Meal From Below: A Lenten DevotionalSample

Into the Desert

“A voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ 

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness” (Mark 1:11-12).

The shift from one verse to the next at this juncture of Mark’s narrative of the life of Jesus is stunning. In verse 11 we are with Jesus dripping in the waters of baptism, soaked in the voice of a loving Father’s affirmation and delight. Verse 12 finds the Beloved One driven out. The Greek verb here (ekballo) is the same verb Mark uses to depict Jesus forcefully driving out merchants from the temple or expelling evil spirits from afflicted people (Mark 1:34, 11:15). Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is the cast-out One. The wind of the Spirit drives him out into the desert.

Mark’s account of the desert experience is spare. While other accounts present more detail, Mark offers only this brief synopsis: “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him” (Mark 1:13). That’s it, for forty days.

Later Gospels, recounting the same bleak experience, soften the language a bit. “Immediately” becomes simply “then,” and “drove out” becomes “led into.” While in Mark we get a picture of Jesus almost hurled out from the lavish embrace of the baptism experience into a hostile land (only Mark adds that Jesus was “with the wild beasts”), in Matthew and Luke we can imagine the Spirit gently leading Jesus into an uncluttered space.

So what are we to make of this for our shared Lenten Meal from Below? If we accept Duns Scotus’s assertion that “what happens to Jesus, happens to the soul,” we can surely expect desert times in the pilgrimage of our souls. However, our wilderness narratives may read quite differently from each other. Some of us find ourselves in a hostile land quite apart from what we might have ever intended, jarringly removed from what we have known of God’s care. “I never imagined I would be here. I couldn’t have envisioned this for my life and I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” a colleague groaned recently. The dynamics might be external events or internal turmoil or both, but the experience is one of alienation and deprivation. Like Sam and Frodo crawling through the ash of Mount Doom in Tolkien’s mythic Middle Earth, we can barely summon the memory of “eating the first of the strawberries with cream.” Skin cracks; tongues are dry in the mouth.

Others of us actually have a sense of eagerness to be led into unfamiliar spaces. We’ve been filled. Bolstered by the nourishment of affirmation, we now have courage for rigors of the unknown. We may be heading out beyond what’s safe, but we’re game to discover what’s out there. We’ve feasted on the meal of blessing. We sense there might be health for our souls in going lean for a while. If anything, our willing submission to hunger and thirst will remind us that we are fully alive. The Spirit is leading us and off we go.

“Driven out.” “Led into.” In either case, our desert experience offers a unique promise for communion with God.