Mark 1: 12, 13- “At once, this same Spirit pushed Jesus out into the wild. For forty wilderness days and nights he was tested by Satan. Wild animals were his companions, and angels took care of him.”
Just after the baptism of Jesus by John, this is what happened, according to Mark. We fill in the story with what Matthew and Luke would later write, but- as a gospel standing alone- what are we to make of Mark’s comments here?
It is theorized that the gospel of Mark is collection of spoken stories- maybe spoken by Peter, maybe not- that were collected and written down. The gospel has the feel of an urgent, spoken message. (Try it out loud sometime in a loud stage whisper, as if you were speaking it to a small group and didn’t want to be overheard by others- you’ll what I mean) The sentences are short, and to the point, and written originally in the most basic Greek.
It must be assumed, therefore, that the audience of either Mark or the original speaker, had some shared knowledge of this Satan. In the book of Job, a character named Sa-tan, is an accuser, a prosecutor and provocateur, given reign by God to prove Job’s righteousness. The Satan of Mark’s gospel was probably being referred to in a similar role. The wilderness was a test for Jesus, in other words, which he had to pass.
Other scriptures seem to link Satan and the devil. Traditions within the church have cemented the relationship. In many churches, Satan (or the devil) will have equal billing with God in terms of words expended. I can only conclude that the reasons for that is that, for some, fear is a stronger motivator than love.
But Mark’s gospel doesn’t afford us much wiggle room for surmising or guessing. We only know that Satan forced Jesus to the wilderness, where he was tested, and taken care of by angels. That leaves a lot of room for the reader to fill in the white spaces with their own imagination.
Thus, the cults of Satan-fear and of angel-worship within the church are able to emerge, particularly as the original meanings and understandings of those words are lost in the mists of ancient memory. We have the ability to project our own personalities or emotional baggage onto either concept, and twist both ideas into whatever modern definitions we want them to be. It is easy for many to even compare themselves to Jesus by claiming to be harassed and tested themselves by Satan, or protected by a personal set of angels.
Oh, my.
I don’t claim to know all of what Mark meant when he was using those power-packed words. But I do know that when I make them into words for my own personal use, I can absolve myself of many responsibilities, or claim a special status in the eyes (do they have them?) of angels. If Jesus was human, and he was- that’s the point, then what he would have experienced in the wilderness would have been no less or more than any other human would have experienced there. He would have experienced hunger, loneliness, fear, and doubt. Like I would have, like anyone would have. If he didn’t- if he experienced anything in a supernatural way of any sort- then he wouldn’t have been relating to the experience as a human. He couldn’t have been followed, heard, or been a real brother to other humans.
But he was able to move through all of those difficult experiences, as a human. And prove, by doing so, that any of us can do the same.
