My grandpa had a story that I heard him tell a few times. I can’t confirm all of its details but I can confirm its truth.
Sometime when my grandpa was a teenager going to the local Christian high school, during an evangelical chapel service, he was moved to dedicate his life to God and felt a call to be a missionary or service worker in Africa. And maybe that kind of call feels a bit stereotypical for a white kid in Kansas to receive in the early 1950s, at a time when American missions were booming globally, conceiving of Africa as a racialized monolith, a mythical place ever in need of Western Christian help. But the journey was a long one for my grandpa, who spent most of his adult life in Central and Southern Africa as an agricultural development worker and leader with Mennonite Central Committee and the Mennonite Missions board.
Later that same day after my grandpa first dedicated his life to this call, he woke up crying in the middle of the night – “scared stiff” as he would say – wondering, “O Lord, what have I just accepted?!” Then his mom, my great-grandma, came into his bedroom and offered him three wise messages, messages that I wonder were just as influential if not more to him, than his original call. She told him three things:
- God called you, but never meant to scare you.
- You don’t have to go this morning.
- When the time comes you’ll be ready, and prepared, and some of it will probably be fun.
Today is the first Sunday of Lent, a 40-day journey that the church takes every year, where we focus on our discipleship with Jesus. Maybe for you, when Lent comes around every year you feel like my grandpa – scared and unsure of what this journey might mean? Or maybe you’re a stormier soul and you crave the blunt honesty that Lent invites us into. Perhaps you receive it as a gift to look into the face of your own frailty and the violence and despair in our world and wrestle with how God is present.
Lent is a time of vulnerability as we choose to walk into the wilderness? What are the messages that will get us through the fear we will encounter there?
The first message my great grandma gave my grandpa was, “God called you, but never meant to scare you.”
Our Mark gospel passage begins not in fear but in revelation as Jesus is baptized and the heavens are torn apart and the Spirit descends and Jesus is blessed by heaven as God’s Beloved Son. And our text ends within Jesus’ first words spoken, proclaiming the good news of God – declaring that the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near! But after his baptism and before his public ministry can begin – Mark gives us two potent and potentially scary verses, that hold within them our entire Lenten journey:
“And the Spirit immediately drove [Jesus] out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts and the angels waited on him.” (Mark 1:12-13).
Most Bibles I looked at labeled this short section as “The Temptation of Jesus.” But the First Nations Version, which Samir also quoted from last Sunday, names this moment as Jesus’ Vision Quest, a ritual of transformation practiced in Indigenous cultures. God called Jesus, but never meant to scare him. The same Spirit that the tore apart the dividing lines between earth and heaven and descended like a dove on Jesus also drove him into the wilderness.
Matthew and Luke in their versions of this Vision Quest, name specific temptations and give us back and forth dialogue between the devil and Jesus. But all Mark tells us is that the Spirit led Jesus to the wilderness. And once in that wilderness Jesus encountered a number of characters – Satan the Accuser, wild beasts, and angels – and he was there a total of forty days. That’s all we get. We’re left to imagine all that took place.
The second thing my great grandma told my grandpa was, “You don’t have to go this morning.”
I think what my grandma meant is that the work of faithfulness is steady attentiveness to God over a lifetime. But it is true that the gospel of Mark has a sense of apocalyptic urgency – the world is ending – so Jesus and everyone else needs to get to the work of doing and proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom! What’s more urgent than that?
But before Jesus is to go make that proclamation and do those healings, he remembers that he doesn’t have to go right this morning. So Jesus takes forty days to soak in the goodness of God’s creation, slowing himself down to feel the rhythm of his people who had spent forty years wandering in the wilderness learning how to be free after God delivered them from slavery in Egypt. Perhaps Jesus discovered during those forty days that if you remain curious enough, boredom can bring not just temptation but also gifts and insights,
I wonder if he felt connected to Noah’s family who were cooped up in an arc for forty watery days and nights before emerging back into a changed world. I wonder if during Jesus’ forty days in the backcountry if the clouds ever parted after a rain, and a rainbow broke through prompting him to remember God’s promise that the world and all its creatures would never again be destroyed.
Mark tells us that Jesus was “with the wild beasts”? Did he smile at the sight of the wild goat and the hyrax? Did he fear at night the cries of the hyena and jackal and wolf? When he saw the soaring eagle did his mind drift back to those words spoken down on him from the heavens, “You are my Beloved Son, with you I am well pleased.”
I wonder if it took at least forty days for those words to sink into Jesus’ soul. How long do you need for the full truth of who you are as made in the image of God to sink in? What kind of wilderness space to need to live into the depth of your call?
The last thing that my great grandma said to my grandpa was, “When the time comes you’ll be ready, and prepared, and some of it will probably be fun.”
I can’t promise you that a life spent following Jesus will be fun or that this Lent will be all fun, if by fun we mean things like scrolling through YouTube or eating a tub of ice cream or playing HORSE on the driveway basketball hoop. Because even in this first chapter of Mark the shadow of death hovers. Right after Jesus finishes his wilderness vision quest we learn that John the Baptist has been arrested, and you know what happens when powerful empires arrest the prophets and dissidents within their borders.
Right from the start, the good news of the kingdom of God means a clash with the powers of evil and a confrontation with death. And death isn’t fun. Whether we’re grieving the loss of someone dear to us or horrified as wars continue to rage or we’re just numb to see news of another shooting – death isn’t fun. It’s confusing, maddening, heartbreaking.
And in this Lent journey, Jesus invites us to be honest about death. The world can be brutal and our lives are more fragile than we’d like to admit. Following a God of love to the fullest means not running away from but lingering with this ache. And the wilderness prepares us to be present with God, with all of creation, and with ourselves, wherever this journey of faithfulness will lead. And that journey extends to and through death and beyond death.
“When the time comes you’ll be ready, and prepared, and some of it will probably be fun.”
By this I imagine my great grandmother meant that my grandpa would have companions on his life journey of faith and that he was already more equipped with gifts and support than he knew. Mark tells us that the angels, the divine messengers, waited on and helped Jesus in the wilderness. They deaconed to him, just like Peter’s mother-in-law would do for Jesus and the disciples after being healed, just like we care for one another here in the church.
We will never be fully ready or prepared for or able to predict the temptations or gifts we will encounter on a wilderness journey, but we can begin with the assurance that we don’t walk alone into any wilderness. We walk with the memories and messages of care and love others have blessed us with, to which we can cling to in times of turmoil.
We can look to the beasts of the wilderness, remembering that God also made them good, and promised never to destroy them or us or any of this beloved world. We can look up at the rainbow and remember we are living in God’s time and promise. We can look to the mysterious angels, helpers in disguise who will arise in our moments of confusion and need.
And we can look to Jesus, who walks with us in the wilderness. He understands the temptations and loneliness and the despair, the hope and the giddiness and the joy of what it means to be human made in the image of the God. So remember that Jesus walks beside you on this journey, no matter your heartbreak, your trials, your trouble or your sorrow – know that in this wilderness of life, it is Jesus who walks with you, who walks with us.