Readings: Genesis 9.8-15 / Psalm 25.4-5, 6-7, 8-9 / Peter 3.18-22 / Mark 1.12-15
I have often wondered what it would be like to be banished from the Garden of Eden like Adam and Eve, or to be exiled from home. What would I feel? What would I think? What would I do next? Where would I be?
I think I’d find myself in a space of barrenness and desolation. It would be a miserable, dark space of loneliness and harshness. It would be space marked by nothingness, pregnant perhaps with the dreadful promise of death.
The closest experience I think any of us could have of this is to get lost in the desert. Has anyone here experienced this? I doubt. But I suspect we have all—at one time or another—found ourselves lost in, or at least meandered aimlessly about, the deserts of our broken hearts, our anxious-ridden minds, our frighten imaginations, our disoriented lives.
And in these desert-like spaces, haven’t you and I experience vulnerability? Haven’t we felt exiled or cut-off from all our comforts and our securities, even from those we depend on to walk with us and to love us? I am sure that none of us wishes to find ourselves in such desert spaces where we struggle to simply exist, not even flourish.
But we don’t find ourselves in such deserts in our lives, whether interiorly or externally, whether briefly or longterm? May be, as we begin Lent, some of us are in such a desert space or two.
The desert is where we find Jesus on this 1st Sunday of Lent. The Spirit drives him into the desert to pray and to fast for forty days.
By depriving himself of the humanly familiar, comfortable and secure, Jesus becomes hungry in body, needy in want, and lacking in physical prowess. These are his vulnerabilities of being in the desert.
In such a state, Satan tempts Jesus to overcome these by focusing on his own self, on his own needs, on his own power, not on God. But Jesus rejects Satan’s temptations.
Led by God’s Spirit, Jesus’ retreat into the desert is in fact his graced entry into a space that is not barren or despairing. Rather, the desert is paradoxically a holy space, a providential space where he encounters God. It is in this encounter that God empowers Jesus to live more fully in God’s ways and with God’s life.
In the Old Testament, the desert is that anointed space where God calls a person out of the world. There, with nothing but the expanse of silence that God uses to cloak, such a person finds himself wrapped into the solitude of communion with God. It is in such an embrace that God has spoken tenderly to such persons as the prophets that he drew into the desert.
Why this space? Because here God speaks words of tenderness and truth that draw such a person into a renewed awareness about: who God is—divine and holy; who he is—human and in need of salvation; and how God’s love in his life will indeed save. Indeed, the desert is always God’s space to re-create this person and his relationship with God anew.
We see something of this truth in today’s gospel story. More significantly, we see how Jesus in his weaknesses in the desert is in fact remarkably open to God, whose Spirit is already at work within him.
What can Jesus’ entry into the desert, and his discovery of God’s power within him, mean for us as we begin our Lenten journey this year? I’d like to suggest that Jesus’ actions in the desert can teach us how to grow in spiritual authenticity.
Like Jesus, I believe you and I are being invited by God’s Spirit within us this Lent to enter more honestly into the desert spaces of our lives. And there, in these grace-filled desert spaces, for us to find God already waiting to help us reclaim the spiritual authenticity of who you and I are to God: not sinful but beloved and worthy to be redeemed for who we are, God’s own.
But this authenticity is something we always struggle to see, to know and to proclaim truly. This is because when we are in those desert spaces of our lives, we find ourselves caught up in a masquerade.
We put on and take off of masks that hide our truest selves. We pretend to be someone else for varied occasions and with diverse persons. We run away from our pain and suffering. We deny ourselves the happiness we should have. And sometimes, we even give up our birthright of who we are, God’s children.
If there is an invitation Lent is extending to us, it is to enter more honestly into these desert spaces where we are inauthentic because there with Jesus we can begin to recover our true selves. We would therefore be very wise to listen to his cry, “This is the time of fulfilment The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
The Lenten practices of prayer, alms-giving and fast offer us concrete spiritual responses to follow Jesus’ call. They can help us to re-examine our lives more honestly before our loving God whose only desire in Jesus is to save and perfect us for fullness of life with Godself.
Sometimes, we practise these Lenten observances well; at other times, we do them miserably. But, practice them we must because they can help us to strip ourselves of all those masks that we wear in our desert spaces. And stripping ourselves completely, they enable us to stand naked before God.
Isn’t nakedness, then, the remarkable reality of who we are authentically to God—God’s little ones, created in innocence and holiness? Created to do nothing less than to love, to praise and to serve God? And like every child's father, doesn't God want to nurture and strengthen us in our nakedness to live life well and happily together with God, not just now but eternally?
If you, like me, want to answer these questions with a “yes,” then, the right move we must make in these Lenten days is not to run away from but to retreat more courageously and more honestly into those desert spaces of our lives.
After all, isn’t it in the deserts of our lives, that you and I, like Jesus, can reclaim our spiritual authenticity as God's own, always worthy to be loved into salvation?
Preached at St Ignatius Church, Singapore
photo: from the Internet (www.theculturemap.com)
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