Reading the Synoptic Gospels Ecologically

Few of those who have written about the ecological dimension of the Bible have found much to say about the Synoptic Gospels.[1] It may be that, as Robert Murray comments, Jesus’ relationship to the nonhuman creation is not ‘a salient theme in the gospels’,[2] but, alternatively, it may be that, especially when the Gospels are read with their relation to the Old Testament in view, there are significant references to the non-human creation that have not been given the attention they deserve. It may be that, in the case of the Gospels, the eyes of modern urban readers still need to be opened to that dimension of human life, our relationship to the non-human environment and its creatures, that to the biblical writers was self-evidently of huge importance.

We shall explore two approaches to identifying the ecological dimensions of the story of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. (Not to distinguish ‘the historical Jesus’ from the Jesus of the Gospels, but with the way in which the Gospels depict Jesus and his story.) The first approach attempts to make explicit the Palestinian ecological context that the Gospels largely take for granted, in the hope of discovering something of Jesus’ relationship with it. The second approach works with the theme of the kingdom of God, unquestionably the central theme of Jesus’ teaching and ministry in the Synoptic Gospels, in order to show that the kingdom includes the whole of creation and that some of the acts in which Jesus anticipated the coming kingdom point to the redemption of the human relationship with the rest of creation.

Jesus in His Ecological Context

In a chapter called ‘Jesus and the Ecology of Galilee’,[3] Sean Freyne has characterized the ‘micro-ecologies’ that distinguished the three regions of Galilee – Lower (including Nazareth), the Valley (including Capernaum and the lakeside) and Upper (including Caesarea Philippi) – along with the ‘different modes of human interaction with, and different opinions about the natural world’[4] that the three different environments produced. Freyne sees Jesus’ ministry as taking place successively in these three regions, and suggests ways in which the ecological character of each may have influenced Jesus’ thought and teaching. It has to be said that many of these suggestions are very speculative, while some are illuminating and others at least plausible.

It is probable, for example, that the term ‘the sea’, used by Mark and Matthew to refer to the lake of Galilee, reflects the usage of those who lived beside it and were unconcerned with the Mediterranean, while the story of the stilling of the storm reflects the threat of the mythological abyss on the part of people whose lives were dominated by water, its possibilities and dangers. It is also plausible that Jesus’ faith in the Creator God of the Hebrew Scriptures, who cares for his creation and overcomes the ever threatening chaos, engaged at this point with the consciousness, at once realistic and mythic, of the local fishermen who were his disciples.[5]

On the other hand, it is not to be tempted by this suggestion: ‘One is tempted to ask whether Jesus’ healing ministry, attested in all the gospels, might have given him a special appreciation of the climatic  conditions of the Lake area, and the quality of its water, prompting a visit to its source [Mount Hermon].’[6] Nothing in the stories of Jesus’ healings offers the slightest hint of a regard for the health-giving quality of the water of the lake. There is nothing like Elisha’s command to Naaman to wash in the Jordan (2 Kgs. 5:10) or the Johannine Jesus’ command to the blind man to wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:7).

Freyne does not answer the question he says ‘one is tempted to ask’, but one may also question whether such an excessively speculative question is even worth asking. It seems to be a strained attempt to forge a link between Jesus and some aspects of the lake of Galilee and Mount Hermon that we know interested some ancient writers. This example is among the least plausible of Freyne’s suggestions.

Freyne is surely right in general to argue that Jesus’ thought and teaching were influenced by his natural environment, its diversity and the various ways Galileans made a living from it. He was not a bookish intellectual but a man consciously embedded in his rural environment. But Freyne is also right to insist that we need not play off Jesus’ direct experience of his environment against the rootedness of his beliefs in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish religious tradition (especially, in this case, faith in God as Creator of all things). The parables, he says, ‘are the product of a religious imagination that is deeply grounded in the world of nature and the human struggle with it, and at the same time deeply rooted in the traditions of Israel which speak of God as creator of heaven and earth and all that is in them’.[7]

It is also important to note that Freyne does not, like some nineteenthcentury writers,[8] depict Jesus’ relationship to nature as a romantic idyll. Many of Jesus’ references to the non-human world are to the hard work of making a living from the soil or the lake, and the parables also show awareness of the increasingly precarious state of small landowners, hard pressed or deprived of their land as large estates became more numerous.[9]

Freyne’s method is a historical one, drawing on archaeology and literary sources to reconstruct the ecology of Galilee in Jesus’ time. As in much historiography, historical imagination is required to make the links with Jesus. But Edward Echlin’s approach is more creatively imaginative. He speaks of ‘imaginative contemplation’ in which we can make the ‘implicit’ in the Gospels (as in the rest of the Bible) ‘explicit.’[10] ‘When we contemplate the testimonies to Jesus looking for insights we will catch glimpses in the depths, in the small print, in what is hidden, between the lines, tacit and silent.’[11]

The following passage, imagining Jesus’ early years in Nazareth, shows how Echlin takes up hints in the Gospels to paint the sort of picture they make no attempt to provide, but which Echlin, a former Jesuit, aptly places in the tradition of the imaginative meditations in

Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises:

With imagination we may place ourselves in hilly Nazareth with its few hundred families and their sheep and goats, oxen, cattle and donkeys. In those green and brown and stony hills we may imaginatively observe the growing Jesus (Lk. 2.40, 52) learning, especially from his mother, about the useful elder trees, the scattered Tabor oaks and Aleppo pine, the nettle, bramble, mallow, and startling yellow chrysanthemums of April, the galaxy of weeds and herbs and wild flowers which he later compared to Solomon’s attire. Grapes grow and grew in Nazareth’s old town, their branches nourished by the everlasting vine. Jesus wondered at their rapid growth, their ripening in the burning sun, and their harsh winter pruning, he learned about apples, almonds and pomegranates, he saw figs swarming from rocks offering two, even three crops of dripping sweetness. When they began to put out leaves, as did the other trees, he knew that summer was here (Lk. 21.20).[12]

This may seem novelistic, but something like this must indeed have been the case for Jesus, as for any boy growing up in the villages of Lower Galilee. In principle, this kind of filling in of the environmental context of Jesus that the Gospels take for granted or ignore is no different from the way that historical Jesus scholars routinely fill in the social, economic, political and religious contexts of first-century Jewish Palestine to which events of the gospel narratives relate.

Imaginative as it is, an exercise like this could, paradoxically perhaps, also be an exercise in historical realism. The wealth of references to flora, wild and cultivated, and fauna, wild and domesticated, as well as to common farming practices, in the

synoptic teaching of Jesus has, of course, often been taken to indicate Jesus’ closeness to the natural and rural world of Galilee. In an admittedly rapid survey, the following animals mentioned, each at least once: bird, camel, chicken (cock and hen), dog, donkey, dove, fish, fox, gnat, goat, moth, ox, pig, raven, scorpion, sheep, snake, sparrow, viper, vulture, wolf (21). Of these, eight are domestic animals. None is especially surprising in a rural Palestinian environment. The following are the plants to which the synoptic teaching of Jesus refers: bramble, fig tree, herbs (mint, dill, cummin, rue and others), mulberry, mustard plant, reed, thorn, vine, weed, wheat, wild flower. Methods of making a living from this environment, mentioned in Jesus’ teaching, include arboriculture, viticulture, shepherding, trapping animals, netting birds, and the various stages of growing and processing wheat and other grains.

Of course, this basic information could be expanded to include the frequency of mention of the various items, and evidence of familiarity with natural and farming processes, animal behaviour and so forth.

References to the weather and its bearing on the farming activities of Jesus’ Galilean contemporaries are another such topic for which the information could be assembled and discussed. Most of these references, of course, function in the teaching of Jesus, not as literal references, but as figurative comparisons, and even the factual references are made for the sake of a religious point. Broadly similar phenomena are common in the prophets, the psalms and wisdom literature. So the question arises whether such material in the teaching of Jesus derives from direct observation of nature and farming or from the scriptural and oral traditional sources of Jesus’ reflection and teaching. Vincent Mora, writing specifically about the animals in Matthew’s Gospel, argues that almost all of these are used as symbols with deep roots in the Hebrew Scriptures.[13] This is, course, true for some of the material, such as the image of shepherd and sheep, but certainly not for all. To take just two examples of Matthean animals, that foxes have holes (8:20) and that pigs can be savage (7:6) are not observations to be found in the Hebrew Bible or in Jewish traditions known to us. As we have already noted that Freyne observes, there is no need to think of direct observation and traditional usage as exclusive alternatives.

With the range and frequency of allusions to nature in the synoptic teaching of Jesus it is perhaps instructive to compare the comparative rarity of such allusions in the Pauline letters. In the whole Pauline corpus (including the Pastorals) these animals occur: dog, lion, ox, snake, sheep (and Passover lamb), viper, wild animals, along with a general reference to birds, animals and reptiles. Only the following plants occur: olive tree, vine, wheat and other grains. Although ancient cities were much more closely connected with the natural and cultivated environment outside them than modern cities are, it does seem likely that the contrast between Jesus and Paul in this respect reflects the urban context of both Paul and his readers and hearers, by contrast with the mostly rural context of Jesus’ life and ministry. The contrast shows that the range and frequency of allusions to nature in the synoptic teaching of Jesus are not merely what one might expect from any Jewish teacher acquainted with the Scriptures and Jewish religious traditions.

This whole issue merits much closer and more careful study. But, even if we suppose that Jesus’ teaching drew extensively on his own close familiarity with the nature and farming practices of rural Galilee, we may still ask what the significance of this might be. With few exceptions, all these references have a figurative function: they do not seem to function to teach Jesus’ hearers anything about the natural world itself or human relationships with it, but serve to make points about God and human life. However, there are some suggestions in the literature that could indicate otherwise. C.H. Dodd, having observed that the parables are realistic stories, true to nature and to life,[14] rather than artificial allegories, writes:

There is a reason for this realism of the parables of Jesus. It arises from a conviction that there is no mere analogy, but an inward affinity, between the natural order and the spiritual order; or as we might put it in the language of the parables themselves, the Kingdom of God is intrinsically like the process of nature and of the daily life of men. Jesus therefore did not feel the need of making up artificial illustrations for the truths He wished to teach. He found them ready-made by the Maker of man and nature.[15]

This feature of the parables of Jesus could be highlighted by a comparison with the rabbinic parables. Though these share motifs with the parables of Jesus, they are much less connected with the everyday world (natural and occupational) of ordinary people. This downtoearth and small-scale character of the stories Jesus told could also be associated with Jesus’ miracles (healings, exorcisms and nature miracles) and significant acts (such as eating with sinners): both in his teaching and his activity Jesus proclaimed and embodied the kingdom of God in small-scale instances within the lives of ordinary people. These people’s relationship to the natural world was a constant and determining feature of their lives, and this is reflected both in Jesus’ parables and in his nature miracles.

Closeness and sensitivity to the natural environment would not, of course, make Jesus a modern ecologist. Echlin is clear about this: ‘What emerges from the gospels is a villager within the Jewish tradition of holistic compassion and sustainable organic husbandry with people and animals on the land, working with and not against the ways of nature.’[16]

In other words, Echlin sees Jesus as embodying the best of the Jewish tradition, informed by the Hebrew Bible, with regard to attitudes to other living creatures and the environment. But this requires that we look for signs of the creation theology of the Hebrew Scriptures within the Synoptic teaching of Jesus. This is the startingpoint for the next section of this chapter, in which we shall ask how creation theology might relate to the central theme of Jesus’ teaching and ministry: the kingdom of God.

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[1] Notable exceptions include Robert Faricy, Wind and Sea Obey Him (London: SCM Press, 1982), pp. 40–8; Northcott, Environment, pp. 224–5; Adrian M. Leske, ‘Matthew 6.25–34: Human Anxiety and the Natural World’, in The Earth Story in the New Testament (ed. Norman C. Habel and Vicky Balabanski; Earth Bible 5; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002), pp. 15–27; William Loader, ‘Good News – For the Earth? Reflections on Mark 1.1–15’, in Habel and Balabanski, Earth Story in the New Testament, pp. 28–43; and some other essays in the same volume.

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

[3] Sean Freyne, Jesus, a Jewish Galilean: A New Reading of the Jesus-Story (London: T&T Clark [Continuum], 2004), ch. 2.

[4] Freyne, Jesus, p. 40.

[5] Freyne, Jesus, p. 53.

[6] Freyne, Jesus, p. 56.

[7] Freyne, Jesus, p. 59; cf. also p. 48. Similarly, Edward P. Echlin, Earth Spirituality: Jesus at the Centre (New Alresford: Arthur James, 1999), p. 76: Jesus’ ‘sensitivity to nature, so vivid in his parables, derived from living close to the natural world and from familiarity with the Jewish Scriptures and their metaphors of cosmic order.’

[8] See especially Ernest Renan, Renan’s Life of Jesus (trans. William G. Hutchinson; London: Walter Scott, 1905), pp. 42–4.

[9] Freyne, Jesus, pp. 45–6. On this point with regard to the parables, see also V. George Shillington, ‘Engaging with the Parables,’ in Jesus and His Parables:Interpreting the Parables of Jesus Today (ed. V. George Shillington; Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1997), pp. 1–20, here 9–11.

[10] Echlin, Earth Spirituality, pp. 26–7, 30, 32, 54–5.

[11] Echlin, Earth Spirituality, p. 29, cf. p. 54.

[12] Echlin, Earth Spirituality, p. 55. It is interesting to compare this account of Jesus’ environment in his early years in Nazareth with Renan’s: Renan’s, Life of Jesus, pp. 17–18. Renan’s is more romantically aesthetic, Echlin’s more ecological.

[13] Vincent Mora, La Symbolique de la Création dans l’Évangile de Matthieu (Lectio Divina 144; Paris: Cerf, 1991), pp. 18492.

[14] On the realism of the parables, see especially Charles W. Hedrick, Parables as Poetic Fictions: The Creative Voice of Jesus (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson, 1994), ch. 3.

[15] Charles Harold Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (rev. edn; Glasgow: Fontana [Collins], 1961), p. 20.

[16] Echlin, Earth Spirituality, p. 78.