What? No Party?

And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.”  Mark 1:11 ESV  

Jesus has just been baptized.  The time has come for Him to begin His public ministry.  Sounds like cause for celebration, if you ask me.

I guess that’s why God doesn’t ask my opinions!  While I would have thrown a party for Jesus, He had a different plan:

The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.      Mark 1:12 ESV

Occasions, accomplishments, victories…  We tend to think of these as reasons to celebrate.  As often is the case, God sees things a bit differently.  We see the immediate; God sees the short-term, long-term, eternal, and the immediate.  He has a much bigger perspective on things.

Looking from God’s “big picture” perspective, there was no time for celebration.  Jesus was going to face an intense three years of public ministry.  It was vital that He be ready.  And since the wilderness is the place where learning and growth occur, God sent Jesus to “school.”  

I never really did like school.  Perhaps that is why I dislike the wilderness so much!  I found school to be tedious, at best, and torturous, at times.  It’s not that the work was too difficult.  I just didn’t like the setting.

A lot of attention is given these days to “learning styles.”  The theory is that different people learn better in different ways.  I happen to learn just fine by reading text and hearing lectures, so as a kid, I may have lacked patience for my classmates who needed more and longer explanations and demonstrations to grasp what, to me, were simple concepts.  I just wanted to hurry and get the work done so that I could move on to more pleasant activities – like reading a book just for fun.

So I didn’t like school very much.  But, fortunately, I had parents who made me go anyway.  What to me seemed a tedious waste of my time, my parents understood was vital preparation for my future.  And so they made me go where I did not want to go.

Fully God, it wasn’t that Christ had anything to learn.  He already knew everything.  But Christ was also fully human, and there were things about the human experience that He had not yet gone through – things that would prepare Him for what lay ahead.  

These are the experiences that would lay the groundwork for Scripture not yet written, such as Hebrews 2:17 where we read that “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect, so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest…”

Because God knew that we would face the wilderness, it was necessary that His Son face the wilderness as well.

And so, rather than a celebratory send-off into His next phase of ministry, Jesus got a little push into the wilderness.  Instead of a nugget tray from Chick-fil-A, Jesus got a forty-day fast.

We don’t know much about Jesus’ early life.  We know that at twelve, He was a bright and obedient son to Mary and Joseph.  We never hear about Joseph after that, so we can gather that it is likely that Jesus suffered the loss of His earthly father at a fairly young age.  As the firstborn, Jesus probably handled the family business and looked after Mary.  But now the time had come for Him to take His place in the other Family business.

And so He went into the wilderness to be about His Father’s business.

This was a different side of the “business” than Jesus had seen prior to His incarnation.  Thirty years earlier, Christ had humbled Himself in ways hard for us to fathom.  He gave up the glory of Heaven, and went from all-powerful deity to helpless baby – from being able to do absolutely anything, to being able to do absolutely nothing for Himself.  He submitted Himself to the authority of earthly, flawed parents, who – technically – He had created.  He faced all of the struggles of childhood – the bumps, bruises, and skinned knees, possibly taunting from a mean kid…  He’s been a teenager and dealt with the frustrations of that age.  And now, when it’s finally time to go public with His true identity, it’s time for more humbling.  He’s headed to the wilderness.

He could have turned around and walked right back out of the wilderness.  I think I might have.  But He didn’t.  He trusted His Father.  He knew that if God sent Him there, it was for good reason.

This is the hard thing for us to grasp.  The wilderness is for our good.

But it doesn’t feel good.  It feels awful!

We would not choose the wilderness for ourselves because it is hard.  Often, it is unpleasant, as wee; but always it is hard. 

We want God to take us out of the wilderness – to rescue us.  But that is not what we need. 

What we need is to learn.