A Place of Testing
Wilderness for Jesus has many facets. Having experienced the waters of renewal in the baptism of John his next encounter was to test the reality and his wilderness experience proper begins with 40 days and nights of questioning and self-examination. The questions which bugged him were the ones which bug most of us most of our life.
Stones into bread. There are situations of extremism. Times when common sense has to prevail. Times when even the most rigid of rules have to be broken or principles modified. But there are also times when somebody has to hold the line, when quick and easy solutions are not necessarily the right ones. How are we to know when to accept and when to reject?
Jumping from the temple. Promotion, publicity and PR all have their place, but at what point do they cease to be an integral and necessary part of the message and become a spectacle simply as a means to an end which distorts the message?
False worship. Of course there are patterns of worship which people find helpful and satisfying and there seems little point in patterns of liturgical correctness in which nobody sees any purpose. But where do you draw the line between adapting what has to be done to meet people’s basic needs and settling for the satisfaction of adoring crowds by turning worship into entertainment? No shepherd wants to stuff his sheep with the unsuitable or the indigestible, but if the hungry sheep look up and are not fed then they have a very poor shepherd.
Jesus was not the first, nor the last, to be driven into the wilderness, either to wrestle with these questions or because his contemporaries thought he had got it wrong. Nor does his experience give us much guidance for any particular situation we face. What it says is that we have to face this same wilderness. His wilderness is our wilderness and, like him, we have to work out the answers for ourselves.
Once Jesus had settled these issues he saw his ministry in terms of ministry to the wilderness people, whether it was the demon-possessed and others who were banished from society or simply hungry crowds who followed him there. Then back to the wilderness again — isolation on the mountains to evaluate what he had done, to charge his batteries and to prepare for the next battle.