y joy of her life, differed only in one particular from one another.
^ She discovered the difference when they were both away from home. She was able to trust one a little more than the other. One of them she knew confidently to be quite safe wherever he might be ; the other she was not quite so sure about. One relied solely on his power of character and his sense of security in the keeping of God. The other relied a little too much on his own cleverness and strength of will. And it was this latter fact that gave the mother anxiety. Her own heart defined the difference, and told her that the only safety was in the strength of a pure life. A good man is safe anywhere.^
II.
The Wilderness.
"The Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days."
i. Jesus in the Wildekness.
1. Jesus had always a strong desire for human fellowship. He appointed the twelve that they might be with Him (Marl^
1 J". E. BrunskiU.
36 THE GREAT TEXTS OF THE BIBLE
iii. 14). And He afterwards appointed unto them a kingdom because, He said, " Ye are they which have continued with me in my temptations" (Luke xxii. 28, 29). The pain of His "Hour" as it drew near, was intensified by the thought that they would leave Him alone. And when all the agony was over, the promise which He made was, " Lo, I am with you alway." For there was no promise He could make that would mean so much to them in the future ; there was none that meant so much to Himself.
Jesus did not choose the wilderness to live in as John the Baptist did. He preferred the haunts of men. And because He lived amongst them they called Him " a gluttonous man, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners." John had sought the wilderness from his youth in order to the imperfect attainment of what Jesus had in perfection, even while He mingled freely with His fellows. It was a different necessity which drove Jesus into solitude, from that which denied the social life to His Forerunner. It was not that He had need to keep His hands clean from the sordid soiling of gain, or His lips from words that might be hasty and unkind, or false, or in any way injurious ; nor that His heart needed to be retired from the reach of stains that might sully it; nor that His feet must be removed from paths where waywardness might stray into the snares of common life. Nor was it that the severities of nature's wildness might ennoble His spirit and strengthen His will for lofty purposes. These were the ends that were sought by John, as they had been sought by many who were lesser than he among the prophets. But it was different with Jesus. He was driven to the Wilderness for the enacting of a drama which no eye might see save Heaven's. The theatre of this temptation must be solitude. This is the explanation of the rigid solitude into which Jesus was driven by the Spirit of God.^
2. Yet He was much alone. The prophetic words, "I have trodden the winepress alone " (Isa. Ixiii. 3), have always been applied to Him. And in St. Luke's Gospel there is a significant remark that when Jesus was praying alone the disciples were with Him (ix. 18). For not only did He often go away to
^ A. Morris Stewart.
ST. MARK 37
Bome mountain to be alone with the Father ; but even when the disciples were beside Him, His prayer was solitary. In the deepest exercise of life, He never could associate even His dis- ciples with Him. " Our Father which art in heaven " — that is not the Lord's Prayer — it is ours ; for it contains the petition, " and forgive us our trespasses." So when the hour of His temptation came He was driven into the wilderness.
3. What wilderness was it ? We cannot tell. If we may search for it geographically it seems to have been further from human habitation than John's wilderness, for He was with the wild beasts. Many find it on the western shores of the Dead Sea. " Those denuded rocks," says Pressens^, " that reddened soil scorched by a burning sun, that sulphurous sea, stretching like a shroud over the accursed cities, all this land of death, mute and motionless as the grave, formed a fitting scene for the decisive conflict of the man of sorrows."
IT The place was a desert, waste, barren, shelterless, overhead the hot sun, underfoot the burning sand or blistering rock. No outbranching trees made a cool restful shade; no spring up- bursting with a song of gladness came to relieve the thirst ; no flowers bloomed, pleasing the eye with colour and the nostrils with fragrance : all was drear desert. Now, two things may be here noted — the desolation and the solitude. The heart that loves Nature is strangely open to her influences. The poet sees a glory in the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, which exalts and soothes him ; but a land of waste and cheerless gloom casts over his spirit a shadow as of the blackness of darkness. And Jesus had the finest, most sensitive soul that ever looked through human eyes. He loved this beautiful world, loved the stars that globed themselves in the heaven above, the flowers that bloomed in beauty on the earth beneath, the light and shade that played upon the face of Nature, now brightening it as with the smile of God, now saddening it as with the pity that gleams through a cloud of tears. Think, then, how the desolation must have deepened the shadows on His spirit, increased the burden that made Him almost faint at the opening of His way. And He was in solitude — alone there, without the comfort of a human presence, the fellowship of a kindred soul. Yet the loneliness was a sublime necessity. In His supreme moments society was impossible to Him. The atmosphere that surrounded the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the Agony, and the Cross,