16th March 2025 

Into the Wilderness: a Place of Confrontation

When I go on retreat, I find it often follows a clear pattern. On day 1 I rejoice in the space, the quiet, the opportunity to spend time alone with God. On day 2, I simply feel overwhelmed. All the things – the conflicts, the problems, the doubts, the fears – which in the busyness of a normal week I can ignore, rise to the surface. I am convinced that I’m a terrible vicar, a terrible person and, probably, that I have no faith.

In Matthew, Mark and Luke's gospels, Jesus bursts onto the scene in his baptism, and is immediately led into the desert for a period of forty days. As the true son of Israel, his withdrawal, before the beginning of his active preaching, teaching and healing ministry, mirrors that of the Israelites as we thought about last week. But, for Jesus, the wilderness is more than a place of disorientation. After forty days, when he is tired, hungry and lonely, Matthew and Luke both record Jesus' confrontation with the devil.

Jesus goes into the wilderness with the words which God speaks over him at his baptism ringing in his ears: "You are my Son, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased." In the wilderness, in his state of hunger and disorientation, the devil steps in to make Jesus doubt what God has said - "If you are the Son of God..." - and so to disobey what God has commanded.

In the fourth century, as Christianity became domesticated as the official religion of the Roman Empire, those seeking what they saw as a more authentic spirituality began to move from the city to the desert and formed small communities, the earliest forms of monasticism. As they left behind all that was familiar for the disorientation of the desert, they confronted all sorts of demons - within themselves, and within the people they found themselves living with! These spiritual confrontations are described vividly in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, with lurid descriptions of the demons encountered.

In the place of disorientation, when we are quiet, alone and without the distractions of our normal lives, we can no longer escape the confrontation with the person we really are. I have learnt on retreat to allow the second day to happen, to sit with the discomfort – because, on the other side, I find I reach a deeper place of openness to God and to receiving all that God wants to offer me. I have learnt to distrust the voice within me that says “If you are…” and to listen instead to what God says: “You are my child, the Beloved. With you I am well pleased.”