “with the wild beasts” while being “waited on” by angels is a compelling image of the human soul in conflict with itself.
For Jesus, wilderness is that conflicted place where he stands utterly vulnerable to the temptation to use his extraordinary gifts for selfish gain. Luke and Matthew include specific details for something only Jesus experiences, while Mark just lays the issue before us in all its metaphorical starkness. Like all of us, Jesus wrestles with his own inner beasts and angels, his own light and darkness.
Yes, I said darkness. If Jesus didn’t face the real possibility of using his gifts for selfish gain, what good is it to say that he was tempted?
Docetism is an old, old heresy, but it remains alive and well. In an effort to protect Jesus from the taint of human weakness, docetism claims that Jesus only appeared human. Docetists get no support from Mark, though. Even in his fleeting account of Jesus temptation, Mark reveals a man bound up in the kind of tortured struggle that all humans deal with.
We all wrestle with temptation. We’re never completely free of the spiritual tug-of-war going on between the wild beasts and the attending angels within us. Writing to the Romans, Paul pens one of the most memorable expressions of that struggle saying, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want…but the evil I do not want is what I do.” That’s not quibbling. That’s the language of honest, deep-wilderness struggle.
We all have characteristics that we cherish. And we all have parts of ourselves that we keep hidden—things about us that we’re ashamed of, or were told to be ashamed of, and things that we find contrary to the self we want to project. Our hearts know these things about ourselves even when our minds deny and repress them. Because of that struggle, when we recognize our dark tendencies in others, we tend to despise those folks. We pile our self-loathing onto those we label as beasts, while we claim to be angels.
If you want to see this in action, just watch a race for political office. The whole right/wrong, good/bad rhetoric is pure wilderness wrangling. Whether in a government, a business, a church, or a family, every personal attack, every demonizing power play, becomes, in some way, an outward expression of the spiritual struggle going on inside us. To become conscious of that struggle, and to live in that new consciousness, is to discover wisdom and clarity. It is to be healed of our fear.
In the synoptic gospels, Jesus leaves the wilderness and jumps immediately and fearlessly into his counter-cultural, Caesar-defying ministry. He lives a life that will get him killed.
In John’s gospel, there’s no temptation-in-the-wilderness scene, but Jesus does square off with his mama. At the wedding at Cana, Mary challenges her son to claim his gifts and to spare the oblivious host a bitter embarrassment, and the chief steward a punishment that is, potentially, even more bitter.
Tempted to remain safe and anonymous, Jesus tries to put her off, but Mamawon’t have it.
“Do whatever he tells you,” Mary says to the servants.
Following the revelatory water-to-wine event in Cana, Jesus goes straight to Jerusalem and clears moneychangers from the temple with a whip—another prophetic act he cannot undo, and which neither the powerful nor the penniless can forget.
Through temptation, we can come to understand ourselves more deeply. The temptations that really matter put us face-to-face with our most debilitating fears and our most transcendent gifts. Overcoming temptation means repenting from greed and committing our gifts to the well-being of all rather than to selfish gain. And by definition, selfish gain always comes, in some way, at the expense of others.
Old Ebenezer Scrooge epitomizes the man of selfish gain. And not only do his miserly ways make life hard for Bob Cratchit and his family, even Scrooge himself lives a meager existence, so obsessed is he with getting, having, and controlling. Not until the wilderness experience of his Christmas dreams does he confront the full weight of the suffering he causes to others and to himself. And only when he recognizes both himself and his wealth as gifts to be shared, does he repent into a life of joyful witness to the at-hand realm of God.
God’s realm of grace is present. At hand. Within and among us. You are uniquely gifted for grateful and joyful witness.
What will you do?
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