Welcome to Lent! Welcome to the desert!

Mark 1:12-15

Immediately the Holy Spirit urged Jesus into the desert. There, for forty days, alone except for desert animals, he was subjected to Satan’s temptations to sin. And afterwards the angels came and cared for him. Later on, after John was arrested by King Herod, Jesus went to Galilee to preach God’s Good News. “At last the time has come!” he announced. “God’s Kingdom is near! Turn from your sins and act on this glorious news!”

Food for thought!

A mother camel and her baby are talking one day and the baby camel asks, “Mom why have we got these huge three-toed feet?” The mother replies, “To enable us trek across the soft sand of the desert without sinking.” “And why have we got these long, heavy eyelashes?” “To keep the sand out of our eyes on the trips through the desert ”replies the mother camel. “And Mom, why have we got these big humps on our backs?” The mother, now a little impatient with the boy replies, “They are there to help us store fat for our long treks across the desert, so we can go without water for long periods.” “OK, I get it!” says the baby camel, “We have huge feet to stop us sinking, long eyelashes to keep the sand from our eyes and humps to store water. Then, Mom, why the heck are we here in the Toronto zoo?” Modern life sometimes makes one feel like a camel in a zoo. And like camels in a zoo we need sometimes to go into the desert in order to discover who we truly are. Lent invites us to enter into this kind of desert experience.

In today’s gospel we read that after Jesus was baptized “Immediately the Holy Spirit urged Jesus into the desert. There, for forty days, alone except for desert animals, he was subjected to Satan’s temptations to sin. And afterwards the angels came and cared for him.” Many times, we as Christians feel the same way Jesus did…when we become a Christian and accept Jesus as Lord and Savior (our baptism), shouldn’t we be protected? We, understandably, assume that life should be “easier”; we feel certain that we should instantly have a closer relationship with God. We can falsely believe that we no longer have to endure “deserts and wildernesses”in our lives. But, then, suddenly, one day, in one moment in time, we find ourselves in a wilderness.

When we make a stand in our faith, when we decide to get in the boat with Jesus, Satan unleashes his rage against us. We are now “officially”his enemy, and the true battle has begun. Shockingly, as we take each step of faith, our temptations seem to actually come more often than before we believed! When we’re faced with the desert experiences, we find ourselves crying out, “Why is this happening to me? Why am I in this desert? If You’re a God of love, why all this pain? Why do the innocent suffer? If You’re a God of order, why all the chaos? If You’re so powerful, why do You seem so incapable? By the way, where are You?”It is at this time that we need to be reminded of the Truth: Jesus told us in John 16: 33, “I have told you all this so that you may have peace in me. Here on earth you will have many trials and sorrows. But take heart, because I have overcome the world.”
It’s interesting that the most violent storm the twelve disciples ever experienced was when Jesus, the Son of God, was in the boat with them (Mark 4:35-41). In other words, in the most violent storms and deserts and wildernesses of your life…Jesus is in it with you, too. Don’t be deceived, Jesus didn’t come to get you out of the deserts and storms of your life; He came to take you through them.

In the desert Jesus encountered beasts and angels. There are wild beasts and angels in everyone of us. Sometimes, owing to our superficial self knowledge, we fail to distinguish the wild beasts in us from the the angels. The desert was the school where Jesus came to distinguish between the voice of God which he should follow and the voice of Satan which is temptation. How many voices do we hear from the moment we get up in the morning till the moment we go to sleep at night? The countless voices in the daily paper, the soliciting voices on the radio and the television, the voices of those who live and work with us, not forgetting our own unceasing inner voices.

In this time of Lent, we can all create a desert space in our overcrowded lives. We can set aside a place and time to be alone daily with God, a time to distance ourselves from the many noises and voices that bombard our lives every day, a time to hear God’s word, a time to rediscover who we are before God and before our dear ones, a time to say yes to God and no to Satan as Jesus did. Welcome to Lent! Welcome to the desert!