Friday, March 03, 2006

First and Only Pass at This Weekend's Bible Lesson: Mark 1:9-15

[At least once each week, I try to share some of what I've been studying and thinking about as I explore the Bible lesson the congregation I serve as pastor will be using for our weekend worship celebrations. Because of an heavy writing schedule--I'm working on our congregation's daily Lenten readings--and the Ash Wednesday start of Lent, I am late in getting these notes online this week. I hope that both the folks of Friendship Lutheran Church, the congregation I serve as pastor, and others will find it helpful.]

The Bible Text:
9In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” 12And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. 13He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

14Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, 15and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

Some Comments:
A good chunk of this text for the First Weekend in Lent has already appeared in Bible lessons appointed for earlier weeks of the Church Year that began on November 27. My focus this weekend will be the verses we haven't touched on yet, Mark 1:12-13.

Remembering a basic principle of Biblical interpretation, context impacts content, let's consider context. This entire lesson is sandwiched between Jesus' Baptism, where the voice of the Father affirmed Jesus' status and ministry to Jesus, and the beginning of His ministry.

Jesus' temptation in the wilderness has something to do with both sides of that sandwich. The heavenly affirmation fortifies Him for the wilderness and all the challenges to come, including the cross.

The Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness. The verb is evocative. Jesus is driven away from what must have been a comfortable and comforting moment into the wild places. (There, he will even be met by what Mark describes as "wild beasts.")

Pastor Brian Stoffregen suggests that Mark's account of Jesus' Baptism describes our lives after we are baptized. I think that he is onto something!

Though, in Baptism we're assured of God's affirmation and presence in our lives, we still must face life in the wilderness. The Spirit-driven person--the person who has surrendered to Jesus Christ--won't always have it easy. Check that, will almost never have it easy. This is true even if the outward circumstances of their existence are comfortable. There will still be "wild beasts" with which they must deal. I'm not referring to struggles with "infidels" out there. Most people, honestly, couldn't care less about the spiritual struggles of those committed to following Jesus Christ. Many friends of Martin Luther King, Jr., for example, found it quaint that he actually recoiled at his own marital infidelities. No, I'm talking about the interior spiritual struggles that are a constant part of the lives of anybody who is intent on following God. Get closer to God and you see just how perfect He is and how hard it is without utter dependence on Him. The temptation is to throw up our hands and say, "Sod it all!" Without constantly renewed dependence on God, that's exactly what we'll do!

Pastor Luke Bouman, based on lectures he heard given by Professor Fred Neidner of Valparaiso University, offers the intriguing suggestion that our traditional understanding of "the wilderness" in reading about Jesus' temptation may be all wrong. Because Moses was called to lead the people of Israel while watching his sheep in the wilderness regions of Midian because God shaped His people in their forty-year wilderness wanderings, Bouman suggests, the wilderness is "a holy place."

While I understand where Bouman and Niedner are coming from in their interpretations of the wilderness in the Biblical witness, I find their arguments unconvincing. In the Genesis 2 account of creation, the disordered chaos from which God makes life and on which peace and order are imposed, is not a roiling, stormy sea as in the Genesis 1 account, but a wild and dangerous desert wilderness.

God can carve Edens from wilderness, of course.

God can also meet us in the wilderness. That was what happened to Moses and the people of Israel.

But it doesn't alter the basic estrangement from God and danger to humanity, spiritual and otherwise, represented by the wilderness.

Jesus was driven into the wilderness, I believe, in order to taste something of the estrangement of humanity from God that came after the fall of Adam and Eve when they were driven east of Eden.

The fact that the wild beasts apparently don't assault Jesus doesn't represent the re-establishment of Eden-like harmony between human beings and God's creation, although it may foreshadow the Old Testament prophecy about the lion living at peace with the lamb. (Question: Which is Jesus? The lion? The lamb? Both?) But I think that the beasts more likely represent all the opposition Jesus will face, including that from Satan and from evil. In First Peter, Satan is described as "a roaring lion searching for who he may destroy."

Understanding why the Spirit drove Jesus into the foreboding wilderness can be seen in that phrase, "tempted by Satan." The verb--peirazo in the Greek of the New Testament, is like a coin with two sides of meaning:
  • Temptation: Allurement by Satan into rebellion from God's will and ways.
  • Testing: God using the circumstances of a life in order to test faithfulness, not so much for God's benefit, but for that of the one being tested.
One of the things I tell my Catechism students is: Either God gets His way or God gets His way. God can even take the shenanigans of those who might try to lure us into wrongdoing and turn the experience of resistance and struggle into something that will strengthen our characters. As Martin Luther points out in The Small Catechism, God never tempts someone into sin. But God will use whatever temptation we face to prepare us for the next steps in our lives.

In the wilderness, Jesus was driven to utter dependence on the Father. In our after-Baptism lives, we too will either depend on the Father or experience spectacular failure, the result of relying on ourselves, others, or our feelings in the face of being assaulted by the wild beasts of life.

In the midst of being tempted and tested, Jesus was served by angels. The word angel, in Greek, means messenger. The angels are messengers from God. The New Testament tells us also that they can bring ministry (diakosune) or service, calling them "ministering spirits."

God always sends help to us in the wilderness. Sometimes that help may be supernatural, as was true of Jesus. Often, it comes in the form of people. In the movie, The Color Purple, one character tells another, "When you walked in the room, I knew there was a God."

Psalm 23 says: "Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff— they comfort me." In the wilderness, a place of danger and temptation, Jesus fortified Himself for a ministry of loving self-sacrifice by relying on the Father and experiencing the help of the angels. Surely, there is a message in that for His followers.

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