On July 30, 2020, the Mars rover Perseverance was propelled into space via an Atlas V launch vehicle. Perseverance soon began making its way to the Red Planet, and this past Thursday, landed on Mars at 3:55 p.m. Eastern Time. When Perseverance was launched back in July, it was not assured that the rover would ever make it to the surface of Mars. It was a harrowing final seven minutes on Thursday as Perseverance entered the atmosphere of Mars and descended to the planet’s surface, while mission control waited for news of an arrival or a disaster. Although there have been other successful missions to and landings on Mars, Perseverance is the first vehicle equipped to assess whether life has ever existed on Mars.
This rover has been sent into a wilderness land. Perseverance and its companion helicopter Ingenuity will venture into a strange place with a difficult terrain, and extreme weather conditions. The space vehicles that are now on Mars are equipped to withstand bitterly cold temperatures and conditions unlike anything on Earth. Perseverance and Ingenuity will trek into lonely territory where no life appears to exist, guided only by a space center some 128 million miles away.
Propelled from the hospitable conditions of Earth into a wild, foreign land, this Mars mission is in search of life in a place that seems to have none. And the question remains whether this wilderness will ever be able to sustain human missions. But life can blossom in the most unlikely of places, even in the wilderness.
Journeys into the wilderness, whatever they may be, are not for the faint of heart. Most people try to avoid them. We have been told that the wilderness is a dangerous place. No one wants to be stranded in a wild place, left out in the cold or heat with no provisions. We all know how such stories usually end. We can only imagine the intensity of Jesus’ wilderness experience, forty days and nights in a barren place, where water is hard to come by and where wild beasts prowl, looking for prey.
The wilderness we might envision is one of a dark forest with impenetrable vegetation and strange animals crying in the night. One can easily become lost in such places. But the wilderness of Jesus was the Judean desert. This sandy, dry, vast stretch of land east of Jerusalem is indeed a dangerous place. Water is hard to come by. The weather is harsh. It can be bitterly cold at night and scorching hot by day.
This wilderness is also terrifying because of its loneliness. You might travel for days without encountering a living thing, except for the wild beasts and tenacious plants.
But it’s the silence of the wilderness that is perhaps the most intimidating of all. When one is thrust into the wilderness like Jesus, one is alone with one’s thoughts, the wild beasts, and the demons.
It is a strange sequence of events that lands Jesus in the Judean desert. And with Mark’s fast-paced storytelling, it’s even more disorienting. Jesus suddenly appears on the scene in the first chapter, miles from his hometown of Nazareth, and he is baptized by John. In this moment, the heavens part—as the Temple veil will be rent at his death—and the Spirit descends on him like a dove. God affirms Jesus’ exalted status as his Beloved Son.
A strange twist emerges when the same Spirit that descends on Jesus at his baptism soon propels him into the wilderness, where he spends forty days and is tempted by Satan. Mark gives us few details, but we know it must have been an agonizing time.
Why does the same Spirit who rests on Jesus at his baptism also send him into the wilderness, where he is abandoned to wild beasts and the presence of evil? Mark makes no explicit causal connection between the Spirit sending him out into the desert and the temptations that follow. But in reading this story, one almost feels like God is casting his Beloved Son into the wilderness in order to be tempted.
We are so used to assuming that wilderness experiences are the result of our own making. We are either not well-prepared, or we are being punished. We think that if we are abandoned to wild beasts and demons, we have done something to deserve it. Or we imagine that God is testing us and deliberately building up our stamina so that we can withstand temptation and grow closer to him. No one wants to be in the wilderness by choice. It is a difficult place.
We have been journeying through a wilderness over the past year. Countless times, I have heard people compare the pandemic to a wilderness experience. And I suppose that it is, to a certain extent. Some make easy correlations between the devastation of a deadly virus and God’s intentions to test humankind.
But I wonder if something deeper is going on. Being in the wilderness can be a sign that we are entering more fully into holiness. It is no coincidence that Jesus’ wilderness sojourn immediately follows his anointing as God’s Beloved Son. Could it be that the wilderness is precisely the place where God is doing his most holy work with us? Could the wilderness be the place where we are called to find life?
When we are propelled into a wilderness, we usually try to escape as soon as we can. No good can come from a time in the wilderness. It can end only in death or in a bare escape back to civilization.
Right now, on Mars, Perseverance and Ingenuity are searching for signs of life. It may not be existing life, but they are looking amid the harsh conditions of a foreign planet for evidence of past life. Sometimes, in the most unlikely places, life can be found. And where it has thrived before, it can possibly thrive again.
When Jesus was propelled into the Judean wilderness for forty days and nights, he found life. He discovered his identity as the Beloved Son of God. He learned, as everyone in the wilderness eventually does, that we cannot live on bread alone. When fasting and confronting temptation, the securities that usually cushion our lives are of no help. The wilderness strips all that away and leaves us either dead through our attachments to the world, or alive and exposed to God.
It is, of course, to the wilderness that the devil goes to find Jesus, because that is the place where Jesus is up to his most holy work. It is only Jesus and God in that dangerous wilderness, other than the wild beasts and demons. We learn from Matthew and Luke, that the only ammunition the Devil could employ against Jesus was precisely what the wilderness ensures that we forsake. The lure of material things, power, and false idols stand out in relief in the wilderness, because it is a lonely, barren, and silent land. But these things cannot be grasped in the desert. They cannot give us comfort in the wilderness.
The wilderness is a wild and foreign place because silence has become anathema. We don’t know how to handle being alone with ourselves, with our haunted thoughts and vulnerable insecurities. We don’t know how to rely solely on God without putting our trust in an overabundance of resources. And so, the devil wants us to believe that the wilderness is a place to be avoided, hence all the temptations.
But God wants us to venture into the desert so that we can lose our lives to find our lives in him. The wilderness is where we will find ourselves drawing closer to God.
It is possible that Perseverance and Ingenuity will discover evidence of past life on Mars, even in its harsh climate. The name of the Mars rover is apt, because in the most forsaken and desolate of places, nothing short of perseverance will lead to the discovery of life. And it might be that in the most unlikely places, the seeds of life are found hiding under a rock.
So, too, for us, the wilderness is not a place to be feared or avoided. It is a place where we can be changed and where we can find life. When we are alone with our thoughts and our self-obsessions, the wilderness is frightening, because there is nowhere to hide and there is nothing to feed our usual preoccupations.
But we know that it’s not just the wild beasts and the demons who flock to the wilderness experiences of our lives. When God draws us into holy places, the angels are ready to minister to us, for God has defeated the evil powers that feed like lackeys on the clutter of our hearts. If we persevere in the wilderness and overturn a rock or two, we might find the rivers of the water of true life, ready to nourish us so that we’ll never be thirsty again.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The First Sunday in Lent
February 21, 2021