Lent I, 2026

“Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God.”

I don’t know about you, but I have always been fascinated by the wilderness. Perhaps that is because I grew up as far removed from the wilderness as one can get. The closest thing I had was a thin strip of woods behind the Little League baseball diamonds—a place where the wildest creature was probably a mangy stray dog.

For those of us who grow up in cities or suburbs, the wilderness draws us. We romanticize it. We imagine it as a place of peace and calm—where we hear cicadas hum, wind rustle through trees, and see the stars clearly at night. We think of it as escape, as retreat from the noise of modern life. In nature, we expect to find harmony. We expect to find God.

In the 1970s, the essayist Annie Dillard set out to observe nature near her home in western Virginia. Inspired by Thoreau’s Walden, she expected to find beauty and spiritual harmony. What she found instead was something far more unsettling. In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she writes, “Nature is, above all, profligate. Nature is not frugal; she is lavish, spending all.” And elsewhere she observes, with characteristic bluntness, “The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside from a generous hand—but… it is a frenzied and violent world.”

Nature, she discovered, is not sentimental. It is not gentle. It is often brutal—a world of survival and struggle, of beauty intertwined with violence.

The wilderness, stripped of our projections, is not serene. It is dangerous.

And in that sense, it mirrors our world.

Scripture tells us that this is not the world God intended. Death entered through human disobedience. Through sin came disorder, fear, shame, violence, and estrangement. What was once whole fractured. What was once transparent with God’s presence became obscured. Adam and Eve, once unashamed, suddenly hid themselves.

The Judean wilderness—where Jesus fasted for forty days—was not a place of romantic retreat. It was known for wild animals, bandits, and danger. The same wilderness stretched along the road from Jericho to Jerusalem in the Parable of the Good Samaritan—a road associated with robbery and violence.

The wilderness in Scripture is not merely geographical. It is theological. It represents a world disordered by sin.

And that is precisely where Jesus goes.

He does not enter the wilderness as a spiritual tourist seeking enlightenment. He enters it as the Son of God confronting the forces that have fractured creation. He goes to do battle.

Those forces the tradition names “the world, the flesh, and the devil.”

The world—the temptations of power, wealth, prestige.
The flesh—our disordered appetites that promise satisfaction but estrange us from God.
The devil—the personal reality of evil that seeks to distort and destroy.

These are not relics of a superstitious age. They are realities we know all too well. They divide our attention. They lure us from the source of life. They poison not only human hearts but entire societies.

In the wilderness, Jesus confronts them.

And having overcome temptation there, he will go on to confront them fully in Jerusalem—where those same forces gather at the cross. Power, fear, envy, violence—all converge there.

But in what appears to be defeat, Christ conquers.

He suffers once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God. In his death and resurrection, the powers are broken. Sin no longer reigns. Death no longer has the final word.

Lent reminds us of the wilderness—but it also reminds us of victory.

Through Jesus, God is putting the world back to rights. What was violent will become peaceful. What was chaotic will be ordered. What was anxious will be calmed. What was separated will be reconciled.

That is good news—especially in a world filled with fear and discord. Headlines change. Crises rise and fall. Political tempers flare. But Christ remains Lord even here.

The wilderness is real. The struggle is real.

But so is the victory.

This Lent, I want to renew my trust in the One who entered the wilderness for us, who confronted the powers for us, and who opened the way back to God.

Will you join me?