February 21, 2021 “Wilderness” – Mark 1:9-15

Mark 1:9-15
“Wilderness”
February 21, 2021 – First Sunday in Lent

The 2007 film, “Into the Wild,” is the true story of a young man named Chris McCandless. He abandoned everything after college, gave away all his savings, and made his way to Alaska. He eventually ended up living in an abandoned bus in wild country near Denali National Park, 28 miles west of the town of Healy. When his food ran out, he found himself unable to cross the swollen Teklanika river and became weak. He died there in the bus, apparently of starvation. He left a journal and a final note that read, “I HAVE HAD A HAPPY LIFE AND THANK THE LORD. GOODBYE AND MAY GOD BLESS ALL!”

Since McCandless’ adventure and death in the early 1990s, dozens of people made the “pilgrimage” into the Alaskan bush to view the “magic bus” in which he lived and died. At least two of those also died, trying to cross the same river that had daunted him. The lesson is perhaps that, no matter how we romanticize it, wilderness is wild.

Which may help us get a better grasp on Jesus’ journey into the wilderness, driven by the Holy Spirit, as Mark tells us in verse 12. Jesus was not just taking a nice, comfortable spiritual retreat, like I’m beginning on Monday. He headed out into dangerous, desolate territory where survival was not guaranteed.

Our text today overlaps bits we’ve already heard recently. We covered the part at the beginning about Jesus’ baptism six weeks ago. The last couple verses began our reading just four weeks ago as we recalled the calling of the first disciples. Those who planned the lectionary readings for each Sunday wanted to put the temptation of Jesus on the first Sunday in Lent, just as it is in the years we read Matthew or Luke. Mark’s version of the temptation story is so brief they felt they had to pad it out on either end. But there is enough here in just two verses. I’m going to focus only on those.

As I suggested a moment ago, people in ancient times had a completely different perspective on wilderness from what many of us have. I fell in love with wilderness 54 years ago when at age eleven I strapped on an ill-fitting canvas backpack and followed a line of other boys up a trail into Kings Canyon National Park in California. I had enjoyed the outdoors before, fishing along a creek in Arizona, a few car camping trips and day hikes with my Scout troop before this trek, but I was about to plunge into genuine wilderness for five full days. There were no cars, no restrooms, no shelter, no other “services” for miles and miles. There were just pine forest, wildly rushing streams to cross, patches of snow, and granite rocks everywhere. I discovered that I loved it.

I was far from alone in my generation. We made REI, Eddie Bauer, North Face and other esoteric backpacker’s brands into household names. But modern love for wilderness makes it a bit harder to understand how it was for Jesus. So I need to remember the things I did not love about my first adventure in wilderness. It was early season. Streams ran fast and high with snow melt. Our trail was along Bubb’s Creek for several miles. Crossing it was tricky and a little hazardous. At various points along the way we heard the buzz of rattlesnakes and once came upon one right in the middle of the trail. Going “number 2” was more difficult than I’d ever experienced. And with only a thin foam mat and a cheap sleeping bag between me and the ground, I was colder and more uncomfortable at night than I wanted to be. It was exciting and beautiful, but it was also sometimes disagreeable and downright dangerous.

The word “wilderness” in the Bible is both like and unlike what we might mean by it. Versions that translate it “desert” are unfortunate except that the word does mean a “deserted place,” one with no human habitation or presence. “Desert” does connote some of the dryness of most wilderness there in Palestine. We just need to avoid images of empty stretches of sand like the Arabian desert.

We need, then, to get the hostile sense of the whole experience for Jesus, starting with the fact in verse 12 that “the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” That word used for what the Spirit did to Jesus is the same word used down in verse 34 when it says that Jesus “cast out many demons.” The Holy Spirit of God “cast” Jesus “out” into the wilderness. As I said, this wasn’t a retreat, wasn’t a pleasant walk in the woods. It was a trial, a test, as we’ll see in a bit.

The first readers of Mark’s Gospel would have immediately perceived the significance of the next part of verse 13. Those of you who’ve read the Bible a lot probably do too. “He was in the wilderness forty days.” The two great Jewish heroes of faith that we just saw last week on the Mount of Transfiguration with Jesus had their own forty-day adventures. In Exodus 34:28 we learn that Moses spent forty days on Mt. Sinai writing down God’s commandments for a second time. In I Kings 19:8 Elijah journeys for forty days to Mt. Horeb. And our reading from Genesis 9 may have reminded you that the Flood through which Noah came lasted for forty days.

Of course the big Old Testament “forty” in the wilderness was the forty years the people of Israel spent in the wilderness before entering the promised land. Deuteronomy 8:2 explicitly says that God led them through those forty years, “in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commandments.” All those forties in the Old Testament were like that, times of testing. God deliberately put His people into those situations and then brought them through.

We need now to look at our translation of the word we usually zero in on for this story. Mark says Jesus was there in the wilderness forty days, “tempted by Satan.” But just as it is in the Lord’s Prayer and other places in the New Testament, that word “tempt” or “temptation” can also mean “trial” or “testing.”

Yes, if you turn over to Matthew 4 or Luke 4, you find Jesus facing three specific temptations that Satan offers Him. But that whole conversation with the devil would have taken only a few minutes. It came at the end of the forty days. But the Lord was there in the wilderness all that time. Mark wants us to understand that the whole thing was a time of testing, of trial by Satan. Matthew and Luke tell us he went without food for that duration. Every day was a test, then, of whether Jesus would focus on God and what the Spirit of God wanted of Him, rather than focusing on His own need and hunger.

The wilderness is wild. The wilderness is dangerous. Those who go into the wilderness driven by the Spirit, on truly spiritual journeys, will be tested and tried. In Christian history the people known as desert Fathers (and Mothers) were disciples who went to deserted places to be alone and seek God. They often found themselves in danger, but it was danger they brought with them. One of them, Antony, found himself attacked by many sinful thoughts. He prayed, “Lord, I want to be saved but those thoughts do not leave me alone.”[1]

Christians who went into the wilderness like Jesus may have thought they were leaving the temptations of the world behind, but they found that vices like pride and lust and gluttony and envy followed them out into the wilderness and attacked them there. They came to understand very well what Jesus faced alone in His wilderness, His temptation to abandon the hard course of faithfulness to His Father and the Spirit’s direction, the temptation to take some easier path.

As I said, Mark does not tell us about Jesus’ specific temptations like the other Gospels do, but he does add a line in verse 13 that Matthew and Luke don’t have, “and he was with the wild beasts.” Most of the dangerous creatures of that time are now gone from Palestine, like lions and the Syrian brown bear, but there are still a few leopards there. Poisonous snakes, at least three species of viper, were also a hazard. Those wild beasts that Mark notes for us highlight the fact that the wilderness was both spiritually and physically dangerous for Jesus.

The danger of wild animals can also be an image of our own spiritual foolishness at times. Even in our overwhelmingly civilized world, there are regular news stories of people who underestimated the wildness of wild beasts. In Alaska again, Timothy Treadwell made a name for himself by spending many summers in grizzly bear territory and filming 100 hours of the creatures, sometimes with himself very close to them. It all caught up with him in 2003, when Treadwell and his girlfriend met bears who had faced a food shortage all summer. The wilderness is wild. Parts of their bodies were found later and other parts found in the stomach of a large bear that was killed later near their camp.

Remembering that the wilderness is wild and dangerous is a good message for our own time. In the pandemic, our own homes have become a sort of isolated wilderness in which we are very much alone with our own selves and our thoughts. It’s been a spiritual trial for many as we face not only those more glaring vices like lust and gluttony, but with more subtle ones. We have wild beasts of our own. The one I find most dangerous is what those desert Christians called acedia. We often translate it as “sloth,” but that makes it sound like simple laziness. It’s deeper and worse than that. It’s a kind of spiritual despair, a giving up of hope in God and in what is good. It can be lurking even in all the things to which we turn, trying to keep busy in these times, whether it’s on-line work or home repair or gardening or walks in the woods. If we do those things to keep ourselves from facing our own souls in relation to God, then they may become wild beasts ready to rip us apart.

So now most of all we need this little story in two verses of Jesus in the wilderness, facing temptation, facing the testing of His soul. Because wilderness is very possibly where you and I are in these days. The reassuring message is that Jesus came through it, that He won out in the wilderness. While we may suffer in the wilderness because of our sins, Peter wrote in one of our readings today that “Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.”

The writer to the Hebrews, chapter 4, verse 15 tells us: “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin.” That sympathy, especially with our weakness, is the good news that, even in the wilderness we are not alone.

Jesus is there in whatever wilderness the pandemic may have created for us. We sit feeling alone and sorry for ourselves. We’re dejected that we’ve gained weight and lost mental alertness. We can’t remember what day it is and all we look forward to is the next episode of some mindless television series. We find it hard to pray and impossible to feel like watching a pre-recorded worship service is really church. We get angry with others or at the news, partly because we are so very angry with ourselves. The wild beasts are biting and tearing at us.

The wild beasts around Jesus, though, may also tell a different story. We may remember how Adam and Eve seemed to get along with and name all the animals after the Creation. Our reading about Noah reminds us of the miraculous co-existence of all those beasts and human beings on the Ark. Isaiah 11 promised that “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” And the book of Daniel shows us God shutting up the mouths of lions so His prophet could be in their den with them unharmed.

For Jesus to be out there in the wilderness with snakes and lions, with bears and leopards, may also be a sign to us of a day to come when God is going to tame all the wild things in the world and in us. He will bring a peace that will let us live together in harmony with ourselves and with the world around us. Like we read in Genesis 9, when the sign of a new covenant was given by a rainbow, all the wild creatures will come out after days of testing and trial and rejoice together in the new covenant God has made with us through Jesus and the sign of the Cross.

Thus wild beasts can be a sign of danger here, or they may be a more hopeful sign of peace between human and wilderness, a step toward the final word of this tiny account of Jesus in the wilderness at the end of verse 13, “and the angels ministered to him.” Luke doesn’t even mention those angels and Matthew makes it sound like they only came at the end of it all. But Mark seems to suggest that the angels were there all along, that God had not abandoned His Son there in the wilderness. The tender love of God was being extended toward Jesus throughout His testing and trial. More than anything else, that presence of God is what you and I also need in the wilderness.

Ida B. Wells was a Black teacher and newspaper writer during the time of Reconstruction after the Civil War. One might have thought that things were far better than they had been for Black people of that time. But after slavery, new horrors and dangers arose. A friend of Ida’s was lynched after being falsely accused of raping a white woman. Ida took up her pen and launched herself into the wilderness of protesting against the rash of false accusations and fake justice and extra-judicial lynchings which swept across the South.

Wells found herself not just in the wilderness of voicing an unpopular opinion, but in physical danger too. She had to leave her home and flee Memphis. Her newspaper office was destroyed. White journalists generally didn’t write about lynching, so she was alone as spoke out. She was lonely. People said she was too radical. In the end, other people, men, took the credit for the anti-lynching movement which she had begun.

Yet early in 1886, Ida Wells wrote in a journal about her experience at a watch night service her church had just observed on New Year’s Eve. She said,

“I go forth on the renewed pilgrimage of this New Year with renewed hope, vigor, a remembrance of the glorious beginnings and humbly pray for wisdom, humility, success in my undertakings if it be My Father’s good pleasure, and a stronger Christianity that will make itself felt.”[2]

May God make you and I able to go out like Ida Wells on our own pilgrimage into whatever wilderness to which the Holy Spirit drives us. May we be renewed with hope and vigor, and with blessed remembrance of our own beginnings with the Lord. Let us depend on humility there before the wild beasts of sin, both our own sin and that of others. Let us seek success only at the good pleasure of our heavenly Father and not in our own strength.

The wilderness is wild. Yet Jesus went there and found both the dangers and the divine presence of God. Let’s you and I dare the wilderness with Him and therein find His holy angels ministering to us as well.

Amen.

[1] Columba Stewart, The Desert Fathers on Radical Self-Honesty in Vox Benedictina: A Journal of Translations from Monastic Sources 8/1 (1991): 7-54.

[2] This quotation and the story of Ida B. Wells are from an article by David W. Swanson, author of Rediscipling the White Church, for the Covenant Church’s Black History Month series.