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And not just any adversary, but the most powerful and sinister of enemies. Mark's version of Jesus' temptation doesn't tell us much about the strategy of this Evil One, at least as directly as do those of Matthew and Luke. For Mark it is enough to describe his fearsome incarnation: If the Spirit comes to Jesus in the form of a dove, Satanic temptation comes to him in the form of wild beasts.

This temptation was severe—40 days and 40 nights of fasting, that is, a thorough and complete period of rigorous self-denial. On top of that, there were those beasts. But what exactly were they? They could have been physical—boars, snakes, or whatever. But it could be that the beasts were not merely outside Jesus' body but also inside Jesus' head, like the experience of Antony of the Desert.

Antony was a young Egyptian Christian who, upon hearing the Scripture about forsaking wealth and family to follow Christ, did just that. Sometime around A.D. 285, he sold his possessions, put his sister into the care of friends, and walked out into the desert to pray and meditate to learn the spiritual life.

Athanasius, his biographer, describes not only his triumphs but also his most severe temptations. In one series of hallucinations, it seems that Antony's sanity was on the line: "The demons … were changed into forms of beasts and reptiles," Athanasius writes. "The place was immediately filled with the appearance of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, and serpents, asps, scorpions, and wolves, and each of these moved in accordance with its form. The lion roared, wanting to spring at him; the bull seemed intent on goring; the creeping snake did not quite reach him; the onrushing wolf made straight for him—and altogether the sounds of all the creatures that appeared were terrible, and their ragings were fierce."

Don't many of our temptations take such forms? Do we not sometimes hear the roar of condemnation for past sins, feel gored by remorse, and sense hope itself slip away because of the terrible and fierce ragings within? Indeed, if Jesus was tempted in every way like us, he was surely tempted by wild beasts just as fierce.

Be that as it may, Mark seems to be saying something startling in his stark account: God so loved his Son that he sent him into a kind of hell.

He did this to Jesus, his beloved?

The mind reels. A love that casts out? A love that withdraws all loving presence? A love that drives us to the limits of sanity?

During World War II, a Russian brigadier commander called a captain to his headquarters and immediately asked him for his pistol. The captain suspected nothing and handed it over to him. Immediately from a corner of the room, two counterintelligence officers bounded across the floor and grabbed the captain, tearing at the star on his cap, his shoulder boards, his officer's belt.

"You are under arrest!" they shouted.

"Me? For what?"

Indeed, for what? He was the son of a patriot, a man who had served his nation in World War I. He himself had served with distinction for four years, having just ten days earlier led his reconnaissance battery nearly intact under heavy fire.

All he had wanted to be in his youth was a writer. The early death of his father required him to be of more practical help to his mother, and he earned a mathematics degree. He had been teaching physics in a high school and taking a correspondence course in writing when he was called up for service in 1941. The war was now drawing to a close, and he looked forward to returning to his teaching, to his writing, and to his wife. For what, then, had he been arrested?

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December 2004, Vol. 48, No. 12