The struggle against the dominion of death
As we begin Lent, and start our preparation for Easter, we read the story of the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – it’s also the story of his preparation for Easter.
He is baptized by John and he takes over where John left off.
Our text highlights the contrasts between Jesus and John.
John preached repentance for the forgiveness of sins, Jesus preached forgiveness of sins for repentance (do you get the difference). … John said repent, and be forgiven for the kingdom is coming. Jesus says the time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God has come near, repent and believe. It’s the other way round.
You can see this change in emphasis in last week’s text when the man was lowered through the roof to get his legs fixed and Jesus straight out declared God’s forgiveness to the man – without knowing him from Adam. Jesus was a willy-nilly announcer of forgiveness – quite regardless of any repentance.
Another contrast from our reading: John baptized with water, Jesus baptized with the Holy Spirit.
You see, baptism by water as John practiced it, was a symbol of people’s intention to live godly lives. What Jesus was offering was not a symbol, but an internal washing by God’s Spirit – something in a different league. He was doing something with people’s hearts.
So we have a contrast. But notice, Jesus does not reject John’s baptism. He is baptised along with the others. He joins with those who declare their intentions to be part of the way of God. But the gospel tells us that something much bigger is happening with Jesus, something that all the good intentions in the world will not approach. And we learn this because at the point of Jesus baptism God, in the form of a voice from heaven, interrupts the proceedings in a way which almost contradicts the whole thing. The presumption, as I said before, in John’s baptism, is that all the candidates for baptism are sinners in need of a turn around.
But as Jesus comes out of the waters quite the opposite is announced from the heavens. We are told the heavens are ripped open in an apocalyptic moment, and the voice announces ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased’
Something bigger is happening here… Here is one whose life comes from somewhere else (Beloved Son). Here is one whose life is of another kind.
Two things are revealed from heaven. God says, firstly, You are the child of my love… sourced from me (the NT has many ways of putting it) You have come forth from the eternal community of divine love. And secondly, the way you have lived out your life in the human community gives me great pleasure – says the voice of God.
On the one hand, God has given this life, and on the other hand God receives this life with joy.
In this man, humanity and God are in harmony. Here is a human who lives as humans were created to live and whose life is sourced from God’s own life, to the point that it is God’s life among us. The love of God here intersects in a unique way with our life. And God is delighted. That’s the Christian gospel.
It all sounds glorious, like the description of a fairy tale existence, floating untroubled above all the conflict and strife and pain and struggle of being human. If we stopped there we might get that impression of what Jesus’ life was about.
Suddenly the story turns “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness (comes from word for alone)
Let’s take an aside for a moment. We sometimes think of who Jesus was as if he were a substance called Son of God moving through time. But what if that is a wrong way of thinking. What if Jesus, like all of us, is a process in which who he is is constantly formed by his relationships as he goes along. Who he is at any given time is the outcome of that process. He has relationships with his family, his friends, his society and with God
To be the Son of God is not only something he is, but something he is becoming.
So the story moves from a kind of image of what he is – a voice from heaven and a dove symbolizing the presence of the Spirit (a kind of snapshot) – to a story about his becoming.
To become the Son of God is to be tempted. It is to be dislocated in the world. It is to be involved in a struggle which goes to the very depths of his being.
Lets think a little more about this business of becoming… We often think that who I am is a relatively stable kind of thing, possibly influenced by other things but basically, what I want, what I want to do, what I want to have, my desires, come from me. I chose them. I am free.
I believe that that picture is misleading. The truth is much less stable, much more dynamic. What if who I am is largely a product of what I want and (here’s the crux) what I want is constantly being structured and restructured and shaped by those around me. What if rather than being the stable source, I am in fact carried along on the desires of a whole load of others, my parents, mentors, friends and my whole culture. I like to think it’s otherwise, but it’s not really. Who I am is more the effect, than some kind of self-contained cause.
Why I emphasize this is to highlight that what is at stake for Jesus when he goes into the wilderness, is his whole identity…. The temptation is a struggle for who he is.
Jesus is led by the spirit into the lonesome place, because that is the place of prayer. We sometimes blandly say that prayer is a conversation with God. In a sense it is, but the English word pray is closely related bound up with the idea of desire and if you read the New Testament, all the teaching on prayer seems to be dealing with our wants. To pray is to express our wants to God… but more importantly in expressing our wants to God we learn to want what God wants. We begin to be carried on the desires of God rather than our neighbours. Prayer is the interface between the world of desire formed in us by our parents, friends, mentors and culture and God’s world of desire.
In that sense the place of prayer is never completely isolated. We may be physically alone, but the voices of the world continue to draw us.
So when Jesus went to be alone in the wilderness he went to maintain his relation to the Father and to distance himself from all the pressures of the social and political world. And yet into that wilderness come all the fundamental temptations of the human world, in the voice of the Satan.
Mark’s gospel does not tell the whole story of the temptations and how the desire for greatness and power is suggested to Jesus by Satan the deceiver. But in these few short sentences he captures the essence of Jesus life. The one whose identity is carried by the love of the Father, as the loved Son, empowered by the Spirit, is a same man whose life is characterized by a deep process of conflict – hence the temptations
In a fallen world, he becomes who he is, in conflict and in prayer. The acute difficulty for us in the modern world is that the more we think we are the masters of our own destinies, the source of our own wants, the less we are likely to pray. And yet even the Son of God was led by the Spirit into the lonely place of temptation. It was his way also, of letting the desires of God override the desires of his world. The fact that he succeeded in doing so where we fail, is what the resurrection declares…
That we have been given the same Spirit makes it even more crucial to our discipleship and to our preparation for Easter.
Bruce Hamill 01.03.09 at Caversham and Green Island
