Christ in the wilderness

 

Preached as a sermon at Croydon Minster, the First Sunday of Lent, 2021

‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near;

repent and believe in the good news (Mark 1.15)

 

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This is the third time since Advent Sunday that we have been given this passage of St Mark’s gospel.

 

At its heart is the Baptism of Christ, but we have come at it from different angles.

 

First, in Advent, we read it through the lens of the ministry of John the Baptist; then on the Feast of the Baptism of Christ we pondered the mystery of Christ’s Baptism itself; and now, in these forty days of Lent, our focus is on what happens after his immersion in the waters of Baptism, when he is driven out into a place where there is precious little water: the wilderness.

 

The whole scene is dramatic. It begins with the almost violent image of the heavens torn open, ripped apart like a piece of cloth.

 

From that fissure comes the tranquillity of the Spirit, just like a dove, who rests on Jesus, as he is told by God the Father, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ (v11).

 

Then, just as a breeze can pick up and blow hard as a mighty wind, so the Spirit’s breath picks up and drives Jesus out. Into the wilderness. Immediately. No hanging about.

 

The relationship declared at the Baptism – of intimacy between the Father and the Son - is now to be demonstrated in the driving power of the Spirit out in the wilderness.

 

The wilderness is by any terms, and certainly in the scriptures, a place of challenge, devoid of life. But Jesus brings life to the wilderness, so he is not alone and without comfort: ‘he was with the wild beasts, and the angels comforted him’ (v13). The beasts are not a threat, they are with him.

 

There are echoes here of the Garden of Creation, where the ‘creatures of the field and birds of the air are created’ (Genesis 2.19). In that Garden Satan comes to disrupt, humanity colludes and sin enters the world. In the wilderness, by contrast, Satan is faced down, humanity in the New Adam, Jesus Christ, rejects the Prince of Darkness, and the power of sin is annulled.

 

From the Garden of Creation flowed mighty rivers. Life flows from Christ. At the heart of the garden was a tree; at the heart of the Christian life is the Tree of the Cross.

 

And all this, the Church proclaims, is Good News! It’s the Good News of water flowing in a wilderness; light shining in the darkness; life triumphing over death.

 

Many of us are in a wilderness at the moment. It may be a wilderness brought on by the pandemic, or brought on by quite different circumstances.

 

In our wilderness, Christ is with us, bringing life to us, generating within us a New Creation, saying ‘Let anyone who is thirsty come to me’ (John 7.37). And as St Paul declares, ‘If anyone is in Christ, there is a New Creation!’ (2 Corinthians 5.17). Good news indeed.

 

As the Israelites were fed by God with miraculous manna from heaven as they trudged round the wilderness of Sinai for forty years, so may we be fed, in our wilderness, with the bread that comes down from heaven so that we hunger and thirst no more.