Go With the Flow
First Sunday of Lent
18th February 2024
8 am Holy Communion
and 11 am Sung Eucharist
Angela Tilby,
Canon of Honour
At the beginning of Lent we expect to hear about Jesus going into the wilderness for forty days, fasting and being tempted. And so we do in the Gospel appointed for this morning. But this year, the reading comes from Mark’s Gospel which gives us a heavily abbreviated version of the temptations of Jesus. No appearance of the Devil, no promises of glory if Jesus submits to him, no battles over the meaning of texts from scripture. All we get from Mark is ‘He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, and the angels waited on him’. The drama and conflict of Matthew and Luke are here all reduced to one verse.
And there is another difference. In Mark’s version Jesus does not fight back. In fact he is quite passive. There is something quite extraordinary about the phrase, ‘he was with the wild beasts’, not fighting or fleeing, just being with. On the cover of the order of service you will find one of several paintings by Stanley Spencer entitled Christ in the Wilderness. Jesus sits on the ground in a robe while a scorpion creeps over the back of his hand and another scorpion waits at his feet. Here is danger, yes, from the wild stinging scorpions, but there is also a strange sense of peace and acceptance.
And this speaks to me this Lent about something I personally find very difficult to do which is to simply be. To recognise that true human life is lived between earth and heaven, between angels and beasts, between the peace of heaven and the turbulence of the earth and that the division between that peace and that turbulence runs through the human heart.
You might ask, where is Satan in Mark’s quiet version of the temptation? He never appears, he never speaks. Yet I can guess what Mark might be getting at. In the vast silence and loneliness of the wilderness most of what you hear comes from within. And most of that is composed of images, emotions, thoughts, memories, and fears which flood up spontaneously from the mind, from the heart, from the gut. Hungers and terrors. Desires and dreads. A constant background to our more conscious lives.
Jesus himself would later teach his disciples, ‘It is from within, from the human heart that all evil intentions come’. I don’t think it is fanciful to assume that in Mark’s version of the wilderness story Jesus was exposed to this constant flow of emotion, imagery and ideas that accompany us through life, not in itself good or bad, but with the potential to draw us towards the good or towards danger. In that silent space alongside the with wild beasts and the angels Christ was learning what it meant to be the Son of Man and the Son of God.
The wilderness in Marks’ Gospel then is a time of stillness, which allows the floodgates to open with all the desirable and terrible contents of the human imagination to burst through. This is Mark’s quiet and subtle version of what it is to be ‘tempted by Satan’. To have to choose. Which voices do you listen to, which do you reject?
What we also get in Mark’s Gospel is a sense of before and after. In Mark, the first thing we learn about Jesus in this Gospel is that he comes from Nazareth in Galilee and, along with thousands of others, he is baptized by John the Baptist in the River Jordan. And it is there, in the Jordan, as the river flows above him and around him, that the heavens open, the Spirit descends and he receives the words from heaven: ‘You are my Son, the beloved’. But there is no chance for Jesus to reflect on this or take it in. Mark’s narrative is extremely emphatic. ‘Immediately’, (in the old version ‘straightway’) the same Spirit drove him – and the word is strong, even violent – the Spirit pushed him out into the wilderness. No time here to rest in any sense of his divine identity – he is simply ejected into the natural world at its most extreme and the supernatural world at its most intimate. And we don’t learn anything about what Jesus did in the wilderness, or about what he thought and felt. Just that afterwards he returned to Galilee and began to preach the Gospel, the good News of God.
So here in a few verses Jesus is baptised, driven into the wilderness, alone with beasts and angels, and then proclaiming the Gospel of God.
Lent is a season of penitence but it is also a time of renewal. And this Lent we could take from the Gospel an aspiration to ‘go with the flow’, to use a well-worn phrase. To go with the flow of vocation from baptism to mission. To go with the flow of life, which is always struggle and purpose and letting go because nothing stays still.
What might it mean for you, for me, to go with the flow? We were born into this life without our consent, stuff happens and we do stuff and we die. The storm of creation is not only about us but it is within us. We bear the damage of human history, the weaknesses and sins of our parents, the longings and perverse desires of our hearts. All that flows from mind and heart and gut which breaks through into consciousness and can drive our thoughts and feelings and behaviour. Our task, our role, our vocation is to navigate our way through all this, driven by the wind of God’s Spirit, protected by the ark of the Church.
In Lent at least we can attend to some of that, we can sit on the ground or wherever we can sit most comfortably, not always easy when the ground itself is shaking or we are on stormy seas, but at least we can be attentive to the flow within and without. We can attend to Lazarus Raised our exhibition by Garrick Palmer, or join in other activities here at the cathedral. But don’t expect Lent to be necessarily peaceful or reassuring, it wasn’t for Jesus and it may not be for us. But if we do find ourselves among the wild beasts of our nature, remember that we are also ministered to by angels, visible and invisible. Our friends, our animals, perhaps, and the supernatural ones who care for us. For we, like Christ, are baptized, beloved children of God, called to proclaim his kingdom of love and justice. Lent is a season of penitence, but it is also the springtime of the soul.
Angela Tilby
Canon of Honour
The image which accompanied this sermon was Stanley Spencer Christ in the Wilderness - the scorpion