First Sunday of Lent

Lectionary: 23

The Spirit drove Jesus out into the desert, 
and he remained in the desert for forty days,
tempted by Satan.
He was among wild beasts,
and the angels ministered to him.

 

Scholars believe that Saint Mark’s gospel was the first of the four in the New Testament. He gave the word gospel a whole new meaning when he converted the story of Jesus, the “good news,” into a written document. Saints Mathew and Luke received his text and added more stories and teachings from their own resources.

The difference appears especially in the story of Jesus in the wilderness. Matthew and Luke added the story of Satan’s tempting Jesus with three challenges. But that story is quite different from Mark’s original version.

First, we should notice that the Holy Spirit had just appeared. Jesus was in the baptismal water of the Jordan River as the Hebrews had been in the liberating water of the Red Sea. The same Spirit who drove the Hebrews out of Egypt and into the wilderness now drove Jesus out of the river and into the wilderness. 

As they were in the desert for forty years and Moses had stood before God without eating or drinking for forty days, so now Jesus remained in the desert for forty days.

Unlike the accounts of Matthew and Luke, Jesus’s sojourn in the desert is not entirely unpleasant. Mark’s statement that he “was among wild beasts” might describe the experience of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Though tempted like Adam and Eve, he blew off the Satan. And who would quarrel with angels ministering to them? 

That forty-day pleasant experience recalls the forty-year honeymoon which the Hebrews enjoyed with the Lord. As Deuteronomy recalls,

He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food unknown to you and your ancestors, so you might know that it is not by bread alone that people live, but by all that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD. The clothing did not fall from you in tatters, nor did your feet swell these forty years.

Jesus’s trip to the wilderness fulfills Hosea’s prophecy of a second honeymoon for the Holy People:

Therefore, I will allure her now;

I will lead her into the wilderness

and speak persuasively to her.

Then I will give her the vineyards she had,

and the valley of Achor (i.e. the “valley of trouble”) as a door of hope.

There she will respond as in the days of her youth,

as on the day when she came up from the land of Egypt.

 

As we begin our forty-day preparation for Easter, the Church invites us to accompany Jesus into the wilderness of penance and prayer. It is unpleasant only as we let go of the unnecessary, extraneous luxuries we afford ourselves. We might encounter the wild beasts of our irritability and anxieties as we act differently from those around us. The Lord has called us to be a holy people; we should expect a certain discomfort that accompanies that vocation. But we'll have the angels to assure us and the great privilege and pleasure of attending the God who is with us, our Emmanuel.