1. Faith experience implies facing the crossing of the desert. In the Bible, the desert, more than a geographical place, is a situation where the difficulties of liberation appear. It is the price of exodus. The desert is a hostile, terrifyng place ( Dt 1,19 ). Fountains are rare, vegetation scarce, the way is uncertain. It is a place to pass through, not to stay, a place that you must cross to reach a land flowing with milk and honey ( Ex 3, 8 ).

2. The desert is a place of temptation due to its difficulties and emptiness. This was so for the people of Israel, for Jesus and for us. In truth, faith is tested, if we trust in God, if we trust in his Word, "Remember how for forty years now the Lord, our God, has directed all your journeying in the desert, so as to test you by affliction and find out whether or not it was your intention to keep his commandments" (Dt 8, 2 ).

3. After the people fell in adoration of the golden calf ( Ex 32 ), Moses was in Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, without eating any food or drinking any water, and he wrote (again) on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments ( 34, 28; to see 32, 19 ). As Moses and as Elijah ( 1 Kgs 19, 8 ), Jesus went to the desert, where he spent forty days and forty nights, and afterwards he was hungry. And temptations arrive. The temptation comes (like an abyss, like a lure) between the baptism of Jesus and the beginning of his mission.

4. The gospels talks to us about three temptations. The first one is related to bread. Bread is the symbol of all kind of needs: one who has not bread is lacking everything. In the desert there is nothing. Where Israel forgot then its mission and, turning its back on God, desired to return to the fleshpot of Egypt, Jesus answers, "One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of God"(Mt 4, 4). Bread is necessary, but he who lives by bread alone, is not a man, a man loved by God.

5. The second temptation appears as a doubt, "Is the Lord in our midst or not?" ( Ex 17,7). Moreover they want to answer the unsettling question in an improper manner, provoking an extreme situation to see if God can lead us out. They even appeal, with very poor judgement, to a Bible passage, "Commands the angels... lest you strike your foot against a stone"( Ps 91,11-12 ). Where Israel wanted to tempt God and make him do a miracle, Jesus accepts God´s signs without demanding others. Because it is written, "You shall not put the Lord, your God, to the test" (Mt 4,7).

6. The third temptation is provoked by power. Concience would be a humble prisoner to these words, "All these I shall give to you, if you will prostrate yourself and worship me". Whereas Israel yielded to temptation, Jesus answers that man should not kneel before anybody, but God, "The Lord, your God, shall you worship and him alone shall you serve"(4,10).

7. The desert is like a test that discloses what it is in man’s heart. In this situation, man shows his true inner self. Paul remembers the Corinthians who the desert made evident as a people desiring evil things, who did not trust in God. Here are the sins of the desert: idolatry, fornication, temptation, grumblings (1 Co 10,6-10 ). Psalm 95 says, "Forty years I loathed that generation and I said: this people´s heart goes astray, they do not know my ways." Israel is blinded and also all humanity because of too much trust in human strength and not in the strength of God. It is true that He makes ways in the desert and rivers in the wasteland (Is 43,19).

8. The desert is also a place for man´s encounter with God. God takes care that his people do not fall. Every one picks up what they need for their nourishment

(Ex 16,8). Looking back, the people could recognise with astonishement God´s action: "The clothing did not fall from you in tatters, nor did your feet swell these forty years" (Dt 8,4). What could have been the tomb of the people has been converted by God in a splendid land, lively and fertile. God opens ways where there are none.

9. The desert is a place of refuge for the persecuted prophet. Elijah hides himself besides the Kerit stream, east of Jordan, "Ravens brought him bread and meat in the morning, and bread and meat in the evening, and he drank from the stream" (1 Kgs 17, 6). John the Baptist finds refuge in the Judea Desert, by the Jordan valley, a place of caverns and streams (Lk l3.2). The newborn Church runs away to the desert, where there was a place prepared by God to give it nourishment (Ap 12,6).

10. Desert and cross are, in a way, similar realities. The cross, to die in a cross, is the worst of the deserts. Jesus accepted to carry the cross, "So that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life" (Jn 3, 15). The living God, who opens up a road where there is none, in the middle of the sea, in the middle of the desert, opens up a road where there was none, in death.

11. Difficulties can be a means of growing and liberation. It is said beautifully by this parable: There was a bird that found refuge daily in dried branches of a tree that was in the middle of an enormous desert plain. One day, the wind blew down the tree, forcing the poor bird to fly in search of a new refuge...until at last it arrived at a forest whose trees were filled with fruit. In truth, if the dried tree would have remained standing nothing would have made the bird renounce its safe place and take flight. Do we know this by experience?