The desert: a place of terror and tenderness

FIRST SUNDAY OF LENT [C] | 9 MARCH 25 | LUKE 4:1-13

The fact that Jesus’ temptation took place in the wilderness would have evoked powerful if complex associations for any 1st century Palestinian Jew. Much of Palestine was (and still is) uninhabitable wilderness, barren land suitable only for meagre pasturing. The book of Deuteronomy, for instance, describes the southern desert as “great and terrible, with venomous serpents and scorpions and thirsty, arid ground” (8:15). It was also commonly believed that demons dwelt in the wilderness, making it a place of danger in an even more alarming sense. And, of course, in Israel’s history, the wilderness was associated with sin and failure. It was in the wilderness that Israel was tested and found wanting, when the people substituted a craven idol for the living God who had brought them out of Egypt. It was crucially significant that the central temptation put before Jesus by Satan was idolatry.

On the other hand, the wilderness was also a place of blessing, where God had drawn close to Israel. So, the prophet Hosea speaks of God leading Israel into the wilderness in order to speak directly to her heart and reclaim her love (2:16) The wilderness, in other words, was as much a place of trysting as testing; a place of terror, to be sure, but also a place of tenderness.

All of this is a helpful in understanding the purpose of Lent, our own forty days in the wilderness. We, of course, don’t go out into the wilderness: rather, we withdraw into the wilderness within, the wilderness created by whatever penance we choose to adopt: as long as we remember that penance is not a form of mild masochism but a discipline that enables us, by acknowledging and owning our real needs and our deepest desires, to be more receptive to God’s abiding presence.

The early desert Fathers, the originators of monasticism, called the wilderness “a place for the weighing of the human heart”. They were drawing attention to the fact that Lent focusses not just on our actions and the way we conduct our lives, but on our motivations and the dispositions, so easily muddied and muddled by prejudice and self-regard or just fear and faintheartedness, out of which our actions flow. Lent can help us to confront honestly and courageously the self that I have created through my free choices, as opposed to the self that God by his free choice created me to be, in his own image and likeness.

That said, Lent has nothing to do with neurotic or obsessive introspection. The ascetical practices of Lent aren’t about self-improvement or human perfectibility, much less about making ourselves presentable to God. Not only can we never earn God’s love: the good news is that we don’t need to. God knows us infinitely better than we can ever know ourselves; nothing but nothing is hidden from him, and still, he loves us. Nevertheless, realism about our failings is a precondition of both knowing our need of God and experiencing the sheer gratuitousness of his love. Acknowledging our sinfulness is, of course, easier said than done.

Remember the moment in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory when the failed ‘whisky priest’, at grave risk to his own life during the persecution in 1920s Mexico, is hurriedly hearing whispered confessions. He says, by way of encouragement to an elderly woman penitent: “Remember your real sins.” To which she indignantly replies, “But I’m a good woman, Father.” “Then what are you doing here”, he says to her, “keeping away the bad people?”

We can all say, “I’m a sinner”, but beyond the pious rhetoric, if we don’t feel deep discomfort when we say it, we’re not remembering our real sins. St Peter’s words come to mind: “Leave me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.” He certainly meant it.

But like Peter, we needn’t fear. As is so evident throughout the gospels, God meets us where we need him most, in the confusion and chaos of our real lives, in weakness and hopelessness, in temptation and desolation. He alone can and will effect the change we need most. Our penance is, as it were, merely the weeding: it’s God and God alone who gives the growth.

Outward penance and fasting will contribute nothing but corrupting self-satisfaction, unless accompanied by inner penance, and that concerns the heart. The critical fast, not just during Lent but every day of our lives, is from whatever doesn’t have love, truth and goodness as its motive and goal.