Your Faith Journey - Finding God Through Words, Song And Praise

Lent I – B 02/18/24 Our Gospel lesson today puts Jesus in the wilderness. It is not a wilderness that we are used to in our part of the country. In our wilderness we think of different kinds of trees, streams or lakes. It is a place where hopefully we can experience peace and calmness. This is not the wilderness that Jesus was experiencing. His wilderness is often described as a desert with probably only small bushes, if even that and little to no water close by. It also says in our Gospel lesson that Jesus was tested or tempted by satan. It doesn’t sound like peace and calmness to me. Instead, it sounds like constant agitation and a climate that can be difficult to survive in. So then, how can we relate to this type of wilderness, where there was probably no snow. One of my Old Testament professors at the Moravian Seminary suggested that this wilderness is akin to the world we live in. Not the physical climate necessarily, but the cultural and political climate that we have today. The division in our co