EASTERTIDE · 25 APRIL
Saint Mark the Evangelist
Evangelist & Martyr · Author of the First Gospel · Founder of the Church of Alexandria
Mark — MARK · Barnabas — BAR-nuh-bas · Alexandria — al-ex-AN-dree-a · Eusebius — yoo-SEE-bee-us · Perga — PER-ga · Pamphylia — pam-FIL-ee-a
Almighty God, who didst call thy servant Mark to be an Evangelist and to write the first and swiftest account of thy Son’s ministry; Grant that, schooled by Peter and sent to the nations, he may bring us by his gospel into that same urgent obedience to which he himself was called; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Mark’s Gospel is the oldest of the four — probably written in Rome in the late 50s or early 60s, while Peter was still alive, and serving as the primary source for both Matthew and Luke — and its character is completely unlike any of the others. It is short, urgent, breathless: the word straightway appears over forty times, driving the narrative forward with an insistence that the reader feel the pressure of the Kingdom’s arrival. There is no birth narrative, no genealogy, no prologue on the eternal Word. It begins with John the Baptist in the wilderness and moves immediately to the baptism of Jesus and the temptation in the desert, and it never slows down. This is the Gospel of action rather than discourse, of miracle rather than parable, of the deed rather than the word — which is fitting, because its author was himself a man of action whose first significant appearance in the narrative is a failure: the young man who was following Jesus in Gethsemane, who left the linen cloth and fled naked when the soldiers laid hold of him. Most scholars identify this as a self-portrait, Mark’s signature in the corner of the canvas, the only place in the Gospels where an author appears to sign his own name. He ran away in the Garden. He came back.
John Mark — his full name in Acts — was the son of Mary of Jerusalem, in whose house the disciples gathered, which may have been the house of the Last Supper and the location of the Pentecost gathering. He was the cousin of Barnabas (BAR-nuh-bas), who brought him on the first missionary journey with Paul. At Perga (PER-ga) in Pamphylia (pam-FIL-ee-a) he turned back and went home — a desertion that Paul took so seriously that when Barnabas wanted to bring Mark on the second journey, Paul refused, and the two men parted over it. This is one of the most humanly revealing moments in the New Testament: the great Apostle and the son of consolation, unable to agree about a young man who had once failed his nerve. The tradition does not record what Mark did in the intervening years, but it records the reconciliation: in the letter to the Colossians, Paul mentions Mark as a fellow-worker, and in the second letter to Timothy he asks for Mark to be sent to him, for he is profitable to the ministry. The man who was not good enough for the second journey is asked for by name at the end.
His connection to Peter is the foundation of his authority as an evangelist. Eusebius (yoo-SEE-bee-us) records the tradition of Papias that Mark was the interpreter and companion of Peter, and wrote down accurately, though not in order, all that Peter taught about the words and deeds of Christ. This is the apostolic chain by which the Gospel came to be written: Peter, who had seen everything from the baptism to the Resurrection, dictated his memories to his interpreter, and Mark wrote them down with the urgency and concreteness of a man recording what he had heard from an eyewitness. The tradition then sends Mark to Alexandria (al-ex-AN-dree-a), where he founded the church that would produce Clement and Origen and Athanasius — one of the greatest schools of Christian theology in the ancient world. The church of Alexandria traces its foundation to the man who ran away in Gethsemane and came back to write the first Gospel, the man whose failure is recorded in the Scriptures he helped to create, and whose subsequent faithfulness planted the seed of the greatest North African theological tradition.
Mark’s feast falls on 25 April in Eastertide — the season of the Resurrection’s first fruit, the season in which the one who fled from the arrest stands on the other side of the empty tomb and writes, with that recovered urgency, the first account of the story. His feast is in the Easter light, which is entirely right for a man whose whole story is the story of failure and return. He left his cloth and ran from Gethsemane; he left the first missionary journey at Perga; and yet he was there, in Rome, at Peter’s side, when the testimony was to be written down. He was there in Alexandria, building the church that would shelter the tradition through its first centuries. He is there now, in the cloud of witnesses — the man who fled and returned, whose brief and urgent Gospel has been read in every church in every generation since it was written, whose tradition in Alexandria endures through the Coptic church to this day. What Mark accomplished in the years between Gethsemane and the writing of the Gospel, between Perga and Alexandria, between his failure and his faithfulness — only God fully knows. But the fruit of it stands in every Christian community that has ever opened the second Gospel and heard, through that breathless and urgent prose, the voice of Peter speaking of what he had seen.
O Almighty God, who by thy servant Mark didst give to the Church the first and most urgent account of thy Son’s saving work, and who dost receive back into service those who have failed and returned; Grant that we may learn from his recovery as much as from his Gospel, knowing that thou dost not discard those who run from thee in the dark, but dost send them back to write down what they have heard; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.