Skip to main content

Into the Wild


Our narrative lectionary reading for this upcoming week is from Mark 1:9-13.  It is a short little section where Jesus gets baptized by John.  The Spirit of God comes upon him and God praises Jesus from the clouds.  The Spirit then sends Jesus off into the wilderness for 40 days and nights.  In the wilderness he is tempted by Satan, and cared for by angels.

What stood out to me this week is the idea that Jesus is sent off into the wilderness as soon as he receives the Spirit, and just before his ministry begins.  In Jewish thought there was an enemy (Satan) who lived in and roamed the wilderness in the surrounding areas.  They called it Azazel.  When they offered sacrifice to God, on the Day of Atonement, they would release a second animal into the wilderness.  That animal was the scapegoat. It would carry the sins of the people, and it was given to Azazel. 

So Jesus began and ended his ministry with an encounter with Azazel in the wilderness.  Given into the hands of the enemy.  There is something deep there that I cannot even quite put words to. 

Don't we all have an experience in the wilderness?  A time of testing before ministry?  A time where we have to try our own strength so that we might believe in ourselves?  Does that mean we will also all experience some form of Jesus' second meeting with Azazel?  That we have a reckoning in our future? I suppose the whole point of the gospel is that we don't.  Jesus took care of the second meeting for us. He conquered Azazel, and serves as the new judge in the wilderness.  Praise God for a judge that is full of mercy and grace!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Death Will Lose it's Sting

Our reading from the Narrative Lectionary this week is 1 Corinthians 15:51-57. In these verses, Paul reveals a mystery, that in the end some will be transformed, given a new body, instead of facing death.  In other words death is not one of life's two certain terms.  It seems taxes may be the only guarantee.   "...in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except  death and taxes ." - Benjamin Franklin. Ok, all jokes aside, these verses are difficult to read.  Paul looks forward to a time when death will have no victory, it will have lost its sting.  But today, we are in the middle of a pandemic, surrounded by death.  Many are scared for their lives, or their loved ones, and too many have already been lost.  Death does not seem to have lost its sting at all, it feels as if it is closing in. When I worked in wilderness therapy I remember holding a child who was desperately trying to kill himself.  We cried together as he struggled to end it, and I struggled
Post a Comment
Read more

The Return Threshold

  As we come near the end of our weekly series on the Hero's Journey, today we will cover "The Return Threshold".  In this stage, the Hero has succeeded in their quest and now they are coming back to their old world.  Joseph Campbell calls this the "ordinary world".   The return to the ordinary world usually includes some type of challenge.  Sometimes an enemy must be challenged, but sometimes the enemy is the ordinary world itself.  As we have followed the hero's journey we have seen the hero change, what was once important is no longer important.  While the hero has changed, the ordinary world has not.  The ordinary world holds values that the returning hero has abandoned for something greater.  This can cause tension as the hero tries to return as a changed person. In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, we see the Hobbits finally return to their home in the Shire.  Unfortunately in their absence Saruman and his orcs have taken over the Shire and must be defeat
Post a Comment
Read more

Master of Two Worlds

  This week we come to the second to last stage of the Hero's Journey.  Campbell called this stage "The Master of Two Worlds".  In this stage, the hero tries to integrate what they learned and gained on their journey with their old "ordinary" world.   Albert Einstein once said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."  This explains the challenge the hero must face in this stage.  All that they learned and gained must be fully mastered and the test of this mastery is being able to use it in the ordinary world.  They must simplify it so that the uninitiated can benefit from it, just as Einstein encouraged the mastery of complex ideas into simple explanations.   In the Star Wars Trilogy, this stage happens off-screen after the film is over, but before the new movie begins.  We learn in the newest trilogy that Luke created a school for Jedi, taking the wisdom he gained from his journey and sharing it with others.  In
Post a Comment
Read more