ALONE IN THE DESERT

Wednesday after the Second Sunday in Lent

We’ve followed Jesus into the Lenten desert. Our desert is metaphorical, His wasn’t. He was hot and thirsty and hungry—and alone. Scripture tells us that only after His forty-day fast, did the devil finally put in an appearance. For forty days our Lord wandered and watched and waited.

We know He was (and still is) fully God and fully Man at the same time. This dogma is one of the Church’s great treasures, but it’s hard to understand how it can be so—or even why it’s important. Yet the Church has insisted on this precise language since it hammered out an agreement more than fifteen hundred years ago: “...our Lord Jesus Christ, perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man…”

Okay, and this is important because…?...because He is like you and me. St Paul says “He emptied Himself, taking the form of a slave.” He means although our Lord was “truly God,” He laid aside the glory of His Divinity to become like us. After He was tempted in the desert, He told His disciples about His temptations (how else would we know about them?). He recounted the three temptations we read about in the Gospels, but every temptation you and I have endured He has, too. Not only like us in temptation, Jesus knew pain, sorrow, fear, and hopelessness (His cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” was indeed a quotation from the Psalms, but it was wretched from the depths of His Heart)—“a Man of Sorrows,” Isaiah prophesied, “and acquainted with grief.”

Did our Lord laugh? Without doubt—he told jokes, sang at weddings, most certainly (don’t tell your Baptist friends) he danced. He enjoyed wine and good food and sitting around chewing the fat with friends. We see little of that in the Gospels, except indirectly (His wit shines through, especially in the Greek originals); the Evangelists didn’t show Jesus laughing, not because He was a gloomy Gus, but because they were telling the story of the Savior Who takes upon Himself the sin and sorrow of the world.

Jesus Christ, God made Man, went into the desert. He didn’t know what was going to happen there—He followed the lead of the Spirit in faith. He was alone.

That’s when temptation comes to us. When we’re alone, the devil whispers to us our shameful hopes and secret fears, those things we’re too ashamed to speak aloud. Our most profound temptations aren’t to knock over a bank or poison the lady whose dog urinates on our roses, but to be “realistic,” “keep everything in perspective.” It’s fine to trust God and all in general, but we live in the real world; we’ve got to be practical. We have payrolls to meet and forms to fill out. We crave SECURITY.

And security is the one thing we can’t have. We can have fat bank accounts and gold bullion in safety deposit boxes and oil leases till the cows come home, but we don’t get to keep any of it. We have it and control it for awhile, but someday, we lose it all. What we’re left with when it’s all gone—that’s what really matters. That’s who you are. Not your stuff, not your influence, just you—alone—before God.

We followed Jesus into the desert. Can we be alone there, as He was?

You better hope not. Left to our own devices, you and I will give in to every temptation that matters. We may win the kid stuff—keeping our outward Lenten rule, saying a few extra prayers, putting a couple of quarters into a Haiti Relief jar—but when the temptations come that matter, those that touch who we really are, we’ll surrender faster than the proverbial French army. If you and I have a good Lent, it’s because we ARE NOT alone in the desert. Jesus is with us: to pick us up, give us nourishment, bind our wounds and point us in the right direction. “Truly Man,” He knows what we suffer, our temptations, failures and fears. “Truly God,” He is always with us, supplying our needs and conquering our foes.

Don’t despise the kid stuff—giving up soufflés, reading Leviticus or apologizing after an argument even if you know you were right. This may be “training wheel Christianity,” but that’s where most of us are. If we learn the lesson they’re meant to teach, we’ll come to understand that Lent is about Grace—God’s life living in ours (“It’s no longer I who live,” St Paul sings, “but Christ Who lives in me”)—and that means we are never alone.