Extreme Measures        

    The Holy Spirit drove Jesus out into the wilderness; almost as if he had a whip.  You get the feeling of Jesus being rushed out into the wilderness and compelled against his will to be tempted by Satan, to struggle with the possibilities of doing the wrong things.  That’s the way Mark expresses it; and that image of urgency is true.  Although I think we need to keep in mind that the Spirit and Jesus shared the same being, as well as the Father – there was the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit at all times – and so it wasn’t an outside force driving Jesus into the wilderness; it was his own inside processes.  He was a driven man, in other words.  He was a man who was determined to get out there and face the drastic consequences of what had happened when he entered into human life in the incarnation, when he was born in Bethlehem . 

        What happened when he did that was he took upon himself the whole experience of being human; human as God created humans to be.  Jesus took that nature upon himself and joined it with his divine nature; and the two natures in the one person of Jesus Christ were going to do the work that Jesus had come to do.  It was a major task that Jesus was beginning as he went into the wilderness to fast and pray.  And he testified, saying: That task was nothing less than the rethinking of human nature – taking human nature back to the Garden of Eden; taking it back to that time before the first sin, when people had the power of their own selves to choose what is right and what is wrong.   Somehow in the mystery of what happened in the Garden, we lost that power; but it was part of original human nature and Jesus had that nature.  And he took that nature out into the wilderness to face the same temptation that Adam and Eve had faced: the temptation to choose.  If you had the power to choose the other way, you’d choose what was right; or the temptation to choose what was wrong, the opportunity to choose what was right. 

        A drastic task it was, this remaking of human nature, it called for extreme measures.  Now, I think those extreme measures are spoken of in the phrase he was with wild beasts.  Clearly, Jesus was with wild beasts when he was out in the wilderness.  He couldn’t help but run into the occasional snake or hog or lizard or gazelle; maybe there were a few mountain lions prowling around.  I’m not sure what the fauna was in the Holy Land in the time of Jesus’ days, but it was different from what it is now; it was also different from what it was in the time of King David, or the days of Moses.  There were wild beasts there.  But Matthew and Luke talked about specific temptations that Jesus faced but Mark skipped over those, but Mark simply tells us that Jesus was tempted by Satan.  And I have a feeling that his phrase “he was with wild beasts” was kind of a short hand for talking about the specific areas in which Jesus was tempted.  He was with wild beasts.

        Yes, the temptation of Jesus was real.  It was a real temptation.  He actually could have chosen the wrong thing.  He was battling, after all, with his human nature; just as Adam and Eve had done.  The temptation was an actual temptation; it’s not that Jesus was going through a pantomime and because of his divine nature he was never really in danger.  There was real peril here when he went out into the wilderness.  He knew he would have to be strong.  And that’s the respect in which the wildness of the wild beasts is important to this story.  There are powers unleashed in human beings that are very powerful, very strong, and that run very deep.  And they don’t all come from the fallen human condition.  A lot of them come to us simply from the fact of being human. 

        Appetites, normal physical urges that people have; food and sleep, sexuality, companionship; all the kinds of appetites that people have are a part of un-fallen human nature.  Also hopes and dreams, the kinds of things we would like to achieve and to accomplish; things that our reason and our will work around with as we go through our lives; those things are also a part of un-fallen human nature.  And when you put the appetites together with the hopes and dreams; when you put the feelings together with the reasoning process that people go through when the deal with their feelings and their hopes and their dreams; when you put all these things together, you don’t have to have the Garden of Eden outcome, you don’t have to have the fall of men and women, you don’t have to have the impairment that we do experience in our lives, to have temptation.  Jesus was truly tempted.

        Being tempted is not sinning; responding to the temptation with an act of will that chooses to do this or that, that’s where the sin comes in.  Jesus out in the wilderness struggles with temptation.  He did so for himself, for his overall process of creating a perfect human nature.  To give us a chance to step into that human nature and then relate to God in the right way; that was the whole work of restoration that Jesus came to do.  He did it for his own work, but he also did it for each one of us.  Because as Jesus struggled with his temptation, and as he, in every case, was victorious; being tempted and yet not sinning; as he did this, he was giving us the means to overcome our own temptations; means which we didn’t have before he went out into the wilderness, before he came into our lives, before he walked the walk to Jerusalem, before he was tortured and killed, before he died on the cross and was put in the tomb, before he rose again.  We didn’t have the means to resist temptation until these events happened.  And now that they have, our own struggles have a way out, because Jesus was with wild beasts.

        We are with wild beasts, too; only our wild beasts have a little bit more control over us than the wild beasts had over Jesus.  Because we do have that flaw in our human nature that Jesus did not carry into the world; that flaw that is hard to explain but in the narrative of the Christian people it comes out as something that we cannot avoid.  We cannot avoid being selfish.  We cannot avoid sinning.  We cannot avoid doing the wrong thing out of our own powers, of our own resources, because of that flaw; the flaw that people sometimes refer to as the fall, or sometimes as original sin, but we do have that.  And to be people who live in the Biblical narrative we need to acknowledge that we have that; not only do we suffer temptations but we actually have sins; and we have reason to repent.  That’s why we do have some sort of silent or spoken prayer of confession in our weekly worship, because we need it; we have that flaw that requires it.   And for us, these flaws exist within a mixture of motives and powers that we rightly can think of as wild beasts; the wild beasts live inside us; they are the forces at work inside us that are likely to lead us down wrong paths. 

        We are aware o f the wild beasts, not so much as sin, but as things going on inside us that we’re not rally happy about.  Things that are deep down; things that come up when we’re lying awake in bed at night, before we’ve quite gone to sleep, and we’re sort of going over all the wrongs in our lives that we’ve been embarrassed or frustrated or disappointed in the way things have worked out in our lives; those are the wild beasts that begin to stir around and grumble and maybe even occasionally roar a time or two.  The wild beasts deep down inside us I think, are part of our human experience. 

        I know that I myself have some very strong urges toward losing my temper, toward competitiveness, toward aggression.  All of these things I can remember, not so much as things that I’ve ever fulfilled, because I’ve never been an aggressive or violent type person in my conduct; but I can remember them as moments of childhood rage when I was very young.  I was the fourth of the children of my parents and my older sister and brothers used to gang up on me; when my younger sister came along, I was no longer in that position, but the damage was already done by that point.  I felt the rage of wanting my own way, the frustration of having others thwart my own way and tease and taunt me about it and the sheer frustration of being powerless to do anything about it.  And I don’t like that place, even now when I revisit it, I don’t like going there and re experiencing the feelings. 

        And so, in a sense, all of my life I’ve had that wild beast roaring down inside me; and I’ve found various ways of dealing with it.  I have learned various types of self control that have kept me from living a life where I might let this rage come out.  I’ve also developed ways of ignoring it or keeping it from having an opportunity to come out.  One way that shows up in my life is that I don’t like to play games with large family groups; I get too competitive.  It frustrates them and upsets me too much. 

        And when I first entered into Lois’ extended family; they’re a great game-playing family, and I kind of had to fight for that position because people were insisting – Oh, it just because you don’t know the game and if you learn the game and start playing it you’ll get to experience it just the way that we do.  And they meant well; they were being welcoming to do that, but I did make a few attempts to enter into their game playing and I found that it bothered me a whole lot more to lose than it bothered them.  All of their taunting and teasing and mocking of each other not withstanding, I was the one who was genuinely bothered by loss; a lot more than their family was.  They have a different wild beast in each of them, perhaps; but for me its fear of competition, because I’m afraid to let the rage out.  And so, I don’t play games; that’s one of the things I do.

        And then, other things that are commonly done by us with our wild beasts I’ve done as well.  I’ve recently made a major cut down in my caffeine intake; but drugging ourselves is one way we have of controlling our wild beasts.  And the drugs don’t have to be the “dangerous ones” like alcohol or other controlled substances, but also caffeine can be a way we have of taming the wild beasts.  Food, watching TV late at night, all these things are things that people use to help control their wild beasts.  And I’m a part of that experience, because I’m a part of the common experience we all have: of having powers within us that are too great for us to master, to gain pure control over.  We can manage them somehow, we can wrestle them down once in a while but they do still lurk there, and they’re still potentially damaging to us, ready to crop up and make us miserable.  

        Those are the wild beasts that we are dealing with.  And Jesus, by going out with the wild beasts is taking the extreme measures necessary to give us a means of conquering them, because he did conquer them.   He conquered them and then he offered up his life so that we could have a share of his life and that gives us the possibility of being conquerors as well.     The resurrection of Christ, after dying the redemptive death that he had died, the resurrection of Christ brought a power into human possibility, a power into our midst; a power into each of us potentially; a power that can choose, in every case presented to us, the right thing.

        Now the old person and the new person inside us seem to continue to struggle with Christian life, so we don’t always choose the right thing.  I imagine you can’t find anybody who has lived a life of always choosing the right thing, even after having Jesus living inside them.  Even when Jesus comes and enters into our lives, even when our lives are joined to his and the two powers come together so that our power to control ourselves is greatly enhanced by the power of Christ; even when that happens we still are inclined to let the old person have his or her way and let the wild beast have its way.  And in that sense we are still inclined to sin, but we don’t have to anymore because of what Christ did.  Because of his project of remaking human nature, we ourselves can enter into that new human nature, even now as we begin to grow in that human nature as we move through life toward the life that is to come. 

        And that’s our project here on earth; a project that the season of Lent helps us to remember; because in the season of Lent, we directly confront some of those wild beasts.  Fasting is one way this commonly takes place; (fasting can mean abstinence from certain foods as well as abstaining from entire meals, not everybody is in a position to fast by abstaining from entire meals, you might have medical reasons why that doesn’t work for you, but changing your eating habits in a way that reminds you, that puts you in mind of God, that’s also a form of fasting).  Prayer, self-denial, these disciplines of Lent all have the capacity to help us, to accept into our lives the extreme measures that Jesus took.  And sometimes when we do fast, when we do adopt a new discipline, when we try to be more mindful more reflective, when we try to examine our lives more carefully, often we find that the wild beasts seem to be stronger; they seem to be more potentially able to disrupt our lives.   We might, in a period of fasting, have more bouts of depression or anxiety.  We might find ourselves more unhappy because we’re not mindlessly drugging the wild beast into not bothering us; but instead we’re engaging with them.  But that’s still a good sign, even if the lion inside roars from time to time, its still a good sign that a genuine spiritual struggle is taking place; because this struggle, while its one that Christ has already completed for us, its still a struggle that we too need to go through; its still a path that we too need to walk.  We have him helping us; we have him carrying us sometimes; but its something that all of us need to do in order to have the life he has.  We walk the road that he has walked and is walking; and that means that his time with the wild beasts gives us a chance to have our time with the wild beasts.  His extreme measures give us a chance to take our extreme measures; and in this way, in the season of Lent, draw closer to God.  For this period of time, these forty days of Lent which correspond to the forty days that Jesus was in the wilderness, we draw closer to God.  So that when the Resurrection comes, when we relive the experience of Easter morning, we will truly be ready to know what that means and feel how that feels.  The extreme measures were necessary to the joy that lies ahead.  Amen. 

Top of Page