Matthew 4:1-11 (CEB)
Then the Spirit led Jesus up into the wilderness so that the devil might tempt him. 2 After Jesus had fasted for forty days and forty nights, he was starving. 3 The tempter came to him and said, “Since you are God’s Son, command these stones to become bread.”
4 Jesus replied, “It’s written, People won’t live only by bread, but by every word spoken by God.”
5 After that the devil brought him into the holy city and stood him at the highest point of the temple. He said to him, 6 “Since you are God’s Son, throw yourself down; for it is written, I will command my angels concerning you, and they will take you up in their hands so that you won’t hit your foot on a stone.”
7 Jesus replied, “Again it’s written, Don’t test the Lord your God.”
8 Then the devil brought him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. 9 He said, “I’ll give you all these if you bow down and worship me.”
10 Jesus responded, “Go away, Satan, because it’s written, You will worship the Lord your God and serve only him.” 11 The devil left him, and angels came and took care of him.
Let the words of my mouth
and the meditations of my heart
be pleasing to you,
Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
I used to spend a lot of days in wilderness. The scout troop I was a part of in Maryville went camping at least monthly. Not RV camping. Not glamping. I took a tent that was probably thirty years old at the time and a sleeping bag rated for something below freezing attached to a backpack that was outdated a generation before me.
Old school, y’all.
None of this high-tech, gas stove, interior-frame backpack, dome tent silliness. I went camping. I roughed it in the wilderness.
I was grunting before Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor made it cool. Back in the days when he was getting kicked out of Central Michigan University for some illicit college silliness.
The wilderness can test you. It can make you smarter. It can make you stronger. It can also break you. It can make you never want to leave the comfort of home again. You either learn to adapt or you fail to thrive.
In Christianity’s early days, quite a lot of followers of The Way chose to live lives of seclusion. They followed John the Baptist’s model of asceticism, of self-denial. They found caves in the Near Eastern deserts and waited for the impending Day of Wrath, or tested their resolve by forsaking all earthly comforts in an effort to get closer to the Creator. In the wilderness, away from the distractions of modern culture and convenience, they could find proximity to the Divine.
I’ll offer this reflection on that practice: it can be helpful. I would even recommend it occasionally. Go find a wilderness place, a place away from distraction and noise. Go let go of all the worry and stress. Work through them one item at a time until what’s left is you. Then open yourself to an awareness, an attentiveness to God. God will not fail to meet you. God is already right there with you, waiting to be rediscovered, waiting to greet you with a smile the size of an upside-down rainbow and a hug warmer than grandma’s quilt.
It can be helpful. Can be. It’s not going to work for everybody, though. Maybe you can’t handle the mosquitos and the cold and the wet and the permeating smell of campfire smoke and probably a good bit of your own body stench once you realize that it’s your deodorant that’s drawing the mosquitos in. Maybe the stillness itself is too much, and the distractions are exactly what keep the swirling paranoia and neurosis in your brain at bay.
Maybe it’s too much to go all in all at once. That’s okay. Some of us have to stick a toe in the pool before we sneak the rest of us in. Not all of us are cannonballers.
But try. I’m convinced that it’s necessary, at least from time to time. It is a vital practice to shed all the extraneous stuff and find our way to a place where we’re interacting with the Stillness, the Harmony of Creation, the Unity of the Universe that is God’s infinite imagination.
And if the paranoia and the neuroses are what you find when you quiet yourself, then they are what you need to work through to get to the stillness that they’re guarding you from. But I promise you that you can get through them, too. It’ll take some time and some cooperation with folks who know the intricate trails of the human psyche, but that is a wilderness you can navigate.
Find that still place, that quiet place. Find that place where you can still yourself enough to hear God’s voice. It’ll be easier to find the next time you come. The trails may change a bit over time, but you’ll learn them. You’ll even learn the particular ways that they tend to change, where the erosion is frequent, where the nettles want to creep in, where the twilight transforms a grove into a place you never want to leave.
Find that place. Find that stillness.
You’ll find that what once was a wilderness is actually a garden.
(It’s funny to discover that everything God creates is good.)
In that garden is an opportunity to discover the difference between life and death, between good and evil. It’s a choice. It is always a choice. It might even be that what happens in the garden has less to do with a mystical (mythical) tree and more to do with a conscious choice contrary to what God has in mind for us.
Life and death.
Every evil choice that we make kills us just a little more. Every day we eat of that tree, we bring death to ourselves and to the creation around us. With every bite, we the world gets a little darker. The cross gets a little closer.
But there’s a world beyond that cross.
We’re not there yet. We know it’s coming, but we have to get through the wilderness first. Jesus knew there wasn’t an easy way out. He couldn’t turn the rocks into bread or dive off the pinnacle of the temple or take the world by storm. He had to face the wilderness, to take the hard road.
He had to go to the cross.
But thank God he does that for us, because death has no victory and hell has no power.
That’s the already and it’s the not yet.
It’s the promise that is already true but still coming.
Now we journey with him. Don’t rush through it. Let these days in the wilderness strip you of all the excess. Let them put to death all that is slowly killing you.
What God wants for you is life, and life abundantly. It’s coming, but you have to face the quiet and the wilderness first.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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