Our Place in the Wilderness
First Sunday of Lent, Year A
“Christ in the Wilderness,” by Ivan Kramskoi
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 | Psalm 32 | Romans 5:12-19 | Matthew 4:1-11
Like many of us, I have romantic notions of wilderness. I love the outdoors as a place where I may forget my alienation from the natural world and thereby feel less alienated from myself. Furthermore, being outdoors quiets my soul and it is easier to know myself close to God and to hear the voice of God. That many distractions are absent only helps with that. And yet, our encounters with wilderness are always from the comfort of civilization to which we plan to return. This does not diminish its therapeutic and spiritual value but this may not have been the experience of Jesus, nor of the desert fathers and mothers.
We have other ways of understanding wilderness, for we speak of it metaphorically. The metaphor describes an experience of isolation from the world, from an established discourse, of not being heard or understood, rightly or wrongly. And we may describe changed political circumstances as a wilderness in which we feel lost. This is, I think, closer to the experience of wilderness that Jesus endured.
However, wilderness, even one like this, is not a place of the absence of God. After all, it was the Spirit that led Jesus into the wilderness. We have long regarded the diminishment of the church in the Western hemisphere as a time for renewal. It turns out that the current wilderness is also a time of testing.
In this parable (both George MacDonald and Robert Farrar Capon regard the story of the temptation of Jesus as a parable), Satan does not tempt Jesus to do evil things. MacDonald tells us that Jesus was not tempted with evil but to evil. Jesus’s hunger is real. To seek to invoke faith is not a bad thing, and to challenge the empire is what Jesus embodied, for empires demand an allegiance that belongs to God alone. Later in his ministry Jesus feeds the crowds, speaks of his body as the temple, and announces the nearness of the reign of God.
What is striking is that Jesus demonstrates his power, even in his famished state, by refusing to use his power for his own purposes. It is the inversion of power. Jesus remains committed to the will of the Father (which is for the world God loves) and the clearest indication of this commitment is that he does not act on his own, nor for himself.
This is challenging for a culture that is result-oriented. All of us can recite a list of accomplishments and things we are proud of, and we are taught to think this way. Performance reviews only affirm this bias. This then may be our temptation, to judge faithfulness by outcomes, not by kenosis. I ration my news intake, yet what I saw of the protests in Minneapolis was that they were guided by faithfulness to the principles of non-violence, of not wanting to become what one protests, of recognizing the humanity even in one’s enemy, despite the fact that one likely wanted to see more immediate results. I heard echoes of Paul and Silas singing, faith as an act of defiance. The noblest exercise of faith, says George MacDonald, is to act with uncertainty of the result.
The church still has power, however, diminished it may be. The question we are asked is whether we can we conceive for the church’s power and for our own to be put in the service of others, not for our own plans, designs, or institutional survival. On a theoretical level we have always known this, yet our time may offer more opportunity for practice.
As Jesus refuses to use his power on his own behalf I cannot help but see a correlation to an epistemology from below. In a piece on human dignity, Vincent Lloyd writes that “those who have the most reason to doubt the wisdom of the world, who are least captivated by the libido dominandi, ought to serve as guides to Christian thought and practice.”
What we see in the way Jesus responds to the temptations is a foreshadowing of what is to come in his ministry. It is also what we contemplate in this season of Lent. God’s power is revealed in suffering.
The church is at its truest and most faithful when it emulates Jesus’s inversion of power, thus embodying the presence of God.
References:
• George MacDonald, Creation in Christ – Unspoken Sermons, edited and abridged by Rolland Hein, Vancouver, BC: 2004 Regent College Publishing
• Vincent Lloyd, Human Dignity Is Black Dignity, Church Life Journal, 16 June 2020