The Kingdom of God in Deserted Places

Dear Friend,

 In this week’s Gospel for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we conclude our march through the explosive first chapter of Mark’s Gospel. This week we see Jesus breaking down barriers in his outreach to the “unclean” leper. There’s danger here. Three Sundays ago, we heard the reference to John the Baptist’s arrest, and here too, we see a sign that in Mark’s Gospel, from the very start, we have, as readers, already entered the cold and looming shadow of Jesus’s ultimate confrontation with the religious and political leaders, the shadow of the Cross. 

Curiously, next Sunday, the first Sunday of Lent, we’ll go back to the first chapter of Mark. Here at verse 12, the Spirit will drive Jesus into the desert for forty days, where he is among wild beasts and tempted by Satan. An intriguing detail: the first chapter of Mark begins and ends in deserted places, as we hear this week as Chapter one concludes, “Jesus remained outside [of towns] in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere.” (And let’s not forget that in 1:35, Jesus goes off to pray, and where else? In deserted place!) 

There’s so much detail to probe in Mark’s Gospel, as the author shakes us up with the breakthrough of the Kingdom of God in dramatic scenes. Yet, what is it about these deserted places? One way of reading all this would be as good news; namely, that wherever and whenever there is a looming threat that our lives might become bereft of hope and life, abandoned or deserted – in confrontation with evil, sickness, loneliness, or fear – that is precisely where the Kingdom of God is meant to break through in the person of Jesus Christ. As disciples, we become instruments of that same Spirit.

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor