The last stop before entering Death Valley strikes a sobering note. There is a gas station (with a bathroom) and a bubble with a sign informing folks that this is the last water. From that point on, there appears to be nothing but baked earth, sun and heat, with hazy mountains in the distance. One enters into that journey only with fear and trembling. The first thought is that we’ll never make it through; the car begins to heat up and we are afraid. Yet the more deeply we enter into the desert, the more life we discover. Certainly our own strength and capacity for endurance emerges, but more than that, we discover the unique animal and plant life of the desert. Death Valley is by no means “dead”. There is a vibrant and unique life. There is challenge and hope.
Jesus is “driven” into the desert. This implies urgency, intensity, life on the edge. We are told that Satan tests him. Remember Mark does not fill in the details; we are told only that Satan tempts Jesus. Jesus discovers his strength and the angels minister to him. There is challenge and there is hope.
The desert is a place of confrontation. The harsh environment forces us to come fact to face with reality and to rediscover life in its most basic form, to discover our true identity and our strength. Jesus enters the desert experience and learns who he is. There are choices to be made, which both shape and reflect his character. The Church calls us into the desert of Lent so that we, too, may come face to face with ourselves in a fundamental way and learn who we are. The confrontation – if it is honest – may well be fearful, but it opens the possibility of growth. There is challenge and there is hope.
Year after year we enter into Lent. The sheer repetition of this season brings with it a temptation to trivialize the experience by reducing the confrontation to a matter of isolated and individualized piety, token self-denial, temporary disciplines that may or may not last the whole forty days. Lent can become a matter of jumping through the hoops of custom rather than a path of conversion. Our taming of lent robs it of its power.
The Christian life is not about “Jesus and me”. Our true identity is as a member of the Body of Christ, a person-in-relationship. Christian life is not about pious practices but rather the fundamental reorientation of our lives to compassion. Christian life is tough. Nowhere is this strength more needed than in the “deserts” of modern life, in the plight of the homeless, the violence of city streets or spousal abuse in superficially nice suburbs. The economic wasteland that leaves thousands jobless or driven out of their homes is a desert experience that confronts people with basic questions of life, survival and values, those raise the questions of identity.
We may enter the desert willingly or, like Jesus, may find ourselves driven into it, but we are there to wake up, to find courage and strength and new life born of a struggle that frees us from a self centered piety and opens us to communion with God and others. What begins in prayer is fulfilled in action.
The challenge of the desert is confrontation. Like Jesus, we face the Accuser; like Jesus, we live among the wild beasts; and like Jesus, the angels will minister to us.
Challenge and hope: the challenge of seeing the world and ourselves as we are, the hope of discovering and living the new life offered to us, a live of honesty, justice and compassion.
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