Not Alone in the Wilderness
A Response to Bishop William G. Cliff’s Lent 1 Reflection (Matthew 4:1–11)
Submitted by David Ian Giffen for consideration by the Anglican Journal board or other relevant publications.
The Temptation of Jesus in the wilderness is among the most familiar Gospel readings in the lectionary cycle. Familiarity can dull its edge. Bishop Cliff’s recent reflection restores that edge by reframing the drama not as spectacle, but as solitude.
We often imagine temptation in cinematic terms: confrontation, defiance, victory. But as Bishop Cliff rightly notes, the more dangerous terrain is isolation. The wilderness is not merely geographic. It is relational.
“The spiritual walk with Jesus is not meant to be lonely,” he writes. “It is not meant to be easy, but neither is it meant to be isolating or meant to break us.”
That sentence deserves to be read slowly.
In my own life and ministry, it was not theological doubt that endangered me most. It was isolation. It was the quiet severing of honest speech. It was the slow drift into believing that endurance required concealment.
For nine and a half years of ordained ministry, I remained sober. Not because I possessed exceptional willpower, nor because I was immune to temptation. I remained sober because my life was structured around daily prayer, frequent celebration of the Eucharist, and intimate Christian community.
Daily prayer ordered my mind.
The Mass ordered my loves.
Community ordered my honesty.
The Church, at her best, creates conditions in which truth can be spoken before it metastasizes into secrecy. When we pray Morning Prayer alongside others, when we kneel together and confess, when we receive the Body and Blood not as isolated consumers but as members of one Body — temptation loses its private mythology.
The desert loses some of its silence.
Bishop Cliff gestures toward the wisdom of 12-step spirituality: the acknowledgment that recovery rarely happens alone. That insight is not foreign to the Gospel. It is consonant with it. The Son faces the Tempter alone in Matthew 4, but he does not live his ministry alone. He calls disciples. He forms community. He institutes a meal of remembrance and presence.
To be tempted is human.
To face temptation alone is perilous.
To insist on self-sufficiency before God is itself a temptation.
In an era when institutional trust is fragile and ecclesial failures are painfully visible, there is understandable instinct to withdraw — to manage faith privately, to detach from the burdens of communal life. Yet the Christian life has never been an exercise in private resilience. It is participation in a Body.
The wilderness reveals what we believe about dependence.
If the Church is merely an institution, then isolation may feel safer.
If the Church is the Body of Christ, then communion is not optional.
There are seasons when community fails us. There are seasons when clergy, bishops, or systems fail to embody the mercy they proclaim. That reality must be named without defensiveness. Yet the answer to institutional fracture is not spiritual individualism. It is deeper, more honest communion — structured by prayer, sacrament, and mutual accountability.
Temptation thrives in concealment.
Grace thrives in confession.
The Collect for Ash Wednesday petitions God to “create and make in us new and contrite hearts.” That is not a solitary prayer. It is prayed in assembly. The Church does not confess as spectators; she confesses as participants.
Bishop Cliff’s reflection reminds us that Lent is not a test of private strength. It is an invitation into disciplined dependence.
The desert is real.
But so is the table.
And it is at the table — in daily prayer, in Eucharistic rhythm, and in accountable Christian friendship — that many of us have found the strength to remain standing when isolation would have undone us.
That, too, is part of the good news.
