Christ in the Desert

If you’re unfamiliar with Benedict’s Rule, his instructions can seem moralistic: here’s a bunch of stuff you have to do to be good. If you pray and work hard enough, you might be worthy of life in the monastery. And if you stick it out long enough, you might become acceptable to the LORD. 

I doubt Benedict was thinking in such conditional terms. He is a Christian after all, so we should judge everything he says about conditional terms according to the person and work of Christ. And Christ’s person and work show up in an interesting way in the first chapter, on the four kinds of monks: cenobites, who live in a community regulated by obedience; sarabites, who live in a community that is unregulated by obedience; gyrovagues, who rove about enslaved to themselves; and anchorites, who live in solitude after having passed through the crucible of obedience in a community.

In the short paragraph on anchorites, or hermits, Christ’s person and work shine through. Anchorites have spent a long time in a community, and thanks to that community, “they are now trained to fight against the devil” (1:4). In fact, this “combat” takes place in the “desert,” where the anchorite is “ready with God’s help to grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind” (1:5). 

For Christians, this imagery alludes to Christ’s temptation in the desert, after his baptism. During those forty days of combat, Jesus is tempted to use his power to feed himself, to abuse his relationship to his Father to save himself, and to submit his allegiance to Satan to gain power for himself. In response, Jesus reaffirms his unconditional belonging to his Father. In the battle against selfishness, despair, and pride, he reveals to us our method of resistance: belonging. In other words, Jesus is trust, dependence, and love incarnate in history. He is relationship. He is belonging. He is a child. And because of him, we are not orphans wandering about looking for somewhere to belong.

All Jesus’ work flows from this identity. The order matters, and Benedict knew this. In the first paragraph of the prologue, he asks his readers to listen to a father who loves them. Why should they listen? Because they have drifted away from the One to whom they belong. As in Luke’s parable of the lost son, belonging to the father is the one unconditional reality that makes the entire story possible. There is no going off to a far land, away from the father’s house, if there is no father’s house to begin with. And there is no return to the father, no homecoming, if the father is not the one to whom the son belongs in the first place. 

All the work of the Christian life — and all Benedict’s instruction in the Rule — only makes sense within the reality of our unconditional belonging to the LORD. That unconditional belonging makes the work possible, whether it is the work of a beginner or a master.