Mark 1: 9-15
First Sunday in
Lent/ 26th February 2012
We begin with Jesus in the
wilderness. The lectionary for this First Sunday in Lent considers this the
proper place to begin our journey through these forty days plus Sundays. But why here?
Why in a wilderness? This is the only question I want explore this
morning. Why a wilderness?
Mark’s Gospel is marvelously
simple. It’s the shortest. He’s brief and to the point in the telling of
a story. And he’s fast. The pace, the movement of the Gospel is
swift. We only heard six verses this
morning, yet these verses covered Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, Jesus’
temptation over forty days, and then the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. The narrative flow here also demands of our
attention. Mark crafts his Gospel,
explicates his theological bent by the way he orders the events. Again, just look at the flow of these six verses;
we could characterize them this way:
Baptism—Wilderness—Purpose. We could say: Baptism— Temptation—Purpose. But note that Mark doesn't seem to make much
of the temptation itself. There’s no
reference here to three temptations, no exchange between Jesus and Satan. All Mark says is that “He was…tempted by
Satan.” But twice here in just two
verses, and given Mark’s economy of words, twice we find reference to the
setting: wilderness. And then
there’s a reference to “wild beasts,” the inhabitants of the wilderness. That’s why I prefer to speak here of Baptism—Wilderness—Purpose.
Why the wilderness? Where is this wilderness? It’s probably the harsh, desert region of
Judea not far from the Galilee. We don’t
know for sure. It’s definitely a place;
but it’s also more than a place, it’s a word that looms large in Israel’s
imagination, being a people that lived on the edge of the desert. The wilderness is a metaphor for everything
that is untamed and wild in creation.
It’s dangerous. It’s difficult to
live there, for anything to live there long.
It’s devoid of water. It’s a
place where very little grows, at least little that one can eat. Hence it doesn’t easily sustain human life.
Because it is devoid of human life it’s perceived as a place that has received
God’s judgment. The wilderness could describe
what the opposite of God’s blessing looks like, feels like. But it’s also the very place where God chooses to show up and surprise us. Just this past week in the Thursday morning
Bible study we were reading Isaiah 35, which describes the future blessing of
Yahweh this way: “The wilderness and the
dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus
it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and signing. …They shall see the glory of the LORD, the
majesty of our God,” in the wilderness.
“For waters shall break forth in the wilderness,” Isaiah affirms, and
streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty
ground springs of water; …” (Isaiah 35:1-2, 6c-7b).
But why a wilderness for Jesus? A surface reading of Mark's Gospel gives us
at least two reasons: first,
because Jesus was baptized and, second,
because the Spirit sent him there to be tested. What is it about baptism
that leads him to the wilderness? What is
the connection here? What is it about
being identified as a child of God that then requires such a journey? Is this where baptism leads, into the
wilderness? And what is it about the
wilderness that from this experience – and only after plumbing the depths of
this experience – that Jesus is able to emerge with a clearer sense of his
purpose, of his mission? Only then can
he preach with conviction that the kingdom of God has indeed come near and thus
calls everyone with ears to hear to believe the good news. The wilderness is essential.
Why is Jesus in the wilderness? He’s there because the Spirit sent him
there. Not as a punishment or judgment. He’s send by the gracious Spirit of God to
that place, for a time – a pivotal time – in Jesus’ life. He doesn't resist the pull to go there or avoid
it or run from it. Led by the Spirit, he enters it; he faces it, and
discovers something there that shapes the rest of his life. He discovers there, I suspect, a wisdom that
can only be known in the wilderness.
Perhaps that is why the Spirit leads him there—because there are things
that can only be known there. There are
things Jesus needed to learn there.
The wilderness can be a place “out there,”
a place you go to visit or a way to describe what is all around you; an
external place. The wilderness can also
be a place “in here,” within one’s heart, or mind, or soul. Whether it’s a wilderness “out there” or “in
there,” most Christian mystics are unanimous in affirming that some kind of
wilderness experience is required for us to really discover the full
implications of our baptismal identity as children of God. Some kind of wilderness experience is
required for us to discover the depths of God’s love for us, to discern the
reach of God’s claim upon our lives, to know the purpose, the calling of our
lives. We cannot discover these things
apart from such an experience.
Sometimes we have to go, literally,
to wild places, to fierce landscapes in order to discover or acknowledge what’s
going on in the wild, fierce landscapes of our hearts and souls. There’s so much in our day-to-day living that
distracts us from listening to our hearts, that hinders us from attending to
the needs of the soul, that prevents us from experiencing God’s love, that
therefore hide from us the purpose and calling of our lives. We will not discover these things by staying
home.
Perhaps that’s why by the third or
fourth century Christians, known as the Desert Mothers and Fathers, started
leaving the cities and towns of the Roman Empire and went deep into the deserts
of Syria and Egypt to discover God there.
This movement became the seed for the development of monasticism. The
Protestant Reformation took a dim view of monasticism, we know, and broke up
these reclusive communities. But you
don’t have to become a monastic to know that these wild, remote, fierce places
serve a purpose.
Because,
you see, there are things that only the wilderness can teach us. Nudos
amat eremos, Jerome (c.347-420) wrote in a letter to Heliodorus. Nudos
amat ermemos. “The desert loves to
strip bear.”[1] It strips bear the ego as we quickly learn
there that we are not at the center of our universe or any universe. The Desert Mothers and Fathers often talked
about apatheia, apathy or
indifference. The wilderness or desert
is completely indifferent to us. It
doesn’t really care about us. It doesn’t
care if we exist or not. It’s
silent. And in the silence of such
places we have nothing to say, nothing to prove, nothing to think, nothing to
defend.[2] We come to face ourselves.
Presbyterian theologian Belden Lane
has written extensively and beautifully on the centrality of what he calls
“fierce landscapes” in the Jewish and Christian traditions. The wilderness or the desert is a metaphor
for “that uncharted terrain beyond the edges of the seemingly secure and
structured world in which we take such confidence, a world of affluence and
order we cannot imagine ever ending. Yet
it does. And at the point where the
world begins to crack, where brokenness and disorientation suddenly overtake
us, there we step into the wide, silent plains of a desert we had never known
existed.”[3]
We “cross its sands,” he writes,
“unwelcomed, stripped of influence and reputation, the desert caring nothing
for the worries and warped sense of self-importance dragged along behind
us. There in the desert everything is
lost. Absolutely everything. The extent of its unrelenting indifference is
devastating. This awareness, at first,
is terrifying.” Lane has spent a lot of
time actually camping, hiking, living in the desert. His exploration of physical terrain parallels
his own personal, individual deserts of human suffering and loss. Through his time in the wilderness and the
desert he discovered something, however, that only makes sense to the one who
has ventured there. He says, “… if we
stay long enough, resisting the blind panic that gnaws at our minds, we discover,
beyond hope and all caring, that ‘in the end we’re saved by the things that ignore
us.’”[4] What he means by this is there’s a kind of
blessing that comes when we are no longer driven and caught by the wishes of
our egos, egos that love to be at the center of attention. And what that happens we discover that who we
really are is deeper than our egos,
deeper than the masks and personas we create—often in fear, often to hide from
our woundedness or brokenness or shame.
We’re saved by the things that ignore us—and nothing ignores us like the
wilderness. The desert doesn’t care about
drives of our egos. Evagrius of Pontus
(349-399) said, “Desert apatheia
(indifference) has a daughter whose name is love.” Love is borne and born by
indifference. When we then discover that
there is a part of us that is deeper than the ego, that deeper than the ego and
the persona is a soul, a true, core self and that soul or true self is loved
unconditionally, not for what you and I can achieve or do, but for who we are,
you and I, as a child of God.
The wilderness can then become the
place of grace, of healing, of transformation.
This was certainly true for Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), the noted
Swiss psychoanalyst of the last century. Jung was one of the first innovators
in the field of psychology at the beginning of the 20th century. He
was born into a long line of Reformed pastors, but felt troubled by the lack of
passion and conviction in his father’s faith and the general hollowness of the
church. He studied medicine at the
University of Basel and then eventually specialized in psychology and worked at
the Burghölzli Clinic in Zurich where he treated patients and developed some of
his theories. In time he became very
good friends with Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and used his psychotherapeutic
theories with patients at the clinic.
Freud considered Jung to be his “disciple,” (Freud’s word) his successor
in the field of psychiatry. Jung wrote
extensively on psychiatry and became a shining star in the field. But Jung and Freud had a falling out, a major
split in 1912, primarily over matters of religion. Jung wasn’t attending church by this time,
but he saw wisdom in things of the spirit.
Freud considered religious faith and obsessions as neurotic. Freud was a materialist; Jung believed that
human beings are more than just matter.
They broke their professional and personal friendship. This was very painful for Jung, who viewed
Freud as father figure. And then Jung
went into a deep, deep depression. His
life fell apart all around him. He had
everything one could ask for, everything to make his ego happy – professional
success, power and influence in the world, wife and children, he married into
money (a whole lot of money). He entered
into a time of deep darkness, of foreboding dreams and visions. Then on the 12th of November 1913,
at his lowest point he wrote these words in his journal: “Meine
Seele, meine Seele, wo bist Du?” “My soul, my soul. Where are you?” “My soul, where are you? Do you hear me? I speak, I call you—are you there? I am weary, my soul.” Courageously, he entered into what he
described as a wilderness, a desert, and allowed himself to be stripped
bare. “My soul leads me to the desert,
into the desert of my own self.” He went
into the desert; he wrote, “to find
their souls, the ancients [meaning the Desert Mothers and Fathers] went into
the desert.” He writes, “I did not think
that my soul is a desert, a barren, hot desert, dusty and without drink.”[5] He went down into his depths, below the ego,
into the core of his being, to listen to his soul, his core self. From this period, which lasted for years, he
emerged with most of his psychoanalytic theories that he then spent the rest of
his life exploring, writing about, and applying. A substantial part of what Jung is known for
today came from that wilderness experience.
He discovered there something of the grace of God and wrestled with his
demons and emerged with a strong sense of who he was (and who he wasn’t) and a
clear sense of his calling in life.
I share this story because it’s
striking that Jesus went through a similar process. From his time in the wilderness he emerges
with his purpose intact, proclaiming and preaching the good news of God. He knows
the good news, not in the abstract, not because it was taught to him in “rabbinic
school,” but—I have to believe–because of something he experienced and knew to
the very core of his being. The Kingdom
of God’s love is near – very
near. There is good news for people in
the wilderness, but we have to enter the wilderness to find it.
This is the truth that the
wilderness teaches and it can only be known there. You can’t find it in books, coming from a
pulpit or sitting in the pews or from the most loving church school teacher in
the world, you can’t find it in a university, it can’t be taught except by
experience. You have to experience it yourself.
The desert calls us to give up our hold on life[6]
– to discover there who we are and whose we and then allow our lives to be
shaped by this grace. This can only be
found in the wilderness. And by God’s
grace the Spirit intentionally sends us there.
Image: The Great Escarpment, Namibia.
[1] Cited in Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes: Exploring
Desert and Mountain Spirituality (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 23.
[2] Cf. Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See (New
York: Crossroad, 2009), 54.
[3] Lane, 195.
[4] Lane, 195.
[5] Carl Gustav Jung, The Red Book/Liber Novus, edited and introduced
by Sonu Shamdasani (New York: W. W.
Norton & Co, 2009), 232-236. I had a chance to see his Black Book, opened
to these words from 12th November 1913, when it was on display at
the Rubin Museum in New York City several years ago.
[6] Cf. the quotation from the
worship bulletin, “How much can you give up? the desert asks. And how much can you love? Only in offering
the severest answers to these two questions does one ever discover, at last,
the solace of fierce landscapes.” Lane, 230.
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