The Gospel According To Saint Mark: A Sunday Rumination

My parish, Saint Louis de Montfort in Sound Beach, enjoys the occasional services of a remarkable priest: Father Edward Kealey, until recently the pastor of Saint Sylvester’s in Medford. Father Ed combines an exceptional talent for homiletics with deep scholarship and a degree of intellectual excitement about Christianity and its history that’s rare even among the most dedicated clerics. All of that and more comes through in his sermons. Today’s sermon was one of the most illuminating yet.

Father Ed spoke of the Gospeler most neglected by Church historians over the centuries: Saint Mark, sometimes referred to in the New Testament as John Mark. Mark’s mother, whose name is apparently lost to history, owned the property on which the Last Supper was celebrated. Mark himself was a companion at various times to Saints Peter, Paul, and Barnabas, in his later years presided as Bishop of Alexandria in Egypt, and was eventually arrested and beheaded as a martyr for Christ.

One of the questions about the Gospels that’s recurred over the centuries is why three of them – Matthew, Mark, and Luke – are so similar in the events they recount, despite the time intervals between their creations. Some classical scholars have proposed that there’s a common source behind them all: a shadowy figure sometimes denominated by “Q” who supplied the narration of those events to those three Gospelers. Yet Mark himself had at least brushing contact with the rest of the Twelve around the time of the Passion, was a companion to Saint Peter while the two were in Rome, and wrote the earliest of all four of the Gospels: the only one of the three greatly similar ones certain to have been produced in the First Century A.D. Thus, it is likely that Mark’s Gospel derives from knowledge of Jesus’s life and ministry conferred upon him by Saint Peter – and that Mark himself was “Q,” the source for Matthew and Luke, whose Gospels date to well after the events all three relate.

Yet for centuries Mark’s Gospel has been treated as the least important of the Big Three. Strange.

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Over the centuries men have searched for more documents from the time of Christ. Numerous candidates have come forth, perhaps the best known being the scrolls of Nag Hammadi. The overarching desire is to find something written by Jesus Himself, or, failing that, a transcription of His exact words by a source other than “Q” that would confirm, at least in substance, the things He preached. Yet the Redeemer was explicit that there was no need for Him to write:

“Heaven and earth will pass away, but My words will not pass away.” – Matthew 24:35

In reflecting on the post-Resurrection careers of Peter, Paul, Mark, Barnabas, and the other Apostles and early evangelists, I am perpetually amazed by their willing, uncomplaining acceptance of lives of hard labor, endless travel, and for nearly all, condemnation and execution for their faith. Those who deride Christianity as implausible can’t cope with that degree of dedication; it baffles them that any man would devote himself to such trials “for a fairy tale.” Yet if anyone needs evidence that the Redeemer did indeed walk among men, that he suffered, died, and rose from the dead in fulfillment of the promises of all the earlier Judaic prophets, what better evidence could there be?

Saint Mark never met Jesus in the flesh. His contact with the Twelve was as a young teenager, through his mother and his subsequent enlistment in the evangelical mission of the newborn Church. His role in the New Testament is far more muted than those of Peter and Paul. Yet he appears to have undergone hardships and trials at least the equal of theirs. He surrendered his life for his faith just as they did. Finally, we might have him to thank for three-fourths of the canonically accepted Gospels.

Who can confidently deride the dedication of such a man? Who can say, without any doubt whatsoever, that the mission to which Mark gave his life and his death – just as with Paul, Barnabas, and all the rest of the Twelve except for Saint John – was a fairy tale?

Not I.

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Among the things that Father Ed had to say about Saint Mark, he noted the optimism that infuses his Gospel. Mark treats even the death of Jesus as a moment in which to exult, for which to give thanks, for it was in that moment that the sins of all Mankind became remissible – according to a former seminarian of my acquaintance, the moment in which they were actually remitted from one end of Time to the other. The other Gospels are more somber in their treatment of the Passion, preferring to reserve any sense of celebration for the Resurrection and Ascension that followed. To Mark, it’s all of a piece: a single, indivisible event in the Mind of God.

Christians are often exhorted to hope – to think of ourselves as “the people of hope.” Yet in the days between the Passion and the Resurrection even the Twelve must have had their doubts that all would ultimately be well. The Gospel According To Saint Mark, the “gospel of the year” at this point in the three-year liturgical cycle, can remind us of the indivisibility of the Divine Plan, the true and inexorable justification for all three of the theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity. Even the agony of His Son’s mortal form on the cross in the cruelest form of execution known to that time was a component of that Plan. We have Mark to tell us...and perhaps to thank for telling Matthew and Luke as well.

May God bless and keep you all.