Matthew 4.1-11, 16.21-23
Have you ever had a day like this?
This is Jesus, but not as we normally
know him. This isn’t gentle Jesus meek and mild. This is Jesus looking hot and
bothered, or tired and frazzled, or a bit down in the dumps, or just having a
bad day - or is it a bad couple of days, or a bad month, a bad 40 days even?
The sun is beating down. He’s sat on
some uncomfortable looking boulders, probably baking in the heat. Either he
needs a couple of paracetamol, perhaps even my favourite tipple,
paracetamol and codeine, or he’s having a bad hair day, or both!
I like this picture because I think it
reminds us what temptation really looks like. It’s not like a pantomime villain
creeping up behind us to whisper wicked enticements in our ear. It looks like
this.
Someone wrote to me to thank me for
helping her get a job. She said she would be calling round to the office with a
bottle of champagne for me. I said, ‘Drink the champagne yourself with your
boyfriend and your mother, because you deserve it. Just bring us your letter of
appointment so that we can use it as evidence that we helped you!’
She wrote back and said, ‘My new boss seems swamped with tasks and responsibilities, and I
wouldn't dare hope for a letter of confirmation. He’s been the only staff the
organisation has had lately, and he just has a terribly busy and worried look
about him.’
Isn’t that the problem
with Christians? We often have a terribly busy and worried look about us.
Worrying about the church roof, and the finances, and the stewards’ rota, and
goodness knows what. And in that situation the temptation - the same temptation
I am sure which Jesus faced many times - is to let our problems overwhelm us.
Being in the desert or the wilderness
is still a way in which Christians often choose to describe difficult
situations and experiences. We can either let the wilderness overwhelm us and
beat us down, or we can resist.
Whistling ‘‘Always look on the bright side of life’’, as the staff of a car factory did when they trudged home after
being made redundant, is one way of coping with trouble. But did those workers
still feel like whistling the same tune when they were alone at home the next
day? I suspect that an alternative coping mechanism is called for, and the one
that’s in vogue at the moment is called ‘developing resilience’.
What does ‘ resilience’ mean? Does it
mean growing a thick skin, so that nothing can touch us? If so that doesn’t
seem very much like the way Jesus handles the wilderness.
Christ-like resilience has to be mixed
with compassion, so that we never see other people merely as problems that we
have to deal with, or escape from, if we’re trying to cope with a bad patch.
But this is the dilemma, Christian compassion is like an antibiotic. There are
times of complete catastrophe, like terrorist attacks, or famine, plague and
war, when the only proper response is open-handed compassion. In those
situations we simply have to reach out to people in need and give them our
help. But if we prescribe compassion as a sticking plaster for every trouble
that people face, the way we used to prescribe antibiotics for colds and
coughs, it starts to lose its effectiveness. Just being nice to other people,
whether or not they deserve it, isn’t compassionate. We have to help one
another to bear and share life’s stresses and strains. Together we have to develop
the sort of resilience that will help us cope with the inevitable wilderness
times.
Resilience is a trendy idea just now
because lots of people are wondering about the best way to absorb and deal with
austerity and all kinds of other social problems. We hear about making the The NHS more resilient. It’s a term that’s been borrowed from science and engineering.
Resilient materials have the capacity to recover from pressure, to bounce back.
They may even be strengthened by it. That’s why resilience has become a
metaphor for coping with trouble and stress. It helps us to become survivors
rather than victims.
But unfortunately, resilience isn’t
something we can learn from a book or in school. We can only become resilient
when we ourselves have been tested by adversity. Like Jesus, we have to go into
the wilderness to find out how to cope with it. That’s why people like
watching, ‘I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here!’ It’s only we see famous people
eating maggots by the fistful that we know what they’re really made of.
One thing that seems to help people
develop resilience is companionship, people who can come alongside us and
provide an anchor for us to cling to when everything else is crumbling and
being washed away. In a moment of crisis it might just be someone who smiles
and says ‘Hello’, but in the longer term it’s the people who help us discover
the inner resources that we need to survive. In the film, ‘The Way’, the American actor Martin Sheen plays Tom, a pilgrim on the way to Santiago de Compostela, who’s going through a wilderness time following the death of his son. At first he thinks he would like to walk alone but gradually he learns the value of companionship.
For Christians, of course that
someone can be Jesus himself, the person who’s been through the wilderness too,
and all the way beyond it to the cross. ‘What a friend we have in Jesus,’ the
old hymn says, and that’s because he’s been there before us.
Even Jesus himself needed companionship
when he was in the wilderness. The Gospel account says, ‘Angels came to
help him.’ The Greek word ‘angels’ simply means ‘messengers’ - in this case
messengers from God. Might that be a team of shepherds who welcomed Jesus to
their campfire, or travellers he encountered on the road? Did they just offer
him an encouraging smile, or a friendly ‘Hello’ as they passed?
Becoming resilient doesn’t mean that we
feel pain and tragedy, trouble and stress, any less than other people do. It’s
about enduring these things and continuing somehow to believe that
there’s a meaning and purpose. It’s about finding a way of holding our ground
instead of being swept away. That’s why people who can help to anchor us are so
valuable.
Resilience isn’t about denial -
pretending that we’re all right or that things aren’t really so bad, after all.
Denial doesn’t make us resilient, it only puts off the day of reckoning. That’s
why whistling, ‘Always look on the bright side of life’ isn’t the answer when
adversity comes knocking.
The theologian Thomas Aquinas had a
different name for ‘resilience’. He called it, ‘fortitude’, but fortitude
implies a stubborn resistance to the things that are battering us down, whereas
resilience can be flexible. It enables us to bend and even retreat. Above all,
it allows us to respond, to bounce back.
Christians often connect wilderness
times with the idea of feeling abandoned or alone, but - as we've seen - Jesus wasn’t alone in
the wilderness. When God’s messengers weren’t helping him he was encountering
the Devil. Perhaps this was just another way of naming his own inner demons,
the subtle chinks in our character which we have to deal with when all the
things that usually keep them in check - good fortune or busyness - are
suddenly stripped away. Suddenly God may seem absent but our demons
feel all too present.’ They cause us to doubt or despair, or to dream of some
easy but illusory way of escape.
Jesus isn’t the only person who faced
down his demons and discovered resilience in the wilderness. So did a host of
other Biblical characters, Hagar, Jacob, Moses and Elijah, to name but four.
They prove that we can sometimes come out the other side feeling better and
stronger.
Even when we think we’ve left it behind, the wilderness is never far away. At Caesarea Philippi Jesus seemed to have put temptation firmly behind him. Peter had turned out to be a rock, someone he could rely on. All was right with the world, until suddenly Peter flipped and revealed the other side of his mercurial character, impetuous, quick to say whatever came into his head. Suddenly he was the Devil, back to tempt Jesus all over again.
The wilderness may be an unfriendly place, it may never be far away, but it’s not unremitting. There can be shelter from the storm. It’s
where, like Jesus meeting God’s messengers, we can meet him and shelter
in the shadow of his cross. But it’s not a place where we have to submit to God
come what may. Like Jesus in his temptation phase, we’re allowed to share how
we feel, to argue, to complain and to protest. To find resilience we deal with
temptation. We have to first embrace our misfortunes and then face up to them
in order to surmount them.
Someone [1] has said that Christians
who’ve come with Jesus through the wilderness may find that they’ve grown in
wisdom and understanding because of their adversity but, if they do, they’re
more likely now to offer words of healing to others rather than trying to
explain things to them. They’re able to feel greater compassion for others who
are suffering because ‘they too have been there’. But they’ll never insist on
talking about their own experience.
Henri Nouwen said that we can’t lead
someone else out of a wilderness place unless we’ve come from there
ourselves. The beauty of the Christian faith lies in the fact that, as the
picture shows, Jesus has come from there and he’s waiting to lead us out
and to help us guide others, too.
[1] Justine Allain-Chapman, Resilient Pastors, The Role of Adversity in Healing and Growth, SPCK 2012
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