Mark 1:13 Commentary

Mark 1:13 "And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him."

If Jesus was in the wilderness forty days and tempted, and subject to the scary reality of wild beasts, we are not talking about a picnic, but an ordeal.

I have not researched Sunday School materials, but I assume a false need to protect children probably mutes all this. For in one verse alone, there is more philosophy than was dreamed of in your Sunday School curricula.

For example, those wild beasts.

No one ever said nature was New Age splendid. In fact, the Old Testament got the nature part right.

We are to dominate nature, not yell "Act of God!" whenever it rears its beastly head. Dominating it does not mean destroying it. Insofar as Abba appears at all in the Old Testament -- that's when Abba is not being evoked as a god of war who takes sides -- Abba is most magnificently manifest in the book of Job. There he as speaker celebrated nature as it has never before or since been celebrated.

The theophany in Job is a way of saying, Does anyone know what was out there at creation? How beautiful it was? How it wed the Dionysian and Apollonian into something transcending tragedy (if I may append a footnote to Nietzsche)? Transcending tragedy and evoking, in Job, the repentance that is due Abba daily?

Yes, the wild beasts.

What a mess we have made of nature. All because the church misunderstood Jesus' message and gave us a half a loaf instead of the whole. Creedal messianism instead of a way of life.

Now to those angels.

We are always ministered to by angels. Angels are who we thank when we are lifted up, sustained, saved, protected. Enough said.

If you have a problem with that, then eliminate the term angels from every usage it has ever had.

We are a spectrum. The better angels of our nature live at one end, the worse ones at the other. Nature is a spectrum as well.

And finally to being tempted by Satan.

Tempted we know. Anyone not tempted isn't alive.

The three temptations we know about in this first chapter of Mark are paradigmatic whoppers. We'll get to them.

For now, it may well have taken forty days for Jesus to consider just these three temptations. Then again, he may have been tempted by everything in the book. The seven deadly sins, the seven less deadly sins and everything else.

The important question is whether Satan is merely the principle of conflict and division that he or she or it eventually becomes in Mark, or whether Satan has the same materiality Jesus does. Is he Hamlet's Ghost or Shakespeare playing the Ghost?

I say Satan is immaterial.

Just as demons are immaterial. Just as the spirit of goodness or grace or holiness is immaterial.

But consider this. Immaterial things are part of us. The battle of existence is one of understanding and overcoming and organizing and controlling all the myriad elements that compose us. Our selves. The spectrum we are.

In this sense, philosophically, the only reason for saying Satan is immaterial is that ultimately Satan exists in the mind. We can say no to the reality of Satan and should. Satan is at an end. Satan has no reality and no domination of the world after Jesus.

In twenty four words Mark has raised three fundamental issues and you have been treated to the understanding of Abba's Way regarding nature, angels and Satan.

Abba's Way. Biblical. Mark 1:13 "And he was there in the wilderness forty days, tempted of Satan; and was with the wild beasts; and the angels ministered unto him." Mark 1:13 parses beasts, angels and Satan.