Week 2 Going where you don’t want to go

It is getting time for the evening meal, and you don’t want to eat at home.  Then comes the classic question, “Where do you want to eat?” with the classic answer, “Anywhere is fine with me.”  This must be very common because all across the country, restaurants have sprung up with names like “Anywhere,” “Anything’s Fine With Me,” “I Don’t Care,” and, of course, “It Doesn’t Matter”¹.  When we have a group deciding on a restaurant, and no one has a preference, we then do eliminations: for example, ‘I ate at Applebee’s last week, so not there’ or ‘I don’t feel like Italian food tonight.’  This seems to be more productive.  Sometimes it is easier to know where you don’t want to go.

There is some discussion in the commentaries about whether Jesus fasted for 40 days and then was tempted or if he was tempted the entire 40-day period and then had the final three temptations that Matthew and Luke discuss.

Mark 1:12-13   The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals, and the angels were ministering to him.

Our English version seems clear that Jesus was tempted for the entire 40 days, and the Greek version even more so.   Matthew and Luke then record the 3 specific temptations, but Mark does not.  It’s not hard to imagine 40 days of temptations.  We are told to expect trials and temptations.

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.  1 Peter 4:12

We are told that this is the norm.  God told Cain that “sin is crouching at the door”.  Peter says, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (1 Peter 5:8).  We are surrounded by trials and temptations — that is the fallen world we live in,

So the Spirit “drove him out into the wilderness”.  The Greek verb is very forceful.  ‘Ekballo’ means to ‘throw out’.  This is the verb used when Jesus drives out the moneychangers in the temple, or when Jesus ‘cast out’ demons, or when Stephen is ‘cast out’ of the city and stoned.    It is the same as when the people in his hometown of Nazareth throw him out of town and then take him to throw him off a cliff.  This was not a friendly suggestion to Jesus by the Spirit to go to the wilderness.  This was no gentle nudge.  The Spirit forced Jesus to go where he did not want to go.

As we have discussed, the wilderness is not a place many would choose to go.  On a trip to Israel in 2016, the bus stopped at the edge of the Judean wilderness, and we were instructed to go off by ourselves for 40 minutes.  It was oppressively hot and dry.  There were no trees, no shade, almost no vegetation, and no signs of water.  40 minutes was long enough.  I could not imagine 40 days.  And in Jesus’ day, it was dangerous.  Mark tells us, “he was with the wild animals.”  That seems an odd detail to throw in a short passage.  That area used to be home to large and small predators.  (We were told the large ones (like lions) were no longer there.)  But this is not a place you choose to be day and night alone. I wonder if Mark was painting the wilderness as an anti-Eden place — Eden was a place of abundant vegetation and fruit of all kinds, the wilderness was desolate.  Eden had abundant water, “there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground” such that a river flowed out of Eden, but the wilderness was dry.  The animals in Eden came to man without fear, but the animals in the wilderness are “wild.”²  But both were a place of testing and interestingly, Adam and Eve’s temptation was about something to eat, just as the first of Jesus’ temptations by the devil.

No one would choose to go to a place of testing, with an encounter with the devil after 40 hard days.  Jesus was forced there at the beginning of his ministry.  He will be forced to go somewhere else he doesn’t want to go at the end of his ministry.  

Matt. 16:21   From that time Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things from the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. 

In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is “greatly distressed and troubled.” He prays and asks if there is any other way to accomplish God’s plan of redemption.  The way of the cross was not the way anyone, including Jesus, would want to go.  But praying in the garden, Jesus makes a choice that Adam and Eve should have made. 

God asked Adam and Eve, “Will you be obedient to me about the tree?”

“Will you follow my will or your own will?”  Adam and Eve fail at the tree of discerning good and evil.

God asked Jesus, “Will you be obedient to me about the tree?”

And Jesus answered, “Not my will, but your will be done.

  Jesus is obedient about the tree.

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree”  Acts 10:39

God sent Jesus somewhere he didn’t want to go, as he did other Bible characters.  Jonah didn’t want to go to Nineveh, Moses didn’t want to go back to Egypt, Ananias didn’t want to go pray for Saul.  Abraham left his home, having no idea where he would end up. And then there is Peter.

 Jesus tells Peter, “When you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go” (John 21:18). Then Jesus gives Peter the same instruction he gave him at the beginning, “Follow me.” I have been to Rome and have seen the spot where, 34 years later, Peter was led, a place where his arms were stretched-out and nailed to a cross. Peter had learned to be obedient, to be faithful to go somewhere he didn’t want to go.  I believe at some point in all of our lives, God will ask us all to go somewhere we do not want to go.  It may be to minister to an enemy or to people who don’t like you; it may be leaving your home to unknown places, or it may be to a place of desolation or testing. It may be to martyrdom. 

Jesus followed God in everything, even to desolation and death.  

The one who restores our soul may lead us through paths of righteousness that look to us like the valley of the shadow of death. There are some dark valleys in this world.  Some of you have walked in the valley. Some of you are walking there now.  There is the valley of pain; there is the valley of depression, the valley of despair, the valley of illness so severe it is the shadow of death, the valley of grief over a loved one.  We all will walk through those valleys — places we don’t want to go.  And on that day, may Jesus remind us:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.  Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.

There they are, the most common command in the Bible (“Do not fear.”) and the most common promise in the Bible (“I will be with you.”).  They are inextricably linked.  As God told Joshua before they entered the land:

Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the LORD your God is with you wherever you go.”    Joshua 1:9

The same promise is given to the disciples right after Jesus tells them to go into all the nations.  Jesus’ last words in the gospel of Matthew:

And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.  Matthew 28:20

Jesus willingly went into the wilderness and willingly went to the cross with no fear, knowing God would be with him.  God promises to be with us in the deepest, darkest valleys of death, comforting, healing, and feeding us with cups running over with goodness and mercy. 

Jesus continues to say, ‘Follow me’.  If we follow him, we know he is there with us.  And if we follow Jesus, we are sure to end up going somewhere we would have never thought about going.  But we will never go alone. Are we willing to go where we do not want to go?  Have you been to the wilderness this week?

1. I have heard the “It Doesn’t Matter Family Restaurant” just below Montgomery, Alabama is a great place.

2. Talking about the ‘wild animals’ in Mark, Skip Moen said, “This sinful world into which Jesus enters to accomplish his mission is less like a pristine garden and more like Jurassic Park.”  Yikes!