PsalterMark

Luke 4:3–8 and Deuteronomy 8:1–6

Trusting in the Desert
The desert has long been associated with Christian spirituality. As a harsh environment it necessitates trust in God and his provision. Other than the struggle for survival there are few distractions. The desert, or wilderness, speaks of testing too. Even in modern Western culture it has this resonance, perhaps mediated through wilderness stories from the Bible.

Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, found the desert attractive because of its cleanliness and austerity. In David Lean’s famous film Lawrence comes across as trusting in himself. There is a scene where Auda, a sceptical tribal leader, questions Lawrence as he sets off to cross the desert with two teenage hangers-on:

Auda: You will cross Sinai?
Lawrence: Moses did!
Auda: And you will take the children?
Lawrence: Moses did!
Auda: Moses was a prophet and beloved of God!

Perhaps his love of the desert and Great Britain’s Christian Nationalism, which was alive and well during Lawrence’s escapades, contributed to his self-understanding as something of a messiah who united the Arab peoples against their Turkish oppressors. Sadly, much of today’s pain and suffering in the middle-east goes back to Britain and France carving up the middle-east during and after the first world war. For some, Lawrence is a hero, for others a meddling ill-placed white saviour wreaking havoc.

More recently, the two-part film Dune has brought the messiah-in-the-desert image up to date. The desert here is an entire planet and Paul Atreides’ career as warrior and prophet has larger and bloodier implications than those of T E Lawrence.

Jesus, the true messiah, has no blood on his hands in the desert, unlike Lawrence of Arabia and the fictional Maud-dib of Dune. Later, of course, the blood on his hands will come from his own body pierced cruelly by iron nails.

Jesus’ wilderness temptation is, of course, less of a physical battle and more a fight in which the deceiver’s singular goal is to sever trust between Son and Father. This foundational episode in Jesus’ life echoes, in many ways, the story of God’s people crossing the wilderness from Egypt through the Sinai desert to the Promised Land. Jesus spent 40-days, whilst the slower to learn Israelites spent 40-years. Jesus knows he is following in the footsteps of Israel as he quotes from the book of Deuteronomy that reflects on the experience of the Israelites.

The Israelites found that in the wilderness God fed them when they trusted him. He supplied them with water and quail. And more mysteriously with manna which became known as bread of heaven—as it appeared like dew in the morning.

Various earthly explanations have been proposed for manna—given that the Hebrew word means ‘what is it?’ perhaps we shouldn’t rush to explain. If the Israelites didn’t know firsthand, I am not sure we’ll fare any better.

Of course, Jesus didn’t seek physical food in the wilderness—he was fasting. It was a supreme act of trust. He was seeking God’s word. Firming up his very self-understanding. Prior to his ministry starting, he waited to discern what God had in store for him next.

Listening in the Desert
We too can experience the wilderness in our lives. Sometimes such experiences seem thrust on us. But sometimes it is right to step out into the desert by choice. The Spirit prompted Jesus to step away from the everyday for a short season―to be disciplined, tested, readied, for what lay ahead.

If you are called to be the saviour of the world then 40-days of preparation and testing might be appropriate. But if we are called to do less, perhaps we might step out for 400-minutes (less than 7-hours), or 40-hours (less than a weekend). If God is preparing you for something new why not step out to be with him, to be tested, to be disciplined, to be trained? To be fed?

How can we feed others unless we have fed on Jesus, the bread of heaven, and drunk deeply from the well of God’s spirit? In the Lord’s Prayer we ask for physical food daily. We should seek his spiritual bread daily too. When we face the deepest challenges of the life of faith we need the fruit that practice and rhythm brings.

The Israelites messed it up spectacularly. During the weekend that Moses spent listening to God on their behalf they managed to make a golden calf and have a pagan worship festival that made Glastonbury look like a church picnic. From the story in Exodus it is difficult to tell whether God or Moses is angrier.

The Israelites are even one step ahead of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve broke one rule—you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Israel broke the first two of the ten commandments just as Moses was being given them:

‘I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
‘You shall have no other gods before me.
‘You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
Exodus 20:3–4, NIVUK

Jesus’ wilderness experience echoes Eden—the infernal serpent is present, once again, questioning what God has said. This echoes the experience of Israel too, as Jesus finds all the words he needs, to refute the evil one, in just a tiny portion of the Law given to Moses.

Satan suggests to the Son of God, who came to give his body as food for all: “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus replies “Man shall not live on bread alone”—he’s been listening to God’s instruction (or torah). How would you get on finding words from Deuteronomy to refute the Devil?

Where do we go to feed on God’s word? What instruction have we listened to and made our own? What words of Jesus, Paul, Peter, the Psalmist, or Isaiah sustain you? How much of God’s word have we truly eaten and digested to nourish and sustain us in the everyday, and in the wilderness?

The Oasis of Fellowship
We are not in the same situation as Adam and Eve, the Israelites, Moses, or Jesus. We are blessed to be ‘in Christ’ as we work out living for God. Of course, we have all of Scripture today, and Jesus on whom we stand to hear it.

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”
Matthew 7:24–27, NIVUK

The wilderness for Jesus was a season. And for us we would do well to taste such seasons before they are thrust upon us. But the Christian life is life together. And such fellowship an antidote to T S Eliot’s diagnosis of our problem:

And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbour
Unless his neighbour makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.
Nor does the family even move about together,
But every son would have his motor cycle,
And daughters ride away on casual pillions.
Choruses from “The Rock “

As acutely as Eliot saw the problem of modern Western life, he knew the solution:

What life have you if you have not life together?
There is no life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
Even the anchorite who meditates alone,
For whom the days and nights repeat the praise of GOD ,
Prays for the Church, the Body of Christ incarnate.
Choruses from “The Rock “

A life together is what we are called too. A life with Scripture to the fore. The fleeting experiences of being alone with God are to be a honing for what counts, serving God together in worship and in mission. The vocabulary for both is Scripture and Jesus is key to both its form and content.