Buddha, Jesus, and the Wilderness of Lent

Luke 4:1-13

Then Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was lead by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days and when they were over, he was famished. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’”

Then the devil led him up and showed up in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

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I read a story in the desert of Phoenix last week about the Buddha, which made me think differently about the story of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness – or desert, as some versions tell it. Their stories sound similar in some ways, actually, and I love it when the world’s religions share some common ground.

Before he became the enlightened teacher and Buddha, of Buddhism, he was Prince Siddhartha. He wanted to see more of the world, but had never stepped out of the protection and opulence of his own city’s limits, because his father, the King, wanted to protect him from the world’s suffering. One day, though, when he was about 30 years old, I believe – the prince asked his chariot driver to take him as far out and far away from the city gates as possible. And when he did, the story goes, he encountered – not so much temptation, like the story of Jesus goes, necessarily – but the prince encountered the four realities of life: old age, sickness, death, and renunciation.

Ultimately, the prince came to see that an enlightened life is, in fact, a form of suffering, lived between the extremes of his former life of opulence and self-indulgence and the life of self-denial he experienced and practiced in his own wilderness wandering. Enlightenment lies somewhere between the extremes of indulgence and self-denial.

Hold on to that story for a moment, if you could, I’ll come back to it. Because I also came across a poem this week that was written by Michael Coffey, a Lutheran pastor, probably many years ago. I’m not sure exactly when I first read it. But I saved it in a file because it’s all about the beginning of Lent – these wilderness days for us as Christian-flavored people in the world. It’s called “Ash Thursday.”

Ash Thursday

He did the yearly, black, solemn ritual
and got smeared and humbled, though he
didn’t like it much, with the flecks falling down
in his eyelashes and the soul’s grief exposed, so
he got home and stared at his conundrummed face
for five minutes, give or take, in the bathroom mirror.

It wrecked him to be so humiliated, so mortified,
he washed away the ashen cross and dreamed of dying.
He woke up Thursday and after peeing and scratching
looked in the mirror and there it was, like a Mardi Gras drunken tattoo,
his forehead graffitied, black, sooty,
haunting him. He wore it all day like an unbandaged wound.

A