The Irrational Season

This is the irrational season

When love blooms bright and wild.

Had Mary been filled with reason

There’d have been no room for the child.

By:  Madeleine L’Engle

I have no doubt that author and poet extraordinaire—Madeleine L’Engle—could have continued her poem, “After Annunciation” with stanzas for “Into the Wilderness.”  What sense does it make for God to proclaim Jesus the Beloved Son at his baptism and then drive him into the wilderness temptation? What kind of a world with the Devil, yet angels that wait on Jesus—ready at his side?  A world in which the human soul could be turned into its own wilderness seeking its own end. 

Yet we know a different story….don’t we?  That Jesus does not fall into the temptation to deny his humanity.  That’s right!  The temptation was not to do miracles.  More was at stake.  For to do so would have denied his humanity.  No longer would he be living his life as the Son—he’s be on his own, a prodigal son. 

Jesus emerges from the wilderness affirmed in his humanity and dedicated to following God as fully human.  The only way I know through the wilderness beset with temptation is with Jesus out front leading the way.  It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote:

“Ah! The way ahead is so straight and narrow with deep chasms yawning on both sides.

To cross it yourself, well…think again and step back before venturing alone.  But, if you see Jesus going on before you.  That’s an entirely different matter!  The way is so wide you could drive a truck through it.” 

Bonhoeffer died in a German concentration camp the day before it was liberated, a few days after Christmas.  How irrational that God would let him die there—Or rather, did he not find his way across the chasm of that place and hold onto the gift of his humanity, the way into his identity as a child of God?