Wilderness

“It is finished.”

When I first started reflecting on this short phrase for a shared reflection, I was struck by how scared I was to imagine someone saying this phrase about my time and efforts on Earth, or that of those I love and care about. I imagine this is not a unique reflection with the weight of this declaration.

From here I imagined how Jesus’s disciples and friends must have felt. I think their loss of Jesus is a type of grief and unwanted change that can easily be compared to a wilderness.

Have you ever noticed there’s a lot of wilderness in the Bible? In fact based on my research it occurs nearly 300 times across both the Old and New Testaments. Abraham and Sarah, Hagar and Ishmael, Jacob, Moses, Elijah, and of course Jesus all end up in the wilderness. 

Barbara Brown Taylor defines a wilderness as a place where the death of your identity, the death of your certainty, your old community, your life as you know it are all entirely possible. 

I wonder what events or experiences in your life come to mind with that definition, I bet everyone has at least one.

I moved to Kansas in July of 2020, away from my family and community back in Oregon. For those keeping track, this was still in the throes of COVID isolation. I was changed by living alone with very few local connections. I hadn’t realized in Oregon how deeply connected I was to my family, and familiar spaces I could go to like, church, my favorite coffee shop, or the university swimming pool. I knew when I moved for a job I wouldn’t have these same spaces, but I had always imagined when I moved away I would be able to immediately start working towards finding them. This of course wasn’t the case. I was changed by the pandemic. I am more anxious than I was before COVID, but I have also learned that I am more resilient than I thought.

I think even if you are warned a wilderness experience might be ahead of you, such as Jesus tried to do for the disciples, it is still a profoundly challenging experience. It is easy to question God’s presence in all of it. Is it a trial to pass? Is it some sort of cosmic karma? An accident? Or evidence that maybe God was never there at all? 

While we know what awaits us on Easter morning, today we are invited to make space for the questioning and uncertainty that comes in the wilderness. If we look to scripture, I think we can reassure ourselves that God does meet people in the wilderness. I don’t think the meeting always provides the easy solution, but encountering God often ends up redefining who one is, when one comes out of the wilderness.

I think often when we say we have faith, what we really mean is, we thought God surely would have had a better plan. But I think God knows all about that. And maybe that is part of what makes Jesus’ words, “It is finished,” so powerful.

It is not just an ending, but the kind of ending that makes space for something we cannot yet see. I think we are invited to a faith that can endure endings, as well as Easter.