Jesus’ first day on the job as messiah
was a rush.
He started working on Saturday morning
giving
the lesson at the village synagogue.
It was going well enough
-- but then
something unexpected happened.
A demon-possessed man charged in disrupting
the service.
Everyone was flummoxed.
Then, without thinking, Jesus took
charge.
He commanded the demon to depart – and it
did.
Jesus performed a dramatic public
exorcism.
Well, that changed everything.
All the things he’d said that got polite
nods before
were
now thunderbolts of divine truth.
He suddenly became a rock star of
religion.
After things settled down, Jesus and his
4 disciples
went
to Peter’s mother-in-law’s house for lunch.
But whey they got there she was sick in
bed.,
so
Jesus took and by the hand and raised her up
healthy
as can be – and she served them.
I have heard a few women say
they’d
be more impressed if Jesus had just gone
to
the kitchen and fixed his own sandwich.
But he went with the miracle instead
and
it was another stroke of PR genius.
One exorcism might have been a fluke.
But this healing proved that Jesus had
the touch,
the
power of the hour.
They ate and rested through the hot
afternoon.
Then at sundown people stated arriving
-- sick people
and more demoniacs.
Jesus healed the sick and drove the
demons away.
The first demon had surprised Jesus and
blown his cover,
called
him “the holy one of God.”
But now he was ready for them.
He not only ordered them out,
he
ordered them to be silent.
And they were silent.
Talk about power.
The people kept coming until late in the
night.
They came in desperate need;
they
left whole and happy,
praising
Jesus both for his power and his mercy.
When the last one went home, Jesus went
to bed.
But
he couldn’t sleep.
Like a football player after a big game,
he
relived each play in his mind,
reveled
in the memory of each healing,
grimaced
the recollection of each misstep,
like
when he let the first demon tell his secret.
His mind raced.
Even when he finally fell asleep, it
wasn’t restful.
The dreams were too real –
and
they were like the day had been
-- only bigger,
grander.
If he could do this in Capernaum,
why
not Nazareth?
Hey why not Jerusalem? He might even play
Rome!
Jesus was experiencing an “inflation.”
His project was blowing up in his
imagination
like
a huge helium balloon
and
his feet were barely touching the ground.
He had brilliant success, an open road of
opportunity,
and,
what’s more, it was a mission from God.
How important can you get?
Tomorrow, the crowd would be back for
more miracles
and
to sing his praises all day long.
But then Jesus stepped back a short
distance
from
his imagination to check in with reality.
He knew where to find reality.
He’d found it there just last week in the
desert.
The desert is where he had discerned this
mission in the first place,
discerned
it in the midst of his hunger, loneliness, and anxiety.
Now it was time to go back.
So Jesus got up before sunrise
while
everyone else was still asleep.
He walked through the darkness
into
the barren wasteland.
The desert isn’t a place for rest and
recuperation.
Quite the contrary.
Thomas Merton wrote:
“.
. . (T)he wilderness (was) created
as
supremely valuable in the eyes of God
precisely
because it had no value in the eyes of men.
The
wasteland . . . could never be wasted by men
because
it offered them nothing.
There
was nothing to attract men . . . . nothing to exploit . . .
The
desert was created simply to be itself . . .
The
desert is therefore the logical dwelling place
for
the man who seeks to be nothing but himself
--
that is to say, a creature, solitary and poor
and dependent on
. . . God,
with
no great project standing between himself and his Creator.”//
So Jesus went where being messiah didn’t
count for much.
The snakes and the scorpions weren’t
impressed.
In the desert, the was just Jesus, a man
made of dust.
There was “no great project standing
between himself
and
his Creator.”
Life can easily turn into one “great
project” after another.
When our projects go well, we are become
inflated.
When they go badly, we become depressed.
When their success is uncertain, we get
anxious.
All along the way, we are obsessed with
our projects,
possessed
by them,
like
he demon possessed peasants of Galilee.
Even when we aren’t focused on a specific
project,
we
are possessed by a mega-project,
so
be, so ever-present, that we just assume its authority,
accepting
without question its demands on us.
We call it “our life.”
But it’s really an agenda prescribed by
our culture
that
tells us how things are supposed to go.
and
what we are supposed to do.
That too is a “great project standing
between our us and our Creator.”
But in the desert, the cultural
definition of success
doesn’t
apply;
the social definition
of success carries no weight.
A BMW won’t get you over the rough
terrain.
You can’t drink a Ph. D.
In the desert we are just who we are –
creatures
– poor, solitary, depending on God,
neither
possessing, nor possessed by, anything.
We can get to the literal georaphical
desert easily.
Just drive or walk out of town – in any
direction.
You can’t miss it.
.
But the more important desert is the
spiritual one.
We can find it in our souls.
And we have all been there.
We may be driven there when our projects
collapse
around our ears.
But we can also choose to go to the
spiritual desert.
We can go there through centering prayer,
insight mediation,
fasting,
going on retreat, or prayers of repentance.
We can go to the desert without any
formal technique
by
just spending time alone, doing nothing,
just
paying attention.
The next morning the 4 disciples found Jesus
out there praying.
What else can you do in the desert?
They said “Master, your fans are all
lined up to see you.”
But that didn’t interest him anymore.
He was ready to move on.
He still had his mission.
The project was still there
but
it no longer stood between him and his Creator.
He remembered who he was.
We can’t really get rid of our project.
But we can peel it off from time to time
and
feel the air on our skin.
That’s the key to reverence, which in
secular language
is
called sanity.
We have to go to that place in our soul
where,
as
Merton says,
“we are just ourselves, solitary and
poor,
with no great project standing between
ourselves and our Creator.
