With wild animals!

"and he was in the desert forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him. (1:13)

The story not mentioned in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke does appear in Mark's Gospel. It is a story about that Jesus was with the wild animals. There was no specific explanationwhat these wild animals could be. Looking at the circumstances, these must be the wild animals living in the desert. Could they be rabbits, or deer? or a little more fierce wolves?

I don't know what Mark's intention could be for adding up the story of the wild animals in here. Of course these are not inappropriate relationship at all between Jesus and animals. According to the tale of his birth, he was born in the manger. There are some pictures with Joseph, Mary, and Jesus with the background of some animals like cows or sheep. When Jesus entered Jerusalem, he rode on a donkey. These must be the only stories with animals being related with Jesus.

Could there be animals in the kingdom of God? If the mankindget eternal lives in there, could it be possible for an animal to get an eternal life in there too? These are not the problems only for the animals. What about the insects and bacteria? Today we cannot imagine a living world, excluding the insects and bacteria on earth. They are related with each other in an organic way. Some relationships we might understand, but some we don't know. Perhaps it could be impossible to understand every single relationship between them until the world ends.

We cannot predict how the relationships between human and animal, between human and microorganism would be in progress. Now they compete with each other, but sometimes cooperate witheach other. But at the ultimate, we don't know what's going to happen. Maybe the microorganism could destroy the species of human beings. But the day when human beings could remove microorganism totally will never come. Becausehuman beings cannot exist without microorganism, but they could exist without humans. Maybe there is no direct connection between what we don't understand the relationship with living species surrounding us and Christian faith. But we should get rid of foolishness to measure everything round the human species as a center. A form of new life begins in a new heaven and a new earth, with Jesus' second coming, doesn't it? Until then we must keep on living on this earth with a partial experience of life. Inside of that partial, there exists a hidden whole thing. If we have good relationships with animals now, we could taste in advance a bit of an absolute world of the whole life that will begin in the future. In this point of view, Christian ethics we should discuss is very complicated. The problems from the carnivorous culture or medical experiment for development of medicine belong to this category. I am saying that we should keep on discussing what kind of attitude toward a life could be a proper way of thinking for a living world in the kingdom of God.

Let's get back to the text for today. At the time of temptations and at the place where Jesus got temptations, instead of people, the wild animals were with him. It could be explained the wild animals were a kind of help to Jesus. It means that the animals were able to support Jesus under hard conditions, but not the humans. Ignorant animals could be more useful beings than highly intelligent humans in a certain way.

Lord, we are looking forward to the world in which people, the wild animals, and microorganism get along together peacefully, Amen.