In the second account of Creation in
Genesis chapter 2 we are given an insight into two aspects of our true nature.
The first is when God creates man from the soil of the earth we are reminded
that we are created from the soil of the earth meaning that we are earthly, in
the living of our faith, we are to keep our feet on the ground. Secondly, we
are told that our earthiness is infused with the breath of God’s own life and
this is the essential part of our nature that sustains us in our life, a
reminder of the divine nature that is within us and sets us apart from all the
rest of God’s creation.
When Jesus goes into the desert He
holds these two aspects of our nature as one and in the desert, He represents
each and every one of us in our struggle with temptation, in whatever struggles
we go through in life, reminding us to hold as one these two aspects of who we
are.
What Satan seeks to do with Jesus in
the desert, the idea he seeks to get across to all of us is that we do not have
a divine nature or at least to suggest that God’s presence is secondary to our
appetites and desires, of lesser importance to the devil himself. More
critically, we are tempted to think that the crises and traumas of life are
evidence of God’s absence. Everything the devil seeks to do is to deny God.
The desert is the place where we
experience absence and emptiness at its most profound level; the desert is the
place where we feel abandoned and lost; it is the place where we really
struggle and struggle hard with life – not just with temptations but with the
sufferings of life, the awful, unbearable sufferings which can bring us to a
point of questioning God, questioning God’s existence.
Jesus is there in every desert
experience to remind us of the truth that God is with us, that God is at the
centre of all life. But He’s not only giving us a reminder – Jesus lives the
desert on our behalf, responds to the temptations on our behalf. He does so
especially when we cannot do it for ourselves. He does it so that our struggles
are filled with hope rather than despair. And when we are gasping for breath in
life, it is the breath of God that sustains us, enables us to keep going
against the odds.
The movie ‘Lion’ tells the true story
of a small boy in India; a boy five years old whose name is Saroo, meaning
Lion. His family is very poor. The mother, who seems to be a widow, earns a
living carrying stones. Her two sons sometimes help her while the little
daughter is too young to work.
One day as she leaves for work she
tells Saroo to stay home to mind his sister but, when the older boy Guddu
begins to leave in search of work, the young Saroo begs to be brought along.
After much resistance Guddu eventually gives in, a decision that was to change
their lives radically.
They travel on a train until they
arrive in a station at night. Guddu leaves the sleepy Saroo on a bench telling
him to wait there while he went off to find work. Guddu never returns and Saroo
wakes to find himself alone in the empty station where an empty train waits
silently. The little boy cries out for his brother, searching for him
everywhere until he falls asleep on the train. When he wakes again the train is
speeding non-stop through the country until it arrives in Calcutta 1500 miles
away.
Saroo is utterly lost and in danger in
the teeming city and he doesn’t even know where he came from or cannot
pronounce properly the name of his home town. Neither does he speak the
language of Calcutta. At this point it strikes me that none of this would have
happened if he had simply done what his mother told him to. And it occurs to me
that my own life would have been less complicated, that I wouldn’t have gotten
lost in the ways I did, if I had simply obeyed God.
Saroo ends up in a most awful
orphanage and from there he is adopted by an Australian couple who have decided
not to have any children of their own and instead to rescue children like Saroo
in order to give them a better life. And that’s what they give him – a good,
happy, loving life.
As a young student, he encounters
others from India and it was then that he started to think about his original
home in a serious way. A very striking moment happens at a party in the home of
some of his Indian friends. He goes into the kitchen where he sees a plate of
jelabies (Indian food for special occasions) and he has a flashback to his
childhood when, at a market, he looks longingly at jelabies. His brother tells
him that one day he will be able to afford to buy some. Now in this kitchen he
picks up a jelabie for the first time, tastes it and says aloud, “I am lost!”
This awareness of being lost sets him
on a journey of searching through the internet for his original home.
There are two important loves at work
in the life of this lost boy. There is the love that rescued him from an appalling
life in Calcutta and the heartbroken love of his birth mother who searched for
him constantly over all the years.
These loves represent the love that
is alive in the heart of God whose heart breaks, continues to search for us
when we are lost; God who rescues us when we are lost. Both loves are held as
one in God so that whatever our state in life there is a love to meet us there.
If Saroo had obeyed his mother in the
beginning, then he would never have been lost; he would have lived at home
under her maternal love. The mystery is that his disobedience eventually led
him to experience a love he might not have otherwise known, the love of being
rescued and the opportunities afforded him by that love.
It reveals to me how God is ever
resourceful in the face of our wanderings, our disobedience, our sin and for
whatever condition we find ourselves in there is a new love to be experienced
in it, a love that flows from the merciful heart of God.
It also suggests to me that the crisis, trauma or hurt we are going through might actually be a sign of God's presence rather than of His absence.
