Repairing The Breach

Where was the evidence that in this famished carpenter, the Son of God is in fact among us? Not much, let’s be honest. Here is the Christian story stripped bare of all the cultural trappings, institutional baggage, religious veneer, social niceties - and what is left? Jesus the Christ, the Promised one, who in his very being is the Kingdom he proclaims. The originating context for God’s mission is always the wilderness, because it is only if Jesus is present in the wilderness that we can have confidence that Jesus will be present everywhere else as well. Wilderness is the founding context for our life with God, and it remains the primary context for salvation in our lives: “We cried to the Lord, the God of our ancestors; the Lord heard our voice and saw our affliction” (Deut 26:7). We must however not make the mistake to think that this is a privatised, individualised encounter. No, Jesus is encountered in this story through the mediation of relationship: through John, through the Spirit, through the disciples. And Jesus’ story is encountered through the mediation of Scripture – Isaiah spoke of a voice crying in the wilderness; the Deuteronomist spoke of God who “brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey”. So wilderness does not mean aloneness nor privacy, nor cut-off from community and history and tradition, but rather ‘stripped-away-of-all- trappings’; it means salvation when all the possible distractions and false starts are removed. Together - Carol Aust 29