Alone in the Desert
THE FIRST SUNDAY IN LENT
Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7 • Romans 5:12-19 • Matthew 4:1-11
Each day of elementary school, I had what felt like a long, lonely walk home from the bus stop in the Sonoran desert. I usually walked in a dry wash—like an empty streambed. Occasionally, I crawled through culverts, even though my parents had solemnly warned me that rattlesnakes and scorpions loved to hide there. I did know better than to pick the yellow fruit from the barrel cactus, with its long, hooked spines. And I knew not to so much as touch the jumping chollas. Jumping chollas have segmented branches and barbed spines, and they’re ready to pounce on any piece of flesh that gets too close.
This I learned from experience. One day, I must have brushed against the barb of a jumping cholla limb, and the next thing I knew, my bare legs were covered with pieces of cactus. Blood appeared in all the little punctures. Worse, the barbs deep in my skin made every step painful. I couldn’t walk the rest of the the way home.
I was within screaming distance of my friend Nicole’s house. (Nicole went to a different school.) I started screaming. “Mrs. RUGGGG!” “HEEEEELLLLP!”
But after several minutes of screaming, I had a sudden, terrifying recollection: Nicole’s mom . . . had a job. The mom in that house was at work, and there was no one to help me.
(This story would have made great propaganda at the time.)
Eventually, a complete stranger came and helped me limp home. I don’t remember those details. What I do remember, though, is the feeling of being young, small, hurt, bleeding, unable to take a single step, and completely alone in the desert.
And all because of a stupid plant. What kind of God makes jumping chollas anyway??
Most human beings have stories of how they came to know themselves in this way: vulnerable, exposed, alone, debilitated. Many of us spend much of our lives building armor against these experiences. Some of us spend a lot of energy acquiring what feels like a God-like power to fill our own needs, rather than feel dependent on forces outside our control.
But in our gospel today, Jesus resists that temptation to exercise God-like powers. He knows these powers come at a cost: a broken relationship with God. Instead, Jesus remembers his reliance on God in the desert. He also exhibits an excellent memory for quotations from the book of Deuteronomy.
Jesus’s quotes come from a long section of Deuteronomy, when the Lord, through Moses, asks the Israelites never to forget their forty years of wandering in the desert. They’re about to enter a land of streams, springs, olive trees, fig trees, pomegranates—all the fruit they can eat!—plus mineral resources. But the Lord knows the dangers of such an abundant place: the people will forget the God who, as Moses puts it, “led you through the great and terrible wilderness, and arid wasteland with poisonous snakes and scorpions.” Instead, Moses worries that the people will look at the abundance that surrounds them and say, “My power and the might of my own hand have gotten me this wealth” (Deut 8:1-17).
So Moses warns them: “When the Lord your God has brought you into the land . . . a land with fine, large cities that you did not build, houses filled with all sorts of goods that you did not fill . . . vineyards and olive groves that you did not plant—and when you have eaten your fill, take care that you do not forget the Lord . . . The Lord your God you shall fear; him you shall serve, and by his name alone you shall swear” (Deut 6:10-13).
Moses warns the people not to make the mistakes of the desert. The full version of Jesus’s line, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” is Moses’s, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah” (Deut 6:16). (At Massah, the people had begged Moses for a sign of God’s power and presence, and Moses had struck a rock with his staff, and the rock turned into a watery oasis.)
Moses reminds the people that in the wilderness, God fed them with manna—a bready substance that fell like rain—and that their clothes didn’t wear out and their feet didn’t swell for forty years. According to Moses, the Lord provided manna to help them understand “that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.”
In today’s gospel, Jesus shows the power of remembering his own time in the desert, and his people’s time in the desert. In the desert, people learn how to depend on God when we’re empty, exposed, and alone. Jesus remembers this feeling when the devil whisks him away to Jerusalem for his next temptations.
Jesus carries the memory of the desert not only through the temptations in today’s gospel, but throughout his ministry. Just as Jesus tells the devil in today’s gospel, “Away with you, Satan!,” Jesus says to Peter, “Away with you, Satan! (Ὕπαγε . . . Σατανᾶ, Mt 16:23), when Peter tempts him to run from suffering.
The devil’s temptations echo again when Jesus is on the cross. Just as the devil begins two of his temptations with the words, “If you are the Son of God,” so passersby issue to Jesus a similar temptation: “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross” (Mt 27:40).
To face temptations posed this way—“If you are the Son of God”—perhaps Jesus also remembered something from before his time in the desert. Immediately before being driven to the desert, Jesus was baptized, and a voice from heaven declared, “This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom I am well pleased.”
In his showdowns with temptation, Jesus may be the fully obedient child of God that none of us will ever be. But Jesus’s resistance to temptation also shows us the power of hearing and believing that we are beloved children. Jesus shares with us the power that comes with realizing that our status as beloved children of God isn’t something we have to prove.
Jesus shows us the power of claiming an identity, a lovability, that we don’t need to prove to anyone. This season of Lent invites us to know and remember ourselves more deeply as thwarted in our attempts at obedience, wounded and debilitated by sin, but also as empowered and emboldened and fully beloved children of God, with nothing to prove.
© 2023 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas