There are many landscapes in the Bible; rivers, lakes and the sea and cities, but the desert is the feature or that is referred to perhaps most frequently, often symbolically and always ambivalently. Deserts have negative associations but below this they are places of hope.
The desert is certainly a harsh place; normally barren, waterless, insufferably hot by day and freezing at night. It is uninhabited save by wild beasts (that’s what wilderness means) but while inhospitable, it is strangely attractive to men. My own experience of deserts is limited, but I have felt the austere and even awesome appeal of wind swept rocks, limitless sand and intense wide skies and photographs of the Gobi or Atacama deserts seen in my armchair, rouse, even if only briefly, a desire to lose myself and adopt a spare existence- for a day or two. I can understand why people might feel close to God in such places; they represent life at its simplest and most essential, a landscape untamed or controlled by humanity. I suspect the desire to commune with God in such places may sometimes owe more the absence of other men and women and distracting human activity, than the intrinsic virtue of the landscape itself.
For the Israelites and Jews the desert was an emptiness on their doorstep, or, often, the intimidating but beguiling expanse that lay between them and the Promised Land, whether they are in Egypt or in Babylon. Intimidating because it is harsh and dangerous; beguiling because it leads to an ideal land and home.
Thus the desert takes on a moral dimension; it is a trial through which they must pass, but equally a place where they find their God and their selves and where they feel most strongly the essential link between their national and indeed, human, identity and the principles of behaviour, of righteousness, which belief in God entails.
So the desert is also place of testing and formation; it is where Elijah goes to make sense of his dramatic experiences, and, of course, to escape Jezebel’s wrath; it is where Jesus goes to sort out his nature and destiny for forty days echoing the forty years the ancient Israelites had spend doing much the same. It’s where St Paul wanders for three years after his experience on the road to Damascus as he develops his Gospel and the strategy for spreading it ahead of him.
For the ancient Israelites the desert was an escape but also where they worked out the principles (some in incredible detail and paradoxically mostly based on an agricultural economy, not their actual nomadic existence). These were the principles and many rules that would govern their behaviour in the Promised Land, land flowing with milk and honey. The desert can be a retreat and even a refuge, from human society and civilisation, but equally a preparation for return. It’s place of hardship but hope; the hardship has a purpose.
In the event, the desert seems seldom to be complete isolation. John the Baptist may have wanted to retreat from the evils of society but society, even the Establishment (we may imagine a little surreptitiously) came out in crowds to see him in his weird costume, the check up on the stories about his strange diet, and (secretly perhaps) to enjoy being lambasted by him. Similarly, centuries later, the Desert Fathers, hermits who retreated to the Egyptian desert to live a life of simple and lonely contemplation, actually found there were queues of people coming to consult them and hear their wise words. It is strange, but some of the wisest words that I have heard have been from monks and nuns who had apparently retreated from the busyness and venality of human society and yet seemed to know a great deal about human intercourse and social affairs (and, as clients, nuns in particular often had a ruthless acumen in business affairs).
So when Jesus asks the crowd about John; “What was it you came out to see?”, there was a good deal of background baggage to the question; there would expectations, hopes and even fears. The desert was a place of prophetic optimism, but that so often entailed a critical examination of the contemporary home society, a challenge to the establishment and a speaking of truth to power. In all this, John the Baptist would not have disappointed.
There is, however, another aspect to the desert, which Isaiah especially draws out. The barren forbidding desert is an antithesis of Eden; it is nature gone wrong; infertile and unfruitful. Most of the crowd whom Jesus addresses and certainly Jesus himself would have been aware of Isaiah’s wonderful vision of the desert turned about face as it becomes wet, lush and inviting; a place where nature lives in harmony with itself. For Isaiah the desert is the place where God’s work in restoring Israel and regenerating humanity shows itself, first in an extraordinary reversal of His earlier works of power over creation; in Isaiah it is not the Red Sea which becomes dry land nor the Jordan which is held back, but the dry desert which becomes a pool of water and the shifting sands a Highway to Jerusalem and the Promised Land. This vision, spread before us this morning is like the beautiful vision of the Holy Mountain which we shall shortly hear in the Carol Service. These visions of Eden restored are indeed a New Thing and promise a new relationship between God and humanity-It’s that which we call the incarnation and redemption and resurrection. These are new things, but they are also the restoration of original plan; they are the primal state regained, where the blind see, the lame walk and the dumb speak. It’s not an innocent vision which ignores human frailty, disability and disease; the harshness of the desert is still lurking as a background memory. It’s a vision that acknowledges the existence of sin and the need to address it-as John so vociferously does.
I do not know whether the crowd who came to see John the Baptist saw all this, and perhaps you will think I have been carried away rather in seeing it myself. I suggest however, as a last thought, that instead of being depressed, as I admit I often am, by the moral deserts, sink housing estates, the ruins of bombed cities, or less tangibly the bankrupt moral emptiness of political discourse, national and international; all the news that fills our newspapers, we should see in them the potential for a new order. One full, to be sure, of challenges and challenging people like John the Baptist, but also where our society may start to re-form itself, regenerate and realise God’s will on earth. Amen.