In just seven verses today Mark gives us three key episodes in Jesus’
life. In just seven verses Mark tells us Jesus was baptized, Jesus was tested,
and then Jesus preached the good news. I
could preach any of the three episodes today. I could talk a while about
Jesus’ baptism, his submission to death and burial, his surrender to God,
and his approval by God not just at the end, when he had proven himself but
from the very commencement of his mission in life.
Or, I could preach about Jesus’ preaching today. All we ppreachers wish
we could be so eloquent, so concise, so brief – I know you do, too!
– and preach so profound a sermon in only fifteen words (nineteen in
English). Jesus makes two declarations and asserts two imperatives. The declaratives
are about urgency and opportunity. “The time is fulfilled,” he
declares. “The rule of God is here.” The imperatives follow
naturally, our only sensible response. “The time is fulfilled; the rule
of God is here.” Therefore, you should “Turn and trust the good
news.” ‘Nuff said! Say the benediction! Let’s go to lunch!
(Knew I’d get an “amen” to that!)
But I’m not going to preach about Jesus’ baptism or his
proclamation today. It’s the “in between” section I want us
to consider, the mean time between Jesus’ baptism and his preaching the
gospel. Matthew and Luke expand on Mark’s version of Jesus’ time of
testing with stories that detail the three temptations of Christ. But Mark
paints the picture in a few deft strokes. Mark tells us that after the baptism
“the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.” Mark
says he was there for forty days. Mark says he was tested by “the
Satan,” which means “the Adversary.” To this Mark adds the
enigmatic paradox: “He was with the wild beasts; and the angels served
him.” Wild beasts and angels! Now there’s a contrast! But
that’s exactly where the test comes for most us between our baptism and
our mission in life.
The three events are connected for Mark. In fact, you could almost say
it’s an outline of his Jesus story to follow. Between beginning and
ending Jesus is tested. Between commencement and completion Jesus faces the
wild beasts and gets an assist from the angels. This is the arena where life
happens for all of us.
And mind you, this “in between” time for Jesus is no accident.
It’s God’s plan. The Spirit leads Jesus into the desert. Actually
Mark says the Spirit drives Jesus out into the wilderness – drags,
forces, expels, casts forth. It is the same verb Genesis uses (in the Greek
translation of the Hebrew Bible) to tell us how God drove out Adam and Eve from
Of course, the wilderness has a special meaning for God’s people in the
Bible.
Later David went into the wilderness to hide from his enemies until it was time
for him to be crowned
When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of
But they didn’t listen, and they lost everything. They went into exile in
The devil shall flee from you,
and the wild beasts shall fear you,
and the Lord shall love you,
and the angels shall cleave to you. (Test. Naph. 8:4).
Wild beasts and angels!
The early church picked up on
As early as the third century Christians began to set aside a special time of
preparation to get ready for the experience of Good Friday and Easter, those
holy celebrations which mark the heart of our faith and the fulfillment of
God’s plan for humankind. They soon set the time as forty days,
remembering these forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness with the wild beasts
and angels. They called this time “Lent” from the Latin word
“Lengthen” because it coincided with the season when the days began
to lengthen and winter moves towards spring with evidences of new life
blossoming forth in nature. Lent was a time for fasting and self discipline,
for self-denial and service, for setting aside the luxuries of the flesh to
concentrate on the needs of the spirit. It was a time to nurture the new life
within that blossoms into something lasting and real.
In the eyes of the world it was a strange practice, countercultural, perhaps
even subversive to the chapter and verse of the social order. I mean, everybody
knew the goal of life was to acquire, not to sacrifice. The joy of life was in
pampering yourself, not denying yourself. The meaning of life was in
self-advancement, gaining power over others so they had to serve you, not
reducing your status by service to others. The Roman gods all helped people get
what they wanted, and all the gods asked in return was that you be loyal to the
emperor, a good citizen respecting the given social order. And then if the gods
favored you, you might be one of the lucky few on top. On top is where
everybody wanted to be. Except those weird Christians, who spoke instead of
self-denial and service, of charity and preparing your soul for the world to
come. Those crazy Christians.
I think the world has not changed so much in two thousand years, and our own
social order is as close to ancient
All of us are compromised by the culture in which we live. We are all addicted
in various ways to the greed and violence and selfishness and abusive use of
power so common in our time. We hate those who hate. We judge those who judge.
But we are as self-righteous and arrogant in our behavior as those we reject.
Even to us the very idea of Lent is a foreign, even quaint custom we take up
lightly, as an occasional add-on to the busy spring schedules we must keep. How
serious are we really about this business of spirituality and the high calling
of our baptism to die to ourselves and live into Christ? But take a single step
back and you can see all the statistics show it and our lives bear witness,
too. Our addiction to the common values of our culture – greed, violence,
power, self-indulgence – are killing us. And a lot of other people, too.
We need Lent. We need to hear the message Jesus brought out of the wilderness:
“The time is fulfilled; the rule of God is here. Turn, and trust the good
news.” But before we can hear it, before we can proclaim it, we have to
put ourselves in the place where we can hear it. I know very few of us can drop
everything we’re doing, wipe the slate clean, go out into the desert to
detox, and get right with God so we can start over. But all of us can take a
Lenten journey of the heart. We can set aside some time to be with God. We can
let go of some of the time wasting entertainments that distract us. We can fast
from some of the behaviors that damage us and others. We can move into a
wilderness of creative possibility where we face down the wild beasts that
threaten us and discover the angels God sends to nurture us.
What could be more opposed to the spirit of our age than the Spirit of Lent? We
live in a day when our ethical standards have deteriorated to the point where
people give themselves permission to indulge in the most destructive behaviors
by saying, “I owe myself this.” You won’t see any commercials
on television advising you to slow down, spend less, stop measuring yourself by
the things you own. You won’t find the ads in the newspaper urging you to
simplify your life, pursue beauty and truth, build healthy friendships, help
the people torn to pieces by the wild beasts of modern life. You have to get
those values from somewhere else.
Anthony de Mello tells the story of a man who got lost in a desert. He thought
he saw some water in the distance, but it seemed to recede as he approached it.
In a panic, he ran to reach it, only to realize it was a shimmering mirage. He
turned this way and that, parched, desperate. He tripped and fell over a dried
branch, and lay there exhausted, ready to die. There was nothing but silence,
and the sound of his own breathing. But he caught his breath and heard in the
silence the sound of a faint murmur. Rising, he moved slowly, methodically
towards the sound, stopping now and then and getting very still until he could
discern again the soft murmur leading him on. Finally he came upon it, the
bubbling water of a small spring. And he knelt to drink deeply of the fresh
cool relief.
There are ways in which we wander every day in the wilderness of a world where
nothing satisfies our thirst for life, nothing satisfies our hunger for
substance. We wrestle with wild beasts within and without. As Frederick
Buechner says: “There are times for all of us when life seems without
purpose or meaning, when we wake to a sense of chaos like a great cat with its
paws on our chest sucking our breath.” That’s when we need to let
the Spirit drive us out into the wilderness of a different kind, where we might
meet the angels God sends to care for us, where we can stop and quiet
ourselves, listen closely and follow the soft murmurs of the fountain of life,
until, finding it at last, we drink deeply and are revived. “(God) turns
a desert into pools of water,” writes the psalmist, “a parched land
into springs of water” (Psa 107:35).
Beloved, Lent is here. God knows we need it. Let us go into the wilderness and
meet God.
May we pray?
In these forty days of preparation, O God, we remember Jesus’ courage in
fighting the Adversary. We remember his obedience to your will, his grounding
in your Word, his willingness to enter the world of struggle we endure every
day that he might show us the way out of the wilderness and back to your garden
of life. In these forty days help us also to follow him, to find your angels
among us, to choose the ways of life over the ways of death, and to discover
the fountain of life that our souls may be refreshed. In these forty days, O
God, let a new life of the Spirit blossom forth among us, that dying to the
world we might rise into life that is life indeed, life abundant, life eternal.
In these forty days prepare us to hear “The time is fulfilled; the rule
of God is here. Turn, and trust the good news.” Help us to hear, turn and
trust. Amen.
Mary Anne Biggs, Pastor
Nekoosa United
Nekoosa