The First Sunday in Lent, Year C
February 29, 2004
Christ Church, Covington

“Then the devil took him to Jerusalem.’” (Luke 4:9).

Lent begins with the desert experience of Jesus, who fasts and prays for forty days in the Judean wilderness. Consider for a moment what this desert experience represents. The wilderness of Judea is outside the boundaries of the settled world, removed from both the fertile plains and from the prosperous hill country. A fifth century Christian monk who lived in this territory, walking in the steps of his Master, called it the “utter desert” or paneremos: a kind of desolate moonscape leading down to the Dead Sea, a most aptly named body of water.

This wilderness is distant from civilization, inhospitable and generally inaccessible to humanity; a place believed to be inhabited by demons. It’s the anti-Paradise, the opposite of the Garden that God made to be the human home. For people who live in the settled and civilized world, the desert is the place out of which the Bedouin enemy comes, the sudden raid or incursion that irrupts irrationally bringing disaster with it. Bad things come out of the wilderness, because the devils that have been banished from the inhabited world (it was believed) have taken up residence there.

The desert is the place in which Jesus struggles with evil, with the Devil, which we might call the first of our Lenten wilderness themes. This struggle begins in the desert, but it moves very quickly to the city, to the very heart of human culture. The conceit of civilized persons was that the demons lived in the wilderness, but this was nothing more than a projection outward of the shadow that lived at the heart of human society. The Devil gives it away when, in Luke’s Gospel, the final temptation takes Jesus from the desert to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem, the place of the great struggle. The real battle with evil will take place before Jesus’ crucifixion and death. Luke, like Mel Gibson, is eager to move us on this Lent to Jerusalem, to the place of the passion, because it is there that the struggle with evil will truly take place.

So Lent is more than just a time for personal growth, for the fine-tuning of an already acceptable life. There is more here than self-help; and that “more” involves the depths of ourselves. The desert experience teaches us that Lent is a time for repentance, for rejection of sin; a time of testing in which evil does its worst but God’s power is triumphant in our lives. There is the evil we do; there is the evil we endure. It’s not grandiose to think about it this way, but simply a sign that we are taking ourselves and our struggles with some moral seriousness.

There is a second aspect of the desert experience, however, which bears on the agenda of Lent. Our Gospel emphasizes the struggle with evil, but it also recalls another truth of the wilderness. There’s less to distract when you move to the margins of civilization. In the desert you can see further, sometimes objects at a very great distance indeed. (I think this is the origin of a desert mirage, which is not an hallucination, but rather the projection of a distant object into the forefront of perception.) Jesus fasts to remove extraneous things from the simple equation, and reduce affairs to their primitive simplicity. In simplifying, and increasing the length of his vision, he comes to know his dependence on God. “One does not live by bread alone” (Lk. 4:4), quoting Deuteronomy; “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him” (Lk. 4:8), again Deuteronomy. Trust in God, in short, and in no one else.

Lent ought to return us to the basics; it cuts out the things that distract us and increases our vision. The desert experience turns out to be a Paradise of sorts, in the very simplicity of the relationship with God we discover there. “Simplify, simplify, simplify”: the truth that Henry David Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond, which he considered a Paradise of sorts. Silence, simplicity, and peace, can be discovered in the midst of the most challenging terrain. We need to increase our long range vision, and remove the barriers that block our sight. What is the change we need to make to allow us to see? What do we need to simplify in complicated and overstressed lives? How can we turn the “utter desert”, the paneremos of our existence, into a Paradise that leads us to the Kingdom?

It is this, as much as the struggle with evil, that brought Jesus to the desert, and then on to Jerusalem. It was a time of letting go, and letting God do what he wills. The vision of trust in God propelled Jesus onward. We will need these gifts of silence, simplicity, and peace as much as he as we cope with our own desert and our own Jerusalem.

The Rev’d John Bauerschmidt is Rector of Christ Church, Covington.
 

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