In the Wilderness
First Sunday in Lent March 5, 2006
(Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:3-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-13)
In last week’s Epistle reading the author of the second letter of Peter said, “we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
The 20th Century German theologian, Rudolph Bultmann, called for a demythologization of scripture study and Christian teaching.
The writer of Second Peter is contrasting his experientially based understanding with the development of complicated Gnostic systems, systems that were going on in his time that focused on mastering mythological and symbolic secret knowledge as a means to salvation.
Bultmann was arguing for an historically grounded faith that could avoid the irrelevance of the German church in the era of Nazism.
But both of these writers use the term “myth” to mean, in some sense, “not true”. And I suppose that coincides with most modern usage. When we say something is “just a myth: we mean it’s not true.
I want to dispute that idea because I believe that spiritual truth can be communicated by mythological narrative in ways that it can never be communicated by factual representation. “In fact” seeing things as either facts or lies has trapped modern western people in a materialistic spiritlessness unprecedented in the history of humanity, a spiritlessness that is only strengthened by a supposedly religious understanding that takes the Bible as literal fact, and leaves not room for mythological truth.
The story from the Gospel today is a perfect example.
Satan is a mythological figure. He starts out in Persian mythology and comes into late Jewish mythology following the exile when there was a lot of contact between Jerusalem and Persia. He represented at that time the heavenly figure of “the accuser”, whose job it was to point out the failings of humanity, both during our lifetime and when we come for judgment. (You’ve met him in that voice inside that tells you what a fraud or failure you are.)
Satan’s not a major figure in the Bible.
The name “Satan” occurs only 18 times in the Old Testament, 14 times in the Book of Job and three times in the Book of Zechariah. In Job he’s involved with that wager with God over Job’s piety, and in Zechariah Satan is said to “sit at the right hand of God”, the position of honor that the New Testament gives to Jesus. (Which, for me, is very significant in thinking about today’s Gospel.)
In the New Testament Satan continues as the accuser, but in that blame-the-messenger-for- the- message kind of way. Satan also becomes the tempter, which is the role that he plays in our reading. And this expanded understanding continues to grow in the New Testament culminating in the Book of Revelation which identifies the tempter as the very source of evil, and that leads in time to all the popularized pictures of Satan as the “Lord of Darkness” and the “Evil One.”
So Satan starts out in heaven, becomes the ruler of this world and ends up in charge of hell. Taking that literally may square with the theology of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but it contradicts the essential monotheism at the base of the whole Jewish, Christian and Moslem religious experience.
So rather than see this experience of Jesus as a factual confrontation of Good versus Evil, of Light versus Darkness, I believe it’s more helpful to see this story mythologically, metaphorically, even psychologically as representing an encounter between Jesus and his own shadow, his own darkness. As the initiation of a dialogue that will culminate in an embrace on the cross and in the wholeness of resurrection.
The idea of the Messiah began as a political hope, but it evolved into a Jewish version of the universal hero myth. Christians have applied that same myth to Jesus ever since Roman times when the Roman military under Constantine transferred its allegiance from Mithraic sun worship to Christianity without much real alteration in world view. (That’s why Christmas is on December 25th, the birth of the sun.)
“Lord” and “Savior” are hero titles, which in some ways are inconsistent with Jesus’ own identification with the suffering servant. If you really read the Gospels you come to see that Jesus never bought into that hero stuff. He knew his call was far, far deeper than simply the restoration of the Jewish monarchy, or even the triumph of the army of the light.
His aim was redemption. The restoration of the wholeness of creation that had been cut in two by the human fall from grace, when we ate from the tree of divine judgment and began to distinguish good from evil.
Jesus is in the wilderness to meet Satan, not defeat him. He doesn’t succumb to him, but he starts to get to know him pretty well.
I spoke at the evening service in Ash Wednesday about two ways to understand Christian penance, forgiveness, sin, healing. One was to use a kind of surgical image where the defect is identified and cut right out, the goal being to leave only healthy organs and tissue. The trouble is that you can only cut so much out before you threaten the life of the patient, and I for one have a number of “defects”.
The second image is more restorative, more medicinal than surgical, less radical but less dangerous as well. The illness is diagnosed and what’s missing is added, what’s in excess is tempered. The goal here isn’t perfection but more a balancing.
Heroic mythology plays into the surgical/perfectionist image, but Jesus offers the medicine of eternal grace and love.
We go through life making choices all the time, about the world, about ourselves, about what we like and dislike, what we want to be and don’t want to be. But the things we don’t choose don’t go away. They remain as unlived, and usually unloved, parts of ourselves. When we turn on a light a shadow is always created.
If we refuse to acknowledge that shadow part of life, shadow part of self, two things will inevitably happen. First we start to encounter it in the outer world. We project our darkness onto someone else. That’s the origin of scapegoating and racism and homophobia. It’s why our nation which is almost fully identified with the hero myth, couldn’t last more than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union before we found a new enemy, trading Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” for George Bush’s “Axis of Evil.” And, personally, the less we’re accepting of our own imperfections the more everybody else we meet will start to drive us nuts.
But the darkness also remains inside us, tempting us, subverting us. I’ve used the image of chocolate milk for this. If it’s all mixed up it’s really very tasty. But if you insist on absolutely pure white milk, you have to let the chocolate settle. Then, when you you’re done with the milk on the top, the over rich unhealthy goop at the bottom’s all you have left.
It’s not that we don’t want to do what’s right. It’s just, as Saint Paul says, that when we want to do good, then evil lies close at hand. It’s after his baptism that Jesus meets his darker brother. It’s after we start to take God seriously that we need to face the darker truths about ourselves.
Paul tells us that the good he wants to do he doesn’t do, but the very evil he doesn’t want to do is what he does. But his response is not to turn back to the perfectionism of the Pharisees, or on to the cynicism of the Gentiles. He turns to Jesus Christ, who went into that wilderness before him and made the two into one.
Light doesn’t banish darkness. Light makes the darkness light.
In Lent we’re called to enter into this myth, to face the temptation, to search our own darkness, to get to know our wounded selves, the brokenness and shrill reactive cry.
But we don’t enter the myth alone. The angels will come and care for us. And we’re here to care for each other as well.
Thanks be to God.
