GREEN THEOLOGY
Jesus and the Peaceable Kingdom

In the Hebrew Bible the desirable relationship between humans and other creatures is sometimes portrayed as peace. As Robert Murray points out, this may be either peace from or peace with.[1] Both speak to the threat that dangerous animals posed both to human life and to human livelihood (in the form of domestic animals). Peace from is the more pragmatic possibility, secured in the covenant with Noah by the fear of humans that came to characterize other creatures (Gen. 9:2).

Peace from could also be secured simply by the absence of dangerous animals, like the absence of invading armies that is sometimes linked with it (Lev. 26:6; Ezek. 34: 25,28; cf. Hos. 2:18). The more positive state of peace with wild animals is a return to paradisal conditions. This is the relationship with dangerous animals that is portrayed in the well known description of the messianic kingdom in Isaiah 11:6–9. This passage has often been misunderstood by modern readers as a picture simply of peace between animals. In fact, it depicts peace between the human world, with its domesticated animals (lamb, kid, calf, bullock, cow), and those wild animals (wolf, leopard, lion, bear, poisonous snakes) that were normally perceived as threats both to human livelihood and to human life. Humans appear in their most vulnerable form, as children, just as most of the domestic animals do (lamb, kid, etc.). This is a picture of reconciliation of the human world with the wild world, healed of the fear and violence that had been accepted, as a pragmatic compromise, in the Noahic covenant.

It is likely that the ecotopia envisaged in Isaiah 11 is the key to understanding the reference to wild animals in Mark’s brief account of Jesus in the wilderness:

He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan;

and he was with the wild animals;

and the angels ministered to him. (Mark 1:13, my translation)

 Here Jesus goes into the wilderness, the realm outside of human habitation, in order to establish his messianic relationship with the non-human creatures. The order in which the three categories of them appear is significant. Satan is simply an enemy of Jesus and the angels simply his friends, but the wild animals, placed by Mark between the two, are enemies of whom Jesus makes friends. Jesus in the wilderness enacts, in an anticipatory way, the peace between the human world and wild nature that is the Bible’s hope for the messianic future. Mark’s simple but effective phrase (‘he was with the wild animals’) has no suggestion of hostility or resistance about it. It indicates Jesus’ peaceable presence with the animals. The expression ‘to be with someone’ frequently has, in Mark’s usage (3:14; 5:18; 14:67; cf. 4:36) and elsewhere, the sense of close, friendly association. (It may also be relevant that Genesis describes the animals in the ark as those who were ‘with’ Noah: Gen. 7:23; 8:1,17; 9:12.) Mark could have thought of the ideal relationship between wild animals and humans, here represented by their messianic king, as the restoration of dominion over them or as recruiting them to the ranks of the domestic animals who are useful to humans. But the simple ‘with them’ can have no such implication.

Jesus befriends them. He is peaceably with them. A passage that evokes a very different aspect of messianic peace with the non-human world is the story of the stilling of the storm. According to Mark’s version (4:35–41), Jesus ‘rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm’ (4:39). The story evokes a mythical image that is widely reflected in the Hebrew Bible: the primeval waters, the destructive powers of nature imaged as a vast tempestuous ocean, which God in creation reduced to calm and confined within limits so that the world could be a stable environment for living creatures. These waters of chaos were not abolished by creation, only confined, always ready to break out and endanger creation, needing to be constantly restrained

by the Creator. For ancient Israelites the waters of the mythical abyss were not simply a metaphysical idea. In something like a storm at sea, the real waters of the sea became the waters of chaos, threatening life and controllable only by God. In the case of this story, a squall on the lake of Galilee is enough to raise the spectre of elemental chaos.

When Mark says that Jesus ‘rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!”’, he recalls the most characteristic ways in which the Hebrew Bible speaks of God’s subduing the waters of chaos. The ‘rebuke’ is God’s powerful word of command, as in Psalm 104:7: ‘at your rebuke [the waters] flee.’ The word that silences the storm occurs, among other places, in Job 26:12: ‘By his power he stilled the Sea.’ What Jesus enacts, therefore, is the Creator’s pacification of chaos. In this small-scale instance he anticipates the final elimination of all forces of destruction that will distinguish the renewed creation from the present (cf. Isa. 27:1; Rev. 21:1).

A third instance in which Jesus anticipated the peaceable kingdom is his entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey (Mark 11:1–10 and parallels). As Matthew (21:5) makes explicit, Jesus here enacts the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9–10.26 According to the prophecy, following the Messiah’s victory ride on the donkey, he will ‘command peace to the nations’. The peace is among humans, but a peaceable animal, the donkey, helps to bring it about.[2] In ancient Near Eastern cultures, horses were associated with war, but a king in peacetime might be expected to ride a mule, not a donkey (cf. 1 Kgs. 1:33).[3] Jesus rides the animal that was every peasant farmer’s beast of burden.

Michael Northcott writes that, in the Gospels, ‘Jesus is portrayed as one who lives in supreme harmony with the natural order.’[4] This is not entirely true. The harmony is marred by the destruction of the Gerasene pigs (Mark 5:10–13 and parallels) and by the cursing of the unfruitful fig tree (Mark 11:12–14,20–21; Matt. 21:18–21). It is, of course, the demons who destroy the pigs, but Jesus lets them do so, presumably because the destruction of the pigs was of lesser concern than the deliverance of a man from demon-possession. The fig tree

suffers from symbolizing the failure of the temple authorities to do the good that God expected of them. In both cases we are reminded that Jesus anticipates the kingdom within a still unredeemed and unrenewed world. The glimpses of paradisal harmony are no more than small-scale instances pointing to the eschatological future.

They do, however, show that the Gospels take seriously the Messiah’s task of healing the enmity between humans and the rest of God’s creation.

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[1] Robert Murray, Cosmic Covenant (Heythrop Monographs 7; London: Sheed & Ward, 1997), p. 126.

[2] Cf. Eric F.F. Bishop, Jesus of Palestine (London: Lutterworth, 1955), p. 212: ‘In this case both animal and Rider implied the same idea of peaceable progress.’

[3] William David Davies and Dale C. Allison, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), pp. 116–17, provide relevant references but seem curiously unable to distinguish a donkey from a mule.

[4] Michael S.

Northcott, The Environment and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), p. 224.