Angels Waited on Him

by the Rev. Dr. Paul S. Nancarrow

This sermon is based on Mark 1:9-15. An audio version of this sermon is available here.

Sometimes it happens that I read a passage from scripture that I’ve read before, read dozens of times, read every three years it’s come around the lectionary cycle — I read a passage of scripture that I think I know through and through and through, and I see in it something that I’ve never seen before. That’s one of the marvelous things about reading scripture: there is always something more you can discover.

That happened to me as I was studying our Gospel reading for today: Mark’s account of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. Most of us are more familiar with the temptation stories in Matthew and in Luke, and in comparison Mark’s story seems very brief, very compact, as if Mark has left out some details in order to make the story move along faster. Mark, for instance, doesn’t have the devil saying “Turn these stones into bread,” like Matthew and Luke do; Mark doesn’t show Jesus quoting scripture to silence the tempter, like Matthew and Luke do. At first glance, Mark’s story seems to be the “condensed version.”

But I think Mark is not just leaving out details that Matthew and Luke leave in; I think Mark is trying to make a particular point, and he is choosing the details that point to his point. And one of those details is that Mark never says that Jesus in the wilderness was fasting. For Matthew and Luke, and for the way most of us understand the story, the fasting is essential: Jesus goes without food for forty days, and after forty days he’s hungry, he’s famished, he’s weak, he’s vulnerable, and it’s in that moment of vulnerability that Satan comes to tempt him, to try to lure him away from his mission as Messiah. Fasting and resisting temptation are two key elements in this version of the story — and because they’re two key elements in the story, they’re two key elements in the way we think of Lent, our forty-day season to act out this story in our lives, our forty-day season to go into our spiritual wilderness along with Jesus.

But if Mark tells the story differently, then perhaps we should think about Lent differently, too. And Mark doesn’t say that Jesus was fasting.

What Mark does say is this: “He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” It’s that last clause that really caught my attention: “angels waited on him.” What does that mean? It sounded kind of familiar, so I started looking at other Bible stories, stories from the Hebrew Scriptures that Mark and his audience and Jesus would have known, would have drawn on for their understanding of God and God’s ways.

And I found a story about Elijah, that archetypal prophet and wild man of God, that told that when Elijah was on the run from Ahab and Jezebel, in danger of his life, he came to a place and collapsed under a broom tree — hungry, exhausted, worn out — and he fell asleep there. And he dreamed (or had a vision) that an angel came to him and said to him “Rise and eat, or you won’t be strong enough to do what God has for you to do.” And Elijah looked and saw beside the angel a loaf of bread and a jar of water, and he ate and drank, and went back to sleep. And the angel came a second time, with another loaf, and Elijah ate and drank again. And then the text says “he went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mount of God.” The angel gave Elijah food good enough for forty days. (The story is in the 19th chapter of the First Book of Kings, if you want to look it up.)

I found another reference, this one from Psalm 78, that refers to the manna that sustained the Children of Israel in their forty-year wilderness wandering — one of the seminal events that formed the people as God’s People — Psalm 78 calls the manna “the bread of angels.”

The Hebrew Scriptures have this symbolic thing going on with forty units of time, and angels, and bread.

And Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, and angels waited on him. And the new thing I see in this story is that I think Mark wants us to understand that the angels were bringing Jesus bread. Jesus wasn’t fasting, Jesus wasn’t going hungry, but Jesus, like Moses and Elijah before him, was being fed by God.

Now that changes the story a lot — but I think it changes the story in an instructive way. For Mark, the purpose of Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness was not to push himself to the limit and be weak and vulnerable and be tempted by Satan to betray his mission from God. For Mark, the purpose of Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness was to test how deeply he trusted God, to put himself totally in God’s hands and trust that God would provide, to learn from his own experience that God would indeed give him everything he needed to do his mission. Being fed by angels in the wilderness is a sign and a symbol for the sustaining presence of God that empowered Jesus to do everything for God he was sent to do. Learning to trust in that sustenance of God is what prepares Jesus to go forth to proclaim and enact the coming of the kingdom of God.

And if that’s what Jesus’ sojourn in the wilderness is all about, then perhaps that is what our Lent should be all about, too. Sometimes I think we make Lent too much about fasting and abstinence and self-denial, we focus too much on giving up and going without. We give up chocolate or meat or alcohol, because we like these things, and going without them makes us feel limited, makes us feel vulnerable — and when we experience cravings for the things we’ve given up, because after all we do like them, then we feel that as temptation, as being lured to do something we said we would not do, and we know we have to be strong and resist temptation for God — or, sometimes, too many times, temptations become occasions for recognizing our weakness, and how we need forgiveness from God. And there’s nothing wrong with that — resisting temptation and asking forgiveness are good spiritual disciplines.

But I also think that Lent can be so much more. Like Jesus in the wilderness, our Lent can be for us a time to learn how God sustains us, how God feeds us; Lent can be for us a time to deepen our trust in God to give us everything we need to do the mission God gives us to do. Notice that I said “give us everything we need” — that’s not necessarily everything we want, or everything we desire, or everything we think we absolutely have to have. Fasting and self-denial are good for paring down our appetites and teaching us the difference between what we crave and what we need. But the main point of Lent is not to give up; the main point of Lent is to be free, free of the anxious craving to make sure we can meet our every desire, at our own time and in our own way, and free instead to turn to God and trust that God will give us every strength and gift and patience and insight and courage and compassion and joy we need.

So this Lent, I invite you to take on a spiritual discipline or faith practice that helps you become more aware of how God sustains you. If you customarily give something up for Lent, that’s okay, do that too. But in addition to giving up, I invite you to take on, take on reading from scripture every day, or following the Lenten devotional, or sitting quietly and breathing, or pondering big questions and big ideas, or looking out the window and watching what goes by and giving thanks for everything you see. Take on some practice that will help you open your mind and heart and spirit to recognizing the ways God is with you in the moment, in every moment, and how God is right now feeding and nourishing and sustaining you with the gifts you need to do the work of love God gives you to do. Let this Lent be for you a time to be free of anxious worry, and instead to learn to trust ever more deeply in God's providing.

Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, and angels waited on him. May God’s messengers of love sustain us too, as we walk these forty days the pilgrim way of Lent. Amen.