Today we celebrate Saint Mark the Evangelist, who is called “the winged lion”.
Saint Mark is a disciple of the apostle Saint Peter and the author of the second Gospel of the New Testament.
Why He was Called the Winged Lion
Like the rest of the Evangelists, the tradition of the Church has characterized Saint Mark with a symbol taken from a passage in the book of Revelation, written by the apostle Saint John: “The first Living Being resembles a lion, the second a bull, the third has a face like a man, and the fourth is like an eagle in flight” (Rev 4:7).
The symbol of Saint Mark is the lion, to which wings have been added. It is a mere representation of spiritual elevation. The figure of the Lion seems to be an allusion to the way Mark begins his Gospel narrative. In the first place, the story introduces us to John the Baptist, “the voice that cries in the desert”, an expression that evokes the roar of the lion, an animal that inhabits the place where the events take place. Secondly, the aforementioned desert, which surrounds the Jordan, is a place where beasts abound and whose lord is the lion. The desert, in general, makes up the background landscape that surrounds the life and sayings of Jesus in his passage through the earth.