One of the key symbols and spiritual realities within our readings today is the Land. It is front and centre in the passage from Deuteronomy, only implied but still central in our Gospel, and hidden but still operative in the theology from our Romans reading.
The Deuteronomy reading shows us that God is control, working with and for the people of God, engaged with the human and natural worlds. We hear of God bringing the people out of Egypt, and though unstated here, after a period in the Wilderness, giving them the Land for as an inheritance for possession. But this is also intensely problematic, as it is without care or concern for the original first inhabitants of the Land, first peoples who are, in other biblical accounts displaced or massacred – all with God’s blessing. Some of this may be a little uncomfortable for us today, living in these Lands we now call Australia.
But this giving of Land is of utmost importance. In the world view of Ancient South-West Asia and what becomes ancient Israel, each people, each nation had their own deity, their own God who was God of the Land where the people lived. Each God was linked to, embedded within and oversaw a particular Land. And through the Land this God oversaw the growth and flourishing of Her people.
Today’s reading shows the God of Israel instructing the people how to form a relationship with Him in the new Land: by offering back the first fruit of the Land. By this they, the people, become caught within, become part of the flow of blessing and return to and fro from God. And in doing so, become closer to God and to the Land itself.
This is not so with the Wilderness, which is only implied in Deuteronomy but central to the Gospel. God does not give the Land of the Wilderness to Israel, and there are no excess fruits there to return to God.
Both the Hebrew and Greek words used for wilderness express what we might expect – a desolate, deserted place with sparse vegetation, with little obvious support for animal and human life. But it was also used to express a lack of people, an absence of population, land that was not claimed by anyone or any tribal group, and therefore not in relationship with any particular deity or God.
The wilderness land therefore allows any wandering person, or any wandering people – for a time – to be present BUT without the grounded presence of the deity of that place. And this means the Wilderness functions as a liminal, an in-between space, a place of testing, trial, and spiritual growth. It is a place where people, and groups of people may encounter isolation and hardship, a paring back, a stripping bare to who we really are.
And so, like the wandering people of Israel, who were in the wilderness for 40 years, Jesus now enters the wilderness for 40 days – to find out who he is.
And at the end of the journeys of both Israel and Jesus, a new relationship is formed; between Israel and God, between Jesus and God. And this is why we now, as the ongoing Body of Christ on the earth, here and now, this is why we enter the wilderness, this is why we travel our Lenten way – to create a new, deep relationship with the divine and with each other.
In our readings from Deuteronomy and Romans God’s agency in the world is undisputable. She has the power. In our Gospel though this agency, this power is dependent on one, Christ, who is fully human, just as we are. It is held in the balance, requiring the choices of one who is tested, just as we are tested.
We know from the text, and arguably from the fact that we are here at all today, that Jesus passes the tests. He does not succumb to the lures of “the devil”, who here is functioning not so much as a source of evil, but more as the older Jewish figure of ‘ha-Satan’, the Adversary or accuser, one of the Divine Council who does the work of God (see the Book of Job).
That ‘the devil’ is doing God’s work is evident in the first verse: Jesus is “led by the Spirit”. By the Spirit, the Holy Spirit. God is in control. God has ordained this testing of Jesus, of the one who is human but who is also God as flesh and blood.
It is significant that the testing occurs after Jesus’ baptism. Because of this baptism, when the Holy Spirit descended in “bodily form like a dove”, Jesus is now “full of the Holy Spirit”. And at the end of testing, at the end of our reading, after the Adversary has departed, he is “in the power of the Spirit”.
No longer simply full, Jesus is now empowered for his teaching and his ministry. Importantly the Greek word for power here, dunamis, is the same word used for ‘miracle’ throughout the Synoptic Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke. Before this point Jesus, in the Gospel according to Luke, has not performed any miracles. Now, he is empowered to bring the strength and love of God to the world for healing and restoration, empowered for miracles.
Significantly and pointing to the greatest of mysteries, this empowerment comes from the choices of God as human.
From our human point of view, Jesus as God, the Uncreated One within Creation would not have been bound by ‘the laws’ of Creation; he could have ‘always’ performed miracles. But his empowerment is only accomplished when God as human passes the tests of the Adversary. These tests speak directly to our embodied, earthy, frail human needs and desires, needs and desires Jesus fully shared: the need for food and comfort; our desires for status and power; and our longing to be invulnerable to harm and to death.
Only when Jesus, as human, accepts his weakness and vulnerability is he empowered by the Spirit. In the same way, today, when we as the Body of Christ, and we as members of his Body, accept our powerlessness, being fully open to God in our weakness, we may find the Spirit among us.
And though he does not mention the Land or the Wilderness, Paul in Romans today is drawing on the same ancient theological principle; each Land had its own deity, its own God – but with one huge difference. For Paul and for Christians, there is the inescapable reality that through the Incarnation and through the human testing of Christ, the world was changed forever.
God, the One God proclaimed by the ancient Jews is now God of the world, the entire world, of each and every Land. This is why Paul is confident that there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, between anybody, anywhere. It is why ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ Everyone. Everyone in every Land.
And what this means is that right here, in this Land of the Hills, in this Land of Perth, in this Land of the Noongar peoples, right here, this Lent, held by the God of this Land, we too can enter the Wilderness. We too, right now can be tested as Christ was, we too can wander and be lost and confused. We too, full of the spirit from our baptisms and from our love, we too can be tested and changed and transformed and be in the Power of the Spirit, able, like Christ, to bring the miracle of the strength and love of God to the world for healing and restoration. In this Name, Amen.