One of the things that’s spoken about amongst Christians from time to time is what’s known as a ‘Wilderness Experience’. A Wilderness Experience is the way people often refer to a time when they struggle with their faith. Some people might refer to the same thing as a ‘Crisis of Faith’. It’s a time when people find faith difficult. A time when they perhaps find prayer difficult or think that God isn’t listening to their prayer. It’s a time when people struggle to make sense of their faith, a time perhaps when things about their faith that seemed quite straightforward to them, they suddenly start to question or have doubts about. It’s a time when people can seem lost in a sense, wandering in a wilderness of doubt and uncertainty, a time when they don’t know what to do or how to follow their faith. A time when they feel that God is very far away from them.
These Wilderness Experiences can happen to any of us, at any time, and they do. In fact, I’d be surprised if there are any amongst us who haven’t had a Wilderness Experience of some kind. But if you have had that kind of experience, there’s no need to worry about it too much because they’re simply part and parcel of a life of faith. In fact, these experiences can be seen as an essential part of a life of faith because, for many people, Wilderness Experiences are nothing other than times of trial that God sends in order to test and ultimately, strengthen our faith.
We see examples of Wilderness Experiences in the Scriptures. In the Scriptures, these experiences are God given times of testing. Perhaps the most well-known, or at least most easily recognisable Wilderness Experience in the Scriptures, is the time Israel spent in the wilderness between their Exodus from Egypt and their entry into the Promised Land. This was a time when Israel’s faith in God was tested. It was a test they failed, many times, so it also became a time of punishment for their unfaithfulness. But it was a time of testing and it was, quite literally, a Wilderness Experience.
Another well-known Wilderness Experience we read about in the Scriptures is the story of Job. We read that God deliberately sends all kinds of ill fortune on Job simply to test his faith. And Job’s faith is tested, it’s tested almost to breaking point. But when Job’s faith is restored, he has a deeper faith because he has more wisdom and a new found understanding of God.
So Wilderness Experiences do seem to be part and parcel of a life of faith. They’re not new and they can happen to anyone. And if and when they do happen to us it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us or with our commitment to our faith, because Jesus himself had a Wilderness Experience and we read about that, about his time of testing, in this morning’s Gospel.
One thing we always need to remember about Jesus is that, whilst we believe that he was the incarnate Son of God, he was also fully human; he was just as human as you and I and anyone and everyone else. So Jesus was susceptible to the same human problems and weaknesses that we’re all susceptible to. And in the story of Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, we get a glimpse of the things that Jesus had to struggle with during his Wilderness Experience, the things that were perhaps a particular temptation to him because these were the aspects of his faith that he found most difficult.
St Mark, whose Gospel we read this morning, doesn’t give us any details of how Jesus was tempted but we know well enough from the other Gospels just what these temptations were. First there was the temptation to turn stones into bread. There are a good number of stories in the Gospels about Jesus dining with friends so that was something he probably enjoyed. On the surface then, this first temptation is a very simple one, Jesus enjoyed his food, and he was hungry. So why not use his divine power to satisfy his hunger? But the underlying temptation is to put our own comfort and convenience before doing God’s will. And we can be tempted to do that in so many ways.
For example, in one parish where I served on the PCC, a decision was made to move a PCC meeting forward from the usual time of 7:30pm to the earlier time of 6:30pm. For those of us who were working, as I was at the time because this was before I was ordained, that made it difficult to get to the meeting, at least in time for the start. And that was a problem because there was an important issue to discuss and a vote had to be taken on it that night. Nevertheless, the meeting went ahead at 6:30pm but, as the discussion went on, and so did the time, one person started looking at his watch and becoming more and more agitated. Eventually, he couldn’t take any more. He stood up and shouted,
‘Come on, come on. Get on with it. I want to be away by half past seven, United are on the tele!’
Then the reason for the early start then became quite apparent. Watching Manchester United play football on the TV was obviously more important to some people on the PCC than an issue that affected the future of the parish church they’d been called to represent and were responsible for.
But we can all, so easily, put our own comfort and convenience before God, our faith and the Church, and this was one temptation and test Jesus had to face and overcome.
The second temptation Jesus had to face was to throw himself from the top of the temple and allow God to save him, thereby proving that he was indeed the Son of God. The surface temptation here is that of turning the Wilderness Experience on its head and instead of Jesus using it to test his own faith, of using it to test God’s faithfulness. The underlying temptation though, is to try to use God for our own purposes. And again this is something that we can do in so many ways. I spoke about this problem in my sermon on Ash Wednesday, that of people who leave the Church because they’re not getting what they want out of it when usually what they want out of it is nothing more than a good feeling about themselves. We see people who’ve succumbed to this temptation too in the ‘empire builders’ we sometimes find in the Church, people who want and take over multiple jobs and roles in the Church and then make a great fuss about just how much they do for the Church. We’ve all met them. They say things like,
‘No one does as much for the church as I do.’ And ‘That church would be lost, or finished, without me.’ But the only person who could ever truly have said something like that is Jesus himself because without him there would be no Church, and only without him could there be no Church.
We all have more than our fair share of pride and it’s so easy for us to let that pride pump us up into thinking that we’re more important than others, even that we’re more important than God and the Church: which is really what’s happened when going to Church becomes all about us and what we want. This is another test Jesus had to face and overcome.
The third temptation Jesus was faced with was that of renouncing God and worshipping Satan in return for earthly power and riches. This is a really a straightforward choice that we all have to face and wrestle with on a daily basis because it’s a choice between choosing God and rejecting God; it’s a choice, for us as Christians, between being a disciple of Christ, or being a disciple of the world.
It’s a difficult choice to make at times too, especially if we’re going through a Wilderness Experience, because the rewards of following the way of the world can be very attractive and very tempting, whereas the rewards of following Christ are far less tangible. The reward for following Christ faithfully will far outlast any worldly rewards because the rewards for following Christ are eternal rewards. But we can’t see or touch those rewards now. And there’s no guarantee that we’ll ever have any tangible reward in this life for following Christ rather than the world. But it was the same for Jesus. His reward for choosing God over the world would be the Resurrection, but in order to get that reward, he would first have to undergo the pain of rejection and betrayal, he’d have to undergo the pain of abuse and scourging, and he’d have to undergo the agony of the Cross. Jesus knew that and yet he chose God and God’s ways over the ways of the world. He chose the far more difficult to obtain eternal reward God offered over the easier to achieve but short-lived rewards the world offered.
I don’t think there are very many people who, having once come to faith in Jesus, really reject God completely but I think what we all do to some extent is fall into a grey area between God and the world. We try to find a compromise between God and the world. We follow God as long as it’s not too hard and as long as we don’t have to give up all hope of worldly rewards, and then we hope that will be good enough to gain our eternal reward from God. But that was not what Jesus did. As he struggled with his doubts, and fears, during his Wilderness Experience, he chose to persevere in faith, no matter what he had to give up in personal and worldly terms to do that and regardless of how long, hard and painful those choices made the road ahead for him.
At the end of this story of Jesus’ Wilderness Experience, we’re told that God sent angels to look after him, and then he went out to start his public ministry. So we can look on Jesus’ Temptation in the Wilderness, his Wilderness Experience, as something that was very necessary for him to go through in preparation for carrying out the task God had given him. And so when they come, we should try to treat our own Wilderness Experiences in the same way. They’re not easy times to go through but, rather than fear them, we should try to look at them as something we need to go through in readiness for what God has planned for us. And because that’s what they are, we need to have faith that God will help us to get through them and to emerge on the other side of the wilderness with a stronger faith in him and a clearer sense of his purpose for our lives, and in his grace to help us achieve it.
Amen.
The Propers for the First Sunday of Lent can be found here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 