With Jesus in the Wilderness | First Sunday of Lent | Sunday Reflection

Jesus was “led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days.” In the desert, he relived the forty years God’s people spent there. The great difference, of course, is that where they failed, Jesus was victorious. He reversed their disobedience. Moreover, he did it for us. His victory is our victory. The purpose of our forty days of wilderness (Lent) is to make the love and obedience of Jesus our own.

Because they failed to trust God, Israel stayed in the wilderness for forty years. Rather than trusting God, they fueled fear. Soon, pride and stubbornness followed this choice to doubt the Lord. The result: forty years of wandering, zigzagging, backtracking, crisscrossing, going round and round in circles. A journey which should have taken eleven days (cf. Deut 1:2) became a forty-year death march because hearts were hardened against God. In the wilderness, the choice is between doubt or trust, death or life.

Yet, the wilderness isn’t all bad. These things were written “for our instruction” (Rom 15:4). What can I learn from the wilderness?

First, the Lord calls me into the wilderness to speak to my heart and revive my first love for him (Hos 2:14). He takes me aside quietly and reveals my heart to me. This a lesson of love. Before God, I am confronted with myself—not always a pleasant experience! Thankfully, the Lord doesn’t leave me there. He loves me into conversion. He moves me from self-will to his holy will. His love, when I receive it, changes me.

Second, in the wilderness, in the absence of familiar comforts and pleasures, we appreciate our complete dependence on the Lord. Biblically, only those who cling to God can survive the wilderness. The only One who can guide us in the wilderness is the Lord who “led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock” (Deut 8:15). Only the Lord gives us living water in the desert, leading to a new relationship with him. Depending on him is our greatest strength. The wilderness can be a fearful and terrible place, but it forces me to go deeper. In the wilderness, I have to rely on God. That is a lesson for life.

Third, and finally, the wilderness reveals hidden sins and so is the place of purification and spiritual growth. It’s a lesson in humility. The wilderness wandering happened after the exodus, the greatest event of the Old Testament. Even though the Lord led his people from slavery to freedom, from death to life, they soon forgot him. Soon, the grumbling, murmuring, and resentments began. God drew them out of the house of slavery and death to test them, that is, to reveal their hearts to them. Only here, with God in the wilderness, is the true extent of their slavery revealed. The real slavery was not the forced labor of Egypt because, after being set free politically, physically, and geographically, they were still slaves of sin. No longer slaves of Pharaoh, they were slaves of self. They had to learn how to become servants of the living God—where real freedom lies.

The worst slavery is to sin, deep-seated in the human heart. It takes the wilderness to unmask this hidden, lurking tyrant. This happens in the numerous backslidings and rebellions of God’s people in the wilderness. There, we learn how deep the roots of sin are, but also how close the love of God is—and how he wants to set us free.

The wilderness exposes the full extent of the problem: the human heart apart from God, at odds with God, against God. This hardness of heart turned an eleven-day journey in obedience into a living death, a fearful, forty-year wilderness wandering.

We don’t have to live like this. During Lent, the Lord of Life takes us aside to speak to our hearts, to help us rely on him, to show us what we’re like and his desire to change our lives. Stay with him because only when we experience our emptiness can we desire the Lord to fill us. We have to feel the emptiness if idols are to be toppled and space made for the living God.

Be generous with him in this journey from ashes to Easter. When we were baptized, we left Egypt (St. Augustine). Now we experience God’s purifying love in the wilderness. This is why we enter the wilderness for forty days.