A doctor buddy of mine, who is no biblical literalist, is nonetheless convinced that the story of Jesus in the wilderness is both factual and true. His assumption is that this wilderness is the same wilderness Jesus traversed in search of John, full of the selfsame angels and beasts and temptations, only unseen until after he found his cousin and was baptized by him.
Jesus fasts for 40 days and nights, however one might construe the facts and figuring of the actual experience. At the end of that period of fasting, he enters a kind of altered state of consciousness in which he does spiritual battle with the tempter. The wilderness Jesus enters still wet with his baptism is a blast furnace that burns away all that might confuse the basic issues of his life and ministry. At the end of his fasting he is able to hear and answer clearly: whether to eat or not to eat, to flex or not to flex, to worship God or not to.
It is such a great story. The bare environs, the diablo y hombre, the eternal versus the temporal—all these basic binaries are amplified by an order of cosmic magnitude.
