First Sunday of Lent - 2024
A wilderness experience
I don’t know about you, but at about this time every Lent, forty days seems like a long, bleak stretch of time. It’s probably mostly to do with the thought of going without whatever of life’s pleasant things that I have chosen to give up this Lent!
This feeling of interior bleakness does help, however, in getting me in touch with the exterior bleakness of the wilderness where Jesus spent his forty days in today’s gospel. The outlook for Him mustn’t have been much more pleasant than it is for me at the beginning of the forty days. Why would the Spirit take Jesus to such a place?
In the history of Israel and even the Church, the wilderness (or desert) has traditionally been a place of encounter with God. Moses, the people of Israel, Elijah, John the Baptist, Jesus himself… for millennia, men and women of prayer have taken themselves into the desert in order to be rid of all distraction and encounter the living God.
Each Lent, we too follow the Holy Spirit into our own experience of “wilderness”, not to prove to God or ourselves that we can go forty whole days without coffee or chocolate or alcohol, but to encounter the living God.
The things we give up help us to create the wilderness experience. Without them, we have less to distract us from prayer and thus from encounter with God.
Well that’s the idea, anyway. In my experience, it’s much easier to rid ourselves of chocolate than to rid ourselves of the desire for chocolate. And so, in the wilderness, we’re prey to temptation, which is ultimately trying to get us to settle for less than what we had set out for: a simple fix of chocolate, rather than allowing my physical desire to point me to the deeper reality of my inner, spiritual desire for God.
Alongside this, we also discover the wild beasts… They’re actually living in us all of the time, but they tend to behave in a more civilized manner when we feed them with regular coffee and take the edge off their appetites with alcohol or Netflix. But without those distractions, we see more of our inner wild beasts in their natural ferocity: our laziness, impatience, quick temper…
How is it in all of this chaos that we have any hope of meaningful encounter with God?
On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like Jesus had an encounter with God in the wilderness either. Looking more closely, however, we see that “the angels looked after him.” The only other time that we hear of angels ministering to Jesus was in a similarly bleak place – his agony in Gethsemane. In the places of his deepest struggles and weakness, Jesus encountered the compassion of God.
Perhaps, for us too, it is only when we let go of our distractions and face our weaknesses and struggles that we can experience God’s compassion. This is might even be in the form of “angels” that God sends to look after us: the person that let us in in heavy traffic, the one who got our washing in before it rained, the listening ear that was present to our struggles, the word of wisdom that gave us hope to hold on to…
Perhaps our daily focus this Lent could be on naming the “angels”, the tangible experiences of God’s compassionate love and mercy for us during this wilderness experience. Rather than giving all of our attention to our temptations and the wild beasts inside, let’s choose to recognise where we have encountered God’s saving compassion.
Reflection questions:
1. Do you find Lent a time of greater encounter with God than other times of year? Why/why not?
2. What are the greatest distractions in your life that draw you away from God and the things of God?
3. Where have you experienced God’s compassion through “angels” that ministered to you in hard times?
Katherine Stone
This post was originally written for the Diocese of Wollongong