This is the second installment in our series, From Eden to Easter: Life and Death in the Garden. Each day throughout Holy Week, we will take a special look at the gardens and wildernesses of Scripture, and in particular, these scenes' connections to Christ's redemption won for us on the cross.
The Bible begins in a garden, but you won’t find much time spent there. Instead, life is lived outside Eden in the place where brambles grow, thorns pierce, and death reigns. Toil and tribulation make up the challenge of daily life, and we all can wonder at times exactly what God is up to. Our lives may be enriched by God’s Word and the truth of Christ, but that doesn’t stop even the most faithful from experiencing the disconnect between the God they know revealed in the truth of Scripture and the God they understand through their own sufferings and struggles. The God of good doctrine, of proper theology is loving, good, faithful, and forgiving. The God of experience can seem distant, capricious, silent, or vindictive. Reconciling the apparent contradiction between the two is often a painful experience, but one that also can lead to greater intimacy and trust in God if one persists in faith.
The wilderness is the wild; the untamed and unorthodox places where life struggles to survive and thrive.
That tension–between the God we know and the God we experience–can, perhaps, be helpfully investigated in the Bible’s own metaphor of the wilderness. The wilderness is the wild; the untamed and unorthodox places where life struggles to survive and thrive. In the Bible it is the place to meet both God and the devil. The wilderness is always a thoroughfare, a space between spaces, a transition that is crossed from one place to the next. For David, it was the place to hide until he could claim (or reclaim) his kingship. For John the Baptist, it was the transition from the old covenant to the new, the waters of baptism washing the Savior made flesh. For prophets like Elijah, it was a place of refuge and ravens until God led him to a small home. And, for our Lord, it was the place where he faced temptation and overcame it, returning as one who defeated Satan’s blows.
However, the most famous story of wilderness in the Bible that encapsulates all these themes is Israel’s wandering in the wilderness for forty years. In the wilderness Israel met both God and suffering. Their pain was so deep that, on one occasion, they longed to be slaves again in Egypt. The wilderness can do that, it can make you exaggerate, reshape your values, and make you rethink what you used to believe was so obvious.
The wilderness is also the place of the law. It was there that Moses received the law from God, and here we have to pause to see the law as the Jews did, as a great and blessed gift, something to delight in. It is, of course, true that we speak of the terror of the law upon our consciences, which drives us to the good news of the gospel. But, in this original context, the law is a gift, a great and wonderful revelation from God to his people. St. Paul agrees, he tells us that the law is good (Rom. 7:12). In the wilderness, we still find gifts from God, though often in forms we would not expect. The wilderness is also the place where God provides daily bread for his people in the form of manna (Exodus 16). In the rugged and dangerous sparseness of the desert; God commits himself to the people’s survival. They are not forgotten, nor has he led them out into the wilderness to die.
The wilderness is the place where we come to the end of ourselves and meet the God who dwells there, where we least expect him to be.
But that’s what they thought God was up to: “They said to Moses, ‘Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness?...For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness’” (Ex. 14:11-12). There is that disconnect again; the one we often face in the wilderness between the God we know in truth and the God we experience in suffering. For the record, their claim was completely false (see Deut. 9:27-29).
So, the wilderness is a mixed bag—divine and demonic, lonely even while we are never alone, exaggerated but real, the place of temptations but also transitions, the place of loss and the place of gift. The wilderness is wild. As such, it is a place untamed and uncivilized, where we face contradictions and confessions and where we are brought low before we emerge high. It confounds explanation yet requires understanding. In short, the wilderness is the place where we come to the end of ourselves and meet the God who dwells there, where we least expect him to be.
There is another wilderness in the Bible that is hardly incidental but nevertheless paramount: the cross. The cross contains all the motifs and themes of the Bible’s wilderness stories: It is a desolate place where Christ is truly alone. Others may be physically present to him, but his cry of forsakenness shows him to be utterly abandoned. It is the place of law, the law of God being executed upon the sinless One who takes on our sin. The cross is the place of transition, from the old to the new, from the age of death and hell to the age of forgiveness and eternal life. The cross is where God dwells, as gift, the eternal manna or life-giving water for those who partake so that they never again need thirst or hunger. The cross is the place of exaggeration where the grace and mercy of God comes to those who, far from deserving it, should be under God’s wrath. The cross is the place of newness, like John’s baptism of Jesus, which ushers in a promise that can never be revoked and that God will save his people from their sin. All in all, the cross meets all the expectations and themes of the wilderness.
But the cross is different, too. Unlike the wilderness, where confusion is a constituent part of what it means to traverse there, the cross offers clarity. It’s not that there is no mystery surrounding the cross, but rather that in the cross, we see a garden within the wilderness. This new Eden is Christ’s own blood, shed for sinners. It waters the desert of despair and confusion and seeds new life from which flows the new paradise. Whereas before, we were confused, wondering what God is up to, now we have assured clarity: God is out to save the world through the death and resurrection of his Son, Jesus Christ.
Unwise words that have no empathy but only offer the “proper” response, do more harm than good.
How does this good news reach into the liminal spaces and stark wildernesses of those who find themselves wandering? What can we say to those who are not able to reconcile the God of theology with the God of lived experience? We can, of course, offer encouragement and loving care. But what will ultimately be required is a word that points the sufferer to the cross. We do not mean by this a surrender of genuine care, a platitudinal dismissal, “Just look to Jesus, and all your problems will go away!” Too many well-intended helpers have increased the suffering of the bereaved by such callous advice. Unwise words that have no empathy but only offer the “proper” response, do more harm than good.
What it means to point a sufferer to Christ is to help them see that Christ is really there. It is an invitation to find that God is already in the wilderness, too. It is a summons to the truth: that the God who loves us is already in the dark and foreboding places of our abandonment and pain and that we have not really been abandoned after all.
It is to see Christ continually here, on the cross, suffering for me. He is not an aloof God who stands above and watches my suffering like a reality TV show. No, he is a God taking on my sin, sitting in my scorn, and already where I find myself to be.
The wilderness is wild. Who can tame it? Only One, and he waters the barren sands with his own blood. Already, a garden grows there, and it will consume the desert.
