Those Friendly Beasts
Anyone who has heard my sermons knows how much I detest tainting the seriousness of preaching with levity and humor, but in the spirit of the season, I would like to offer this story by way of introduction.
A salesman gets lost in a rural area and stops at a farm for directions. As he is talking to the farmer he notices a pig with a wooden leg. "How did the pig get a wooden leg?" he asks the farmer.
"Well," says the farmer, "that’s a very special pig. One night not too long ago we had a fire start in the barn. Well, sir, that pig set up a squealing and a squalling that woke everyone, and by the time we got there he had herded all the other animals out of the barn and saved every one of them."
"And that was when he lost his leg," said the salesman.
"Oh no" says the farmer. "He was fine after that. In fact, a while later I was in the woods out back and a bear attacked me. Well, sir, that pig jumped the fence and came running and set on that bear and chased him off. Saved me for sure."
" …But the bear took his leg," said the salesman.
"Oh no! He came away without a scratch. Why, a few days later my tractor turned over in a ditch and I was knocked unconscious. Well, sir, that pig dove into the ditch and pulled me out before I drowned."
"So he hurt his leg then?" asked the salesman.
"Oh no," says the farmer.
"So how did he get the wooden leg?" the salesman asked.
"Well, mister," the farmer tells him, "A pig that special, you don't eat all at once."
Why am I thinking about special farm animals today? We’ve had a custom for a few years now of taking one of the post-Christmas Sundays to look more closely at some element of the Christmas story. And this year what caught my eye was a detail in the icon of the Nativity: the ox and the donkey kneeling in worship before the newborn Christ.
We hear about them in Christmas songs—"Good Christian Men, Rejoice”: “Ox and ass before him bow, and He is in the manger now.” And “The Little Drummer Boy”: “The ox and ass kept time, pa rum pum pum pum.” Why are they there? Where in the Gospel story do we read about the animals worshipping Christ in the manger?
We don’t. No animals are mentioned in the Nativity story, neither by Luke nor by Matthew. Just because the family was lodging in a stable, doesn’t mean that there were animals in there at the same time. Except in the homes of the wealthy, the stable was attached to the house, much like a modern garage. But if you had guests stay in your garage, you would probably leave your car in the driveway. So too for the animals and the stable.
So the ox and the ass in the icon are not part of the Gospel record, but they do come from Scripture, nevertheless. What the icon is working into the story is a saying from the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah lived some 700 years before Christ, and he was one of the greatest prophets of ancient Israel. His visions contained some of the most detailed information about the coming of Christ, which are woven into the fabric of his message of warning for the Kingdom of Judah. It is from Isaiah that we hear the words (7:14), “Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son.”
Isaiah’s monumental book of prophecy, though, begins with these thundering words (1:2-3): “Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the LORD has spoken: "Sons have I reared and brought up, but they have rebelled against me. The ox knows its owner, and the ass its master's crib (‘crib’ meaning ‘feed trough,’ not ‘baby’s bed’); but Israel does not know, my people does not understand.’”
There they are: the ox and the ass and the manger. Isaiah says that the chosen people don’t recognize their God, but the beasts of the stable do. And so—the icon fills in—when God appears before them in the flesh, the animals show their recognition by bowing in worship. Actually, this connection between Isaiah 1, verse 3 was not first made by an iconographer, but by a fictional gospel, an apocryphal gospel written in the 600s AD, the Infancy Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew.
CHAP. 14. “1 And on the third day after the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, the most blessed Mary went forth out of the cave, and entering a stable, placed the child in the stall, and the ox and the ass adored Him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Isaiah the prophet, saying: The ox knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib. 2 The very animals, therefore, the ox and the ass, having Him in their midst, incessantly adored Him. Then was fulfilled that which was said by Habbakuk the prophet, saying: 3 Between two animals thou art made manifest. In the same place Joseph remained with Mary three days.”
So now we know why there are animals in the Nativity icon, and why they are these two animals in particular, and not sheep and not goats and not camels. But this raises a second question, and perhaps a more interesting one: is it possible that, if there were animals present in the stable, that they might have adored Christ in some manner—kneeling, bobbing their heads in rhythm with a drummer boy, making their stavro with their little hooves?
Can animals worship God?
Think about your family pet. Can you see Fido kneeling down in worship? Actually, the Sietsema family has a dog now, and Shadow bows down in his own way. I think in dog logic it goes like this: She gives me food—she must be god! Those of you who have cats, you know how cats think: “She gives me food—I must be god!”
So I think it’s safe to say that in our own experience, none of us have never witnessed an animal in an act of worship. Does this mean it doesn’t happen?
Be careful about your answer! I would point you to some passages in the Old Testament that suggest that this does happen. Psalm 150:6, the final verse of the Book of Psalms, says, “Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.” Notice that it does not simply say, “Let every human being,” but “Let everything that has breath.” This wording intentionally includes animals.
Why would animals be commanded to praise the Lord, if they were unable to do so?
We find similar statements throughout the Book of Psalms. Psalm 145: 21—“My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord. And all flesh shall praise his holy name forever and ever.” Psalm 148:7, 10—“Praise the Lord from the earth, You great sea creatures and all the depths. … Beasts and all cattle, Creeping things and flying birds.” Can animals pray? Job 38:41 says that God gives food to the raven when its younglings cry to God. Certainly, in the mind of the Scriptures animals can obey the commands of God: the great fish that came to swallow Jonah, the ravens that fed the prophet Elijah, the ass of Balaam that halted before the angel. If animals are commanded to praise God, then presumably they obey that command, too.
But who has seen it? Who has seen animals like those in the icon, worshipping in any way, shape, or form?
If you look again at those verses in the Psalms that command animals to praise God, you realize that in the same place, all kinds of inanimate things are also called upon to praise God: the sun and the moon, the stars, the mountains and hills, fire and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds, and so on.
How do these things praise God? Just by being themselves. Just by illustrating the wonders of the Creator of this whole system we call the universe.
And so it is for the animals. They praise God just by being themselves, just by doing all their little animal things. In a sense, then, these creatures praise God all the time, so long as they do not transgress the will of their Creator; in which case they will have to answer for their sin (cf. Genesis 9:5). But the subject of animals sinning is another sermon altogether.
In our Orthodox theology, the Holy Spirit is called the “Giver of Life,” meaning He is the one that nourishes and cares for all living things. Every Sunday in Orthros we sing a set of hymns called the Anavathmoi. They are poetic riffs on the Psalms of Ascent from the Bible, Psalms 120 to 134. In those hymns, every third one is a special tribute to the Holy Spirit as the one who is present within all creation and caring for all creatures of the earth. From the Second Tone: “The Holy Spirit is the element of life and honor, for as God he empowers all creatures and preserves them in the Father and the Son.” The Third Tone: “With the Holy Spirit every good gift shines forth, as with the Father and the Son, for everything lives and moves in him.
If you want an experience of the Holy Spirit, go spend some quality time around animals. We often have a sense of the innate spirituality of farm people; I think it is precisely because in dealing so closely with God’s creatures, they sense intuitively the presence of the Holy Spirit in the lives of their animals. And we would run out of time altogether if I started to tell you stories about the ways that animals have rescued human beings in peril, seemingly on command from some hidden voice of authority. Can animals honor God? Is there really a question about this?
I close therefore with the saying of Abba Xanthias. Abba Xanthias was one of the desert fathers, one of those men who lived alone in the wilderness of Egypt in a life of constant prayer and communion with God. Abba Xanthias once observed, “My dog is better than I, for he loves, but does not judge.”
Now that I have a dog, I know exactly what the good Abba meant. We should all aspire to be the kind of person our dogs think we are. But if this is true—if a dog can love, if an animal can love (and it is clear to people who study animals that they can love and show trust and empathy and exercise a number of moral capacities) [cf. Wild Justice, the Moral Life of Animals by Marc Bekoff and Jessica Parker], and if love is the sum and substance of religion, as Christ Himself said, then truly animals praise God, animals worship.
And so we turn now back to that special pig who started the sermon. A pig like that you don’t eat all at once. What if there were an ox or an ass at the manger of Bethlehem? If those two animals in that stable on that night had indeed bowed down and worshipped, as the icon illustrates … what should happen with those animals?
Well, mister, that’s a special ox. That ox recognized the Master of the universe and got on his knees and prayed. An ox like that you don’t eat all in one steak fry! And that’s a special donkey. That donkey saw his creator and paid homage. A donkey like that you don’t turn into Big Macs all at once!
Beyond the joke is a point. If my dog is better than I … how should I treat that dog? If those farm animals worship God in their own way—just by being who they are—how should the human race treat them? You see, those animals in that icon pose a tremendous question for all of us. The animal kingdom, in some ways, is the moral superior to the human race.
How should we treat them? By eating them only one leg at a time?
I think as we view the Nativity icon this season, and as we look at the ox and the ass kneeling in worship, we should be reminded of our fellow creatures on this planet, and of how they, unlike us, are more consistently God’s friends, God’s helpers, God’s worshippers. That’s a special ox, a special donkey … and every other ox and donkey are just like them, and should be treated so.
This is not a sermon about vegetarianism. But it is a sermon about raising awareness of how we treat our fellow worshippers. If we are to eat them, let them be slaughtered in the most humane way possible—and let us try to be consumers who encourage this by our choices at the grocery store. If we are to put them to work for us, let it be without pain and degradation. If we are to keep them as pets, let it be done responsibly, attentively, gently, and affectionately, as befits an emissary of the Holy Spirit, for so they are, in the icon and in our lives.