The Way of the Wilderness

Can you feel a shift in the air? This week, many of our neighbours, neighbouring countries and those in our community (including myself) are celebrating the Lunar New Year – a celebration that has been commemorated for over 3500 years. A year that began a couple of weeks ago through rituals of release, literally sweeping away anything that no longer serves in order to make way for something new. It is also a week that marks the beginning of our Muslim siblings’ holiest time: Ramadan, a sacred month observed for over 1400 years through fasting, attention to character, alms-giving and prayer in order to draw closer to God. And for us Christians, we are invited into a posture long held by the Church, one practised for over 1,700 years: a forty-day and forty-night journey that leads us deliberately toward the cross, where we learn to loosen our grip, attend to what is being undone within us, and allow ourselves to be shaped by the slow work of self-emptying—not by bypassing death, but by passing through it into the strange and radiant mystery of resurrection. Maybe different cultures, different religions, but the same human understanding over thousands of years: that in order for truth to emerge, healing to take place and new life to rise, a kind of death must take place first. But I wonder if we Christians, particularly in the West, take Lent as seriously as our Asian communities do in the lead-up to Lunar New Year, or our Muslim communities do during Ramadan? A kind of Christianity that can often be more known for hot-cross buns than for its practice of dying and death. In other words, a Christianity that has more recently been wrapped up by empire and enterprise than by the powerless and penniless practice of self-emptying. Because there is something at the heart of Lent that is crucial to our understanding of what it means to follow this God who walks to the cross—a God who suffers, who dies, and who breathes new life in unexpected ways that Lent has the capacity to unearth for us. This is not only echoed in Jesus’ desert story, but is a repeating rhythm throughout the Bible. We hear this first trickling when rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights while Noah and his family made their own kind of desert in the middle of sea and solemnity, waiting for God’s sign of new life. We see it as a cracked rock where Moses spent forty days and forty nights fasting in the presence of God on Mount Sinai. We see it as the Israelites spending forty years, literally walking in circles in the wilderness—a journey that, according to Google Maps, should have only taken eleven days, yet is excruciatingly elongated as they deepen into a freedom they were barely able to believe. And we almost miss hearing it as Elijah spends forty days and forty nights in the depths of despair, defeat and exhaustion, until he encounters the still breath of God. And now Jesus follows the long arc of his Judean forebears as he too is led by the same Spirit of God into forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. Our story takes place at the tail end of his fasting, where he is at his most vulnerable and most hollowed out, having let the wilderness work on him—body, mind and soul. And instead of being restless or resigned, he seems filled with an audacious spirit: a strength unformed by bread or water, and a wisdom untouched by weariness. It is here that the devil, or more accurately the adversary, enters the scene—not as a red-skinned figure with horns and a pitchfork, but as a voice not unlike those we hear in our own minds or in the minds of those around us, voices that cloud our judgement, twist our intentions, muddle our desires and lead us astray. Three times this adversary whispers words of temptation—bread for the body, God’s glory revealed, and Christ’s kingdom come—and three times Jesus sees through the tempter, knowing that the ends do not justify the means. That is, if we want real truth to emerge, real healing to take place and real life to rise, it will not happen by bowing to the ways of the world, but by being broken open by the wilderness. This way of self-emptying and surrender is not generally encouraged in our society—a society that tells us to cut corners, to buy more, and to believe that our busyness dictates our worth. A society where adversaries abound in soundbites of misinformation and disinformation that seep into our psyches, tempting us to seek food that does not satisfy, power that does not provide, and quick kingdoms that do not quench our thirst. And when we do speak about this countercultural way, it is often discussed and debated from a distance, lest the wilderness touch the reality of our lives. And yet, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we long for the way of the wilderness. Our Christian forebears knew this well. The first followers of Christ bore witness to the way Jesus chose the desert over domestication, not just for forty days but throughout his ministry, in every encounter, every miracle and every word. He died and rose the wilderness way, and those who followed after him were transformed by it, choosing this way of Christ even when it cost them their lives. A few hundred years later, when people were no longer dying for their faith, there were those who sensed how easily Christianity was becoming entangled with empire and enterprise. Intuiting the danger of state religion, these desert mothers and fathers left everything behind to live in the literal wilderness so that they might take Christ’s call seriously. And then there were countless others who understood that true life meant going to the wilderness themselves, learning how to die before they die—like St Francis of Assisi, born into wealth and privilege, who tore the clothes from his own body in the public square when his father tried to reclaim him for the comforts of the world, choosing instead a life of poverty and kinship with creation; or Julian of Norwich, who chose her wilderness in the heart of a bustling city, enclosing herself in a small cell where passers-by came seeking wisdom and hope. Or Nelson Mandela, who followed this way by spending twenty-seven years in prison for resisting apartheid, years that did not harden him but refined him, so that when he emerged he was able to imagine a reconciliation beyond what his nation could conceive. And more recently, when immigration raids were terrorising communities in Minneapolis, an Episcopal bishop urged his diocese to ensure their wills were written, stating that now is the time—with their bodies—to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable, a sentiment he was surprised to learn shocked so many, as if this kind of self-emptying love were meant only for Hollywood stories of old or a cross two thousand years ago. And even though we may not be called to literal caves, jail cells or to put our lives on the line, we are still called to the same kind of dying the wilderness offers us. Because if we want truth to emerge, healing to take place and new life to rise on Easter Sunday, we must first come face to face with Good Friday. These forty days and forty nights prepare us for that truth, revealing how close God is willing to come—so close that God steps into suffering, so close that divine love takes on hunger, vulnerability and risk, so close that the wilderness Jesus walks is no longer his alone but becomes the way laid beneath our own feet. A way that might call us to stand with our Muslim neighbours when hatred is spewed by political parties or a growing populace, a way that might call us to speak up for the voiceless cry of creation as climate change accelerates, and a way that might mean making radical, unrushed space to pray or to paint the possibilities of the Spirit groaning within us. In other words, a way where truth emerges, healing takes place and new life rises again. And we do not go alone. Just as God’s Spirit descended upon Jesus at his baptism and immediately led him into the wilderness, so that same Spirit is among us now, nudging us, speaking to us, inviting us to surrender ourselves not in a way that denies our humanity or the reality of the world, but in a way that reveals them. So perhaps this shift in the air, where our Asian and Muslim neighbours have also entered a time of self-emptying, is an invitation not to see Lent as something we only mark in our calendars, but something humans across time, space, culture and religion have always longed to mark in bodies—just as Noah did, just as Moses did, just as Elijah did, and just as Jesus did. For Lent names this same deep truth: that renewal is never rushed, that transformation asks something of us, and that new life is born not through holding on, but through holy letting-go. This is the way that leads us, honestly, to the foot of the cross, where love refuses to look away from suffering, and then beyond it into the strange and radiant mystery of Easter morning. And as we journey these forty days and forty nights, we do so knowing that the wilderness is not where we are left high and dry, but where we are emptied just enough to recognise the body of Christ, broken and given for the life of the world.