Overcoming the Desert in Our Souls
Our Gospel (tonight) (today) focuses on Jesus’ visit to the desert at the beginning of his public life. This Bible passage, found near the beginning of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, traditionally signals the opening of the main part of Lent.
At the level of the literal, we are talking of course about the physical desert. For many periods throughout its history, the Jewish nation had been conquered by foreign powers. Leaders and other citizens of those occupying powers typically lived in Jerusalem and other large cities of Israel. Jews were often forced to live elsewhere. Some left IsraelMiddle East. completely to dwell throughout the
Some Jews wanted to stay in their country, even while it was being occupied. The only other inhabitable part of Israel was in the southern part of the country near the Dead Sea. To get there they had to travel through a desert that was thirty-five by fifteen miles. It was known as the Devastation, an area of yellow sand, and crumbling limestone. Ridges ran in all directions. The hills were like dust heaps; the ground shimmered with heat like a vast furnace. Travel back then on foot or even by animal transportation took many days, weeks, or months before one reached the Dead Sea.
The desert had very little rain, very little food, extremes of temperature, and little or no civil authority that meant that danger to one’s person and goods was constant from bandits and wild animals. So the idea of exile to the desert was a terrifying thought to Jews. Old Testament prophets had told the Jewish people that beginning with the story of Adam and Eve that we read about in our first reading, the refusal of many Jews because of fear, indifference, greed, jealousy, or apathy to follow God’s commandments was a key reason why they now often found themselves in the desert.
These prophets emphasized that only a return to God through prayer, personal responsibility, purity, and growth in holiness would lead Israel to be a nation able to return to God’s favor. God did not destroy Israel. But God also made clear that Jews as individuals and as a people must accept the love God offers them and have a conversion of heart.
The physicality of the desert was also to play a role in the life of Jesus. But the key difference here is the ability of Jesus, as the Redeemer and Savior of His people and indeed all of us, to use the bleakness of the desert to show his triumph over sin and death. Where many Jews for centuries sinned and died in the desert, Jesus goes in the desert and renounces and resists sin even though he is tempted mightily by the devil. As St. Paul tells us in our second reading, just as through one transgression (the sin of Adam and Eve) condemnation came upon all, so, through one righteous act (the Death and Resurrection of Jesus which begins with his trip to the desert), acquittal and life came to all.
Jesus’ ability to withstand the rigors of the physical desert, and his miraculous ability to turn it into a place of faith is also a logical complement to the concept of desert as metaphor. For neither Jesus nor the Old Testament prophets were concerned only about the physical desert when they spoke or visited there. The bleak and weakening effects of the physical desert on humans in some ways pales by comparison to the bleak and weakening effects of the spiritual desert in our souls. Sin in its innumerable forms (greed, lust, jealously, envy, hatred, violence) is every bit as deadly to human souls as the conditions of the physical desert might be to human bodies.
The Lord’s visit to the desert was one of the most intense experiences of his life on earth. Jesus was alone in the desert. So He would have had to have relayed this intense experience to His apostles for the desert visit to be found in the Gospels. So there is no doubt that Jesus did in fact visit the physical desert.
But the Holy Spirit, Our Gospel says, sent Jesus into the desert. The Spirit would not have done that to punish Jesus. So we should be careful about focusing the meaning of this story only within the geographic or physical level of desert. For the visit to the desert was about a process of deep contemplation for Jesus. The human Jesus went to the desert to think about and establish what would be the best means, the best strategies, for bringing about the redemption of man from sin. After all, that was the principal reason His Father sent to Him to earth in the first place.
Not all aspects of the desert descriptions in the Gospels should be taken literally. The term “forty days” was an expression of Jesus’ time. It meant a long period of time, often not literally forty days, much like we might say “it took forever to get here.” As well, the devil, in tempting Jesus, takes him to what is described as a very high mountain where all the kingdoms of the world can be seen. Of course, we know there is no such place in the desert to which Jesus traveled. The same can be said of the temple parapet, where the devil tells Jesus to cast himself off. The temple of Jerusalem was obviously not located in the desert.
So Jesus undoubtedly went to the desert to seek the Father’s help in His mission to redeem the world. But at least part of the concept of desert is metaphorical, focusing on the devil’s struggle for Jesus’ soul, and indeed all of our souls. It might be useful to think of those parts of these parts of the Gospel account as visions Jesus had in the desert, visions for the benefit of all of us. Here on Whidbey Island, we never have a shortage of water, particularly this time of year. But notwithstanding this literal fact, we face in our own faith lives the same kind of temptations Our Lord did as we struggle with how to live and how to treat others.
The devil offers three temptations to Jesus. The first, to turn limestone rocks into bread can be seen metaphorically as a temptation by the devil to bring people to faith or to your point of view by essentially bribing them. While we are called to meet the needs of others and utilize the gifts we have been given to build up the Body of Christ in various professional settings, almsgiving to impress others or using the gifts of the Holy Spirit for professional gain or credit should never be undertaken.
A faith, which depends on signs and wonders, is no faith at all, and whatever following one gets, if it is a personal following, offends God’s call to the Gospel life. Such followings also easily dissipate as we often see with people in every profession who rise to great power and wealth and then fall just as easily and quickly.
Jesus is also tempted by the devil to perform great signs and wonders like throwing himself off the main temple in Jerusalem and landing softly. But to posit oneself in life as an awesome success in teaching, evangelizing, politics, business, or many other professions is no substitute for the generation of the quiet trust we get from others because they see the way trustful people live, and by the principles through which one choose to live. To do otherwise only creates a vicious game of one upsmanship in which the gift giver must continually give more and more, and achieve more and more.
In professional settings, if we measure success by how much business we bring in, how much money we are able to raise, how much greater and greater our budgets grow, we are proverbial apes on a treadmill. We run as fast as we can just to stay in place.
Human beings have an amazing and rather sinful ability to routinize what they see and do. To long for ever greater sensations is to distrust rather than trust others and us. It is a central part of addictions, of extreme competitiveness, of a loss of ethics, and cycles of violence at the individual, group, national and international level. Such an attitude does not serve oneself or others; it harms and destroys souls, ours as well as others.
Rather, Jesus sought, and calls us to seek, to live by the example of His teachings: the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, and the two Great Commandments.
Finally, the devil offers Jesus absolute power on earth if only he agrees to worship the devil. Here of course, we are once again not talking about the literal. Jesus is clearly more powerful than the devil at the literal level. But to the human Jesus, who must seek to bring others humans to the Father, what the devil seeks from Jesus is a willingness to compromise on principles.
For us, cooperation with evil, compromising the central elements of our faith means that we become just as evil as those who ignore or are indifferent to what the Christian faith teaches. It is a slippery slope to an anything goes attitude in which we buy in slowly but surely to the idea that if it feels good, it cannot be wrong, or that any compromise is preferable to confrontation, or that achieving power justifies any compromise.
While there are many ways to approach our calling to live the Gospel life, while tactics to achieve Christian goals at home, in society, in the workplace can often vary, and we can disagree about them, some things are wrong and violate God’s laws. They are always wrong. And some things, regardless of situations, are always right and are to be defended.
Jesus did not compromise on the core of God’s truth. He sends the devil away with the warning not to tempt God with human weakness and compromise. He was not sent to be a political revolutionary. And if we are to be Christians on the road to greater holiness and salvation, then on matters of principle we cannot stoop to the level of the world. As Christians, our living the truth in love must raise the world to Christianity’s level. Our task is to forgive others and bring them along to a new way of doing things, not simply giving and accepting because it is just easier or more popular. We are called to be new men and women, and build up other new men and women, and a new earth.
Like Jesus, we are called to a loving service to God and others. Like Jesus, we are called to pray to God the Father to give us what we need in a literal physical sense, but also in a spiritual need sense that puts others first. And with Jesus, through prayer, service, sacrament and Scripture, we receive the graces to achieve this calling. If we cooperate with Him, we can traverse successfully the physical deserts of our lives, and the spiritual deserts in our souls.