For Saint Augustine, that great doctor of the Church and light of theology and civilization, his journey to the faith, his conversion to Christianity, his path to baptism was very painful.
It wasn’t easy, but instead difficult and brutal. Attracted more and more intellectually to the faith, overcoming his sophisticated prejudice and ignorance of the Catholic Church, going from darkness to light: that was a delight for him, illumination. But still, there was pain in it. As he moved closer to God, there was pain, an increasing pain. That is, it wasn’t easy for him, becoming a Christian; it wasn’t a journey from glory to glory for him. Because, of course, becoming a Christian rarely is.
Describing it himself, he wrote, “As I grew more and more miserable, you were drawing near. Already your right hand was ready to seize me and pull me out of the filth, yet I did not know it.” Augustine had just lost the woman he was living with. He wasn’t married to her, but they had a son, and he loved her. But it didn’t work out; she went back to Africa, leaving him alone, all of it part of the bitter mysterious providence of God in his life. And this was painful for him. “So deeply was she engrafted into my heart,” he said, “that it was left torn and wounded and trailing blood” when she left.[1] This is part of the pain he suffered as he drew nearer God, nearer his baptism. Becoming a Christian for him wasn’t all pleasantness and pleasure, it involved pain too. Because, of course, it was real conversion, real faith.
Now I bring this up simply as a meditation upon one line from the gospel we have just heard, one line intriguingly strange to me. It’s the little detail Mark includes, certainly not without meaning, that after Jesus was baptized, immediately, it says, “the Spirit drove him out into the desert,” there to be tempted by Satan amid wild beasts, ministered to only by angels.
Driven by the Spirit, that’s what’s strange—that Jesus was driven, pushed, even forced into the desert. That’s the sense of the word in Greek; it’s used elsewhere to describe the expulsion of demons.[2] The word suggests force. Which, of course, is why it’s so strange here, because we like to think Jesus needn’t be the sort of person forced by anything, much less the Spirit.
And I don’t really know what it means. I haven’t really thought about the theology of it; and even if I had, it’s not relevant. The only point I want to make about it, what I want to share with you, is the idea that sometimes following the Christian path, doing what God wants you to do: it sometimes feels like being forced; it’s sometimes even painful. Sometimes doing what God wants you to do doesn’t feel like doing what you want to do. And sometimes that hurts, and sometimes it’s supposed to hurt. Because that’s sometimes how change feels, especially change that’s good for us.
And that, I think, is the first lesson of Lent. Are we mature enough to allow ourselves to be pushed by the Spirit? Are we mature enough to allow obedience to God to conquer our will, our inclinations, what we want to do? At the beginning of his Rule, Saint Benedict said the Christian life was basically a choice between the “labor of obedience” on the one hand and the “sloth of disobedience” on the other.[3] Is that true? I think it is. But are we big enough for that truth, spiritually and morally? Are we mature enough to allow God to tell us no?
We must be honest with ourselves and admit that if Christ doesn’t change us, we’ve probably not really met him; that if Christ doesn’t sometimes make us feel the pain of past sins, we may not have really met him; that if following Christ doesn’t rip us away from some things and some people in our lives; well then, we’re probably not really following him. There are, of course, many other half-false versions of Christianity, half-false versions of Catholicism, out there that will tell you otherwise, but they’re not of the Bible, just bits of it. And they’re not of the tradition, just the shallow spirit of a shallow age. An age, by the way, that Paul said would come eventually, an age when people will no longer “tolerate sound doctrine” but instead accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires; an age eerily like our own it seems, with all due respect.[4]
We, however, are called to be Christians, real ones, to follow the Gospel in all its transforming power. And that means the desert, and it will mean the cross. But it will also in the fulness of time mean resurrection, but only if you’ve accepted death in Christ, the death of your old self and your sins. Only if you’ve taken the first words of Christ seriously, that you must repent and believe in the Gospel. If you want this real Christianity and not what is simply called so. Amen.
[1] Augustine, Confessions 6.15.25-16.26
[2] John R. Donahue and Daniel J. Harrington, The Gospel of Mark, 66
[3] The Rule of Saint Benedict, Prologue 2
[4] 2 Timothy 4:3
© 2024 Rev. Joshua J. Whitfield
