Description
For individuals, study or prayer groups, and those who lead worship.
This book aims to help us reflect on God, Jesus and Christian discipleship during Lent, Holy Week and Easter. Straight-talking short reflections and prayers based on Mark’s Gospel lead you though 47 days of Lent to Easter on a journey of real discovery.
- 47 daily reflections from Ash Wednesday to Easter Day
- 47 daily prayers
- 7 weekly sections on personal reflection and group discussion
EXTRACT
SATURDAY
Mark 1:12–13 What sort of kingdom? What sort of king?
Mark tells us that following his baptism by John in the River Jordan Jesus was driven ‘by the Spirit’ out into the wilderness where he was ‘tempted by Satan’ for forty days. How strange. Jesus emerges from the waters of baptism to hear the great words of affirmation from heaven; the next minute that same ‘Spirit’ sends him into a hard place of discomfort and challenge. Surely Jesus needed some greater encouragement before embarking on what was to be a relatively short-lived public ministry. Would not a party have been of more use to him, building him up and demonstrating the truth of the affirmative words he had just heard from heaven?
Well, fortunately for us, God is not a sentimental deity whose main purpose in life is to keep his people happy all the time. God takes a long-term view of his people and of his Son. There will be plenty of time in the next couple of years for parties and celebrations as people embrace the presence of God’s kingdom in the presence of Jesus among them. But now, right at the outset of Jesus’s public ministry, there are more serious matters to attend to.
Mark doesn’t give us any detail about the nature of the ‘temptation’ Jesus faced. Matthew and Luke tell a fuller story (chapter 4 of their respective gospels), but Mark just tells us it happened. Perhaps he assumed the details were more widely known and needed no further expansion. Or, maybe the detail didn’t seem pertinent to the particular task Mark had set himself in the writing of this gospel and so he simply noted the event as part of the unfolding narrative and left the detail to the imagination. Or, maybe the context of this remark and the brevity of its matter-of-fact description are all that is required to make the powerful point Mark wishes to represent.
Affirmation is fine, but it has to be earthed. Jesus has heard words of encouragement from heaven, but they themselves now beg the question of how ‘Sonship’ is to be exercised in real life and real choices. Pleasing God is not merely notional in nature, but essentially practical. The question that hovers over the narrative at this point is quite simply: if you are truly God’s Son and the one anointed to call God’s people to a new way of seeing and being, then what sort of kingdom is yours to be? What sort of ‘Lord’ will you be? Are you going to be like Israel, deviated from your calling and seduced by status, mistaking your vocation for privilege instead of responsible service, taking God for granted; or are you going to fulfil your calling whatever the cost? Will the people now see before their very eyes what God is truly like? Will those who are poor and marginalised find themselves surprised by God’s welcome and lepers embraced by God’s healing touch? Or will the powerful – especially the religious powerful – compromise you and neutralise the potency of your vision?
These are not trivial questions and they are not the sort of questions that get answered in a single go. It is important, however, that the commencement of any serious mission is preceded by a serious wrestling with questions of true motivation and commitment. The search for a contemporary analogue does not take long. In his remarkable books Stalingrad and Berlin, The Downfall 1945, Antony Beevor has painfully and eloquently described the appalling human consequences of military generals (both Soviet and German) who lose sight of their strategic goal and use people as slaughter-fodder to advance their personal ambitions and play out their petty rivalries. Even though this motivation will be tested again and again, it is important to do some honest soul-searching right at the outset of any project – the lives of others depends on it.
Of course, this episode is also intended to evoke echoes of Israel’s own experience in its seminal liberation from captivity in Egypt. The glory days of the patriarchs had declined into servile exile in a foreign land and the people could not save themselves. The Passover and exodus were costly events and depended on the initiative of God himself, where human endeavour was hopeless. Jewish identity is rooted in this conviction, that God himself liberated his people and what he has done once he will do again. And the sequence was the same then as it is for Jesus now: the singular affirmation of the exodus was followed by a forty-year sojourn in the wilderness while one generation died out and the moaners and whingers learned that they still hadn’t learned the lesson of their original calling.
So Jesus is led into the desert ‘by the Spirit’ and not by his waywardness or sin. He is led into this time and place of testing not in spite of his faithfulness to God’s call, but because of it. His mettle was to be tested and his resolve stretched. The Satan would push him to the limit while his physical resources were low and his commitment vulnerable. He would face similar testings again in the next three or so years, but the onslaught here will prove what sort of ‘Son’ he might prove to be. From Matthew and Luke’s expansions of this episode we know that the temptations put to Jesus are those faced by all God’s people: will you put material things above God’s call? Will you run away from suffering and take the short-cut to glory? Will you take God and his favour for granted? Or, will you fulfil the unfulfilled vocation of Israel – to lay down your life for your people, thus also demonstrating to a watching world what God is like and how far his love and mercy extend?
There are those today who see Jesus as a sort of Superman who probably spent these wilderness days doing press-ups in the sand, building up for the day of glory when he would surprise the world with his macho spirituality. Of course, this is rubbish and nonsense. Jesus faces his demons, the points of real vulnerability for him as a real human being who fully identifies with the rest of us: pride, hubris, fear and passion. The brevity of Mark’s record should not be regarded as a diminution of its importance. The fact and context of its record should, indeed, cause us (as the Body of Christ – those called now to embody the same calling fulfilled by Jesus) to face the same questions with the same vulnerable honesty as did Jesus in his desert, noting that affirmation brings with it the threat of seduction and leads frequently to a Spirit-led sojourn in a dry place where God cannot be taken for granted and where the hard questions can no longer be avoided.
Lord God, whose Spirit both affirms us and refuses to coddle us, give us the grace to stay in the desert place when we are led there by you. Grant us the courage not to run away, but to await the time of our deliverance once the testing is done. Amen.
© Nick Baines