The Wilderness

This morning we hear the profound story of Jesus' temptation in the wilderness as described in Matthew’s Gospel. We need to recall that this event actually takes place right after Jesus is baptized by John, which of course we heard about right at the beginning of Epiphany. So picture it: Jesus is there with John and just as was reaffirmed last week at his transfiguration, we hear God the Father declare, “Jesus is my son, with whom I am well pleased,” and the Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus. But the Spirit doesn’t stop moving with Jesus’ baptism. Nope, the Spirit whisks Jesus away to be tested in the wilderness, an event foreshadowed by Israel’s own testing there. 

To this day, though we should know better, so many of us who have been raised with a mindset of ever more, ever better economic, social, cultural and personal progress - if we work hard, perform well, and be generally decent people - seem to assume that faith in God will, at the least, bring security, if not also visible worldly success in what it is what we desire and hold dear. Jesus’s own life should shatter that illusion. Born into a world that does not know him, accept him, care much about him, and that will facilitate his execution, he doesn’t even get a break when he first starts his God given, God fulfilled mission! Off he goes, off he’s not sent, but taken by God the Holy Spirit, himself, into the wilderness of the desert to be tested by Satan; just as took place with Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, with Israel, with Jonah and of course most famously, with Job.  

This period of testing was - for every one of these people - a refining process, much like the purification of gold or silver. The impurities are burned away until the metal reflects the image of the refiner. For Jesus, however, this testing or trial reveals that he has no impurities that require refining. When he responds to Satan, he shows us the perfect human life and reveals, in part, how he will overcome the snare of temptation in which Adam and Eve, and so you and I, get caught. In this testing, Jesus reveals that his ministry will consist of fulfilling God’s promise to gather all people to him by obeying his Father’s will. 

Already in the desert, standing atop a pinnacle where he could quell his own hunger, not for physical hunger but for righteousness, by exercising immediate judgment, overthrowing all evil i.e. all of us, Jesus sets his face to Jerusalem: not my will, but yours be done Father. Not in the way of Satan - not with condemnation or violence, not with political or media influence, not with money and connections - but by the will of God, trusting in God’s provision, trusting in the words God reveals himself through, our Scriptures, God, in Jesus’s own life, death and resurrection bears us up from the Fall, from sin, having thrown ourselves down from the pinnacle of grace to an assured death. 

Jesus bears us up, sets his face to Jerusalem, as he counters Adam and Eve’s presumption of self righteousness: I shall not eat of the tree of good and evil, I shall not put the Lord to the test. I shall have only one God, not you Satan, not my own will, but yours be done Father. 

And Jesus faces this trial with everything on the line. It’s not simply his own life - but the life of everyone who has, does or will ever exist. He faces these trials not just with the weight of the world on him, but unlike Job, having been there with God, “he was in the beginning with God,” when all things were created. 

And so knowing full well the scope of how every single heart, mind, soul and body will fare in this world. Knowing full well the utter joy and utter sorrow every one of us will experience through our life times. Knowing deeply the complex reasons behind our pain, our doubt, our violence of words and actions, our myriad of betrayals - large and small - of people who will say, “Lord, Lord” while sinning when they attach their political and social power and influence to his grace and the despair too often created by his own followers. Knowing full well that these people are as much in need of mercy and forgiveness as those who struggle desperately, fearfully, in the spotlight of social and religious judgement and exclusion, so often only partially, seeking God’s voice; the faint trickling of hope that seeps out of the rock of living water that is Jesus Christ in our own wilderness. 

Jesus goes into the wilderness desert willingly because he knows that this is where each one of us will go. He goes after us, his wandering sheep who have jumped from the pinnacle of Eden, of green pastures filled with food, down into the barren soil of a fallen world where the bread of life, the trickling stream of grace, seems so hard to come by. He goes to our deserts - those places where we feel tempted and tested to pursue our own ways - and offers himself to us as the true bread of life. He calls us to step out of our stubbornness, our defensiveness, our hardness of dried bones, to be reborn in the water of his own life. AMEN.