Jesus was led by the Spirit
into the desert to be tempted by the devil.
The temptation in the desert has
always struck me as a very
strange and mysteriously important event.
Strange, because it did not jive with my overtly practical mind, mysterious
for the same reason, but important because this was the first time in the
Scriptures that I could at least remotely connect with this God who became man.
After all, I’m no stranger to temptation nor to hunger, though in Jesus’ case both
are extreme. My recurring sentiments cannot be an isolating phenomenon. Surely
Matthew, who pointedly proclaims from the very beginning of his Gospel the God
Man as the fulfilment of all that Israel has desired, wishes to clarify the
identity of Jesus and at the same time demonstrate what has been, is, and will
continue to be asked of us, the People
of God. Only then can he proceed onto
the public ministry, where Jesus’ ministry is quite iconoclastic. Finally, all
of this leads to the ultimate “stumbling block”: the suffering, death, and
resurrection of the Messiah. And so,
Matthew must prepare the reader, just as Jesus himself needed to prepare before
heading into the era of the Church that would smash all the stereotypes of the
Messiah AND His People.
In order for this to
take place, it is necessary to have a practically sacramental experience, and
to be living/reading at the same moment the present with Christ and the past
with Israel. With confidence we can say that we are being beckoned back to the
Exodus. Or rather, that in this first verse,
Exodus is being brought to us. The
significance is that it is a new beginning. The parallel is evident first by
the context, how Israel and Christ got into the Desert in the first place. In each occasion it is a sacramental
event. In the case of the former there
is the crossing of the Red Sea, which is salvation literally through water,
with Moses leading the way.[i]
In the case of the latter, there is the
baptism of Jesus by the greatest of men, John. In either case, it can be called
a baptism of repentance and forgiveness[ii],
a death and resurrection, of the people of Israel into a new beginning as God’s
people. The Red Sea had been for the
Israelites a new beginning and a cleansing from the influence and slavery of
Egypt[iii],
and Jesus underwent John’s baptism of water for the fulfilment of “all
righteousness”[iv] and
undoubtedly to demonstrate our own needs. Therefore, in each case the desert
journey is prefaced by a cleansing and a new beginning, a death and a rising.
Furthermore, God is always the leader. For the Egyptians the voice of Moses was
prophetic[v]
and the cloud by day and the fire by night led the way visibly for all to see[vi]. For Christ it was John’s voice that was
prophetic[vii],
and it was the voice in the heavens and the Spirit that descended that
witnessed the Divine Presence[viii].
And then, this same Spirit led them into the desert[ix]. In each case the desert was not an end in
itself, but rather was a time of wandering and preparation for entrance into
the Promised Land[x] and
the coming of the Kingdom respectively. The desert is a place of purgation and
of testing, of trial before God in order to learn his ways and to prove
fidelity. Only then can the Story
continue.
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