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)
Wild beasts and ministering angels sounds like the way lots
of people experience life – perhaps many of us at some time. Jesus had been baptised by John, and that had
been clearly a profound and vivid experience for him. The narrative in Mark can only be a memory
from Jesus himself, told by Jesus, and Mark recorded it years later in these
very colourful images. The Spirit, it
says, straight away drove him into the desert – the Greek
literally means “threw him out” into the desert. It is a kind of compulsion some may
recognise, when there was something we knew we had to do, and it was as though
we had no choice. Perhaps if that
happens it is a moment of grace when we are not for once being driven by our
habitual busyness, or by social agenda or tribal convention, or by the need to
feed our egos.
There in the desert he remained for forty days. “Tempted by Satan” indicates to me a critical
inner conflict about what kind of person he was to be from now on. He was seriously tempted during this time to
settle for the wrong choices about being powerful or spectacular, popular, a
star, an icon.
He was with the
wild beasts, says Mark. The picture is not that they were threatening
or attacking him. Wild beasts are what
is untamed in any of us, what may emerge when we are not safely behind our
respectable public persona and firewall mechanisms – our shadow side, normally
shut down with the lid on, might appear.
It is something that happens in silence and stillness, when we are
listening and attentive. That is why we
sometimes say that meditation is not always comfortable, that sometimes it is
hard work. The Spirit is confronting
Jesus with his inner truth. Our inner
truth may not always be the truth we like to hear. But if it is the truth, it is as well to
recognise and acknowledge it.
And the angels
waited on him… In the Greek, the word is ministered, served. It is a lovely picture of God with one hand instigating
pain by the piercing light of personal truth, and with the other hand ministering
peace and healing, strength and hope.
It is the whole process of our contemplative prayer and
life. Truth… and healing. We realise the angels have been ministering
when, perhaps at other times altogether than the times of prayer, we discover
that our attitudes have shifted, that we reacted untypically in some difficulty,
that we are aware of a joy or a hope we hadn’t noticed before, or an acceptance
of some limitation or adversity, some fact we can’t change. The silence – some people run away from it,
instinctively, because they sense that there are wild beasts, as it were. Well there are, and there are angels.
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