The Feast of St. Mark (Fr. Roberts)

He was not one of the Twelve. He never met the Lord in the flesh. His mother kept a house in Jerusalem where the church gathered the night Peter walked out of prison. His cousin was Barnabas. His Hebrew name was John. The Romans called him Mark.

He went out with Paul and Barnabas on the first missionary journey, and somewhere in the heat of Asia Minor he turned around and went home. We are never told why. Paul never forgot it. When Barnabas wanted Mark for the next journey, Paul refused him, and the two greatest apostles of the early church split over a young man who could not be trusted with the work.

That is the man whose feast we keep this evening. Hold that in your mind for a minute, because the church remembered him for something else.

By the time Mark sits down to write the book we have just heard read, Peter has been crucified in Rome. Paul has been beheaded. James, the Lord's brother, has been thrown from the parapet of the Temple. The first generation is being cut down. In the gardens of Nero, Christians are being lit on fire to serve as torches at the emperor's banquets. And Mark's church sits in the dark with the question you cannot avoid when the masters are taken: who carries this forward now? Is the gospel running out of hands?

You cannot understand Mark's answer to that question without Elijah and Elisha.

In the Second Book of Kings, the prophet Elijah and his apprentice walk together toward the Jordan. Elisha knows that today his master will be taken. They cross the river on dry ground. Elisha asks for a double portion of his master's spirit, the share that goes to the firstborn son. And then Elijah is swept up in a whirlwind, and the heavens open to receive him, and as he goes the mantle falls. Elisha picks it up off the ground. He tears his own clothes in two. He strikes the water of the Jordan with the mantle. The river parts. And the sons of the prophets watching from a distance say, the spirit of Elijah rests on Elisha. The master is taken. The successor is more powerful. The work continues.

Now hear how Mark begins his gospel.

A man stands by the Jordan in a coat of camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist. That is not a costume. That is a citation. Open your Old Testament to the Second Book of Kings and you will find, in plain words, that Elijah was a hairy man with a leather belt around his waist. Mark dresses John in the same cloth. He is reaching back four hundred years to say one thing. The prophet is here again. The waiting is over. And John points down the road to one who is coming after him. The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me. More powerful. The very thing Elisha became when his master's mantle fell on his shoulders. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

Then Jesus comes down to the river. As he comes up out of the water, he sees the heavens torn. In Greek, the word means ripped. Split. The sound of cloth giving way. The Spirit comes down. A voice says, You are my Son, the Beloved. My Son. My heir. The one to whom the inheritance falls.

This is Elisha at the Jordan. The master is taken. The spirit transfers. The successor stands in the river with the mantle on his shoulders.

But Mark is not finished. He is just getting started.

Watch where Mark uses that same word again. The verb for tearing. He uses it only twice in his gospel. Once at the Jordan, when the heavens are torn open. And once on the day Jesus dies, when the curtain of the temple is torn in two, from top to bottom. Two tearings. The first thing Jesus sees, and the last thing he causes. And after each one, somebody says the same thing. At the Jordan, the voice from heaven: You are my Son, the Beloved. At the cross, a Roman centurion, looking up at a dead man on a piece of wood: Truly this man was God's Son.

What is happening at the cross? The master is being taken. The mantle is falling again.

Three women come to the tomb at first light. The stone is rolled back. Sitting inside the tomb is a young man, on the right side, dressed in a white robe. And he says to the women, Do not be alarmed. He has been raised. Go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee.

Now keep that young man where you can see him. Because Mark calls someone a young man in only one other place in his gospel. It is in the garden of Gethsemane, when the soldiers come for Jesus and all the disciples flee. Mark says, and only Mark says this, that there was a young man following Jesus wrapped in nothing but a linen cloth. When the soldiers grabbed him, he tore himself free and ran into the night naked.

A young man flees the place of arrest, leaving his clothes behind in disgrace.

A young man sits in the place of resurrection, clothed in white, sending the disciples out.

He is setting two figures side by side. Once stripped. Once reclothed. Once fleeing. Once sending. The disciple who fled at the sound of soldiers has his answer in the messenger of the resurrection morning, who carries the word back to the men who ran. Tell his disciples and Peter. Peter, who denied. Peter, who failed. Peter, named by name. Peter, named first.

Now do you see what Mark has done?

There are two transfers in this book.

The mantle falls from Elijah to Jesus at the Jordan, when the heavens are torn open and the Spirit descends.

And the mantle falls from Jesus to his disciples at the cross and the tomb, when the temple curtain is torn and a young man in white sends the women out with a word for the men who ran. Tell his disciples and Peter. And his disciples are every Christian who has ever stood in their place. They are the church. They are you.

John was handed over, and Jesus came preaching. Jesus was handed over, and the disciples were sent. The disciples were handed over: Peter crucified upside down in Rome, Paul beheaded on the Ostian Way, James thrown from the temple in Jerusalem. And the mantle fell on the next ones.

And one of those next ones was a man named Mark. The same Mark who had once turned around in Asia Minor and gone home. Who had broken faith with Paul. Who was the disciple nobody picked first. Mark, who knew in his own bones what it was to flee. Mark, who sat down at last in Rome and, in the steadiest hand he could manage, wrote it all down. The man who lost the mantle, and was given it again.

And the book he wrote, the book we have just heard read this evening, has been carrying its news to us ever since, telling us across two thousand years that those frightened women who fled the tomb in silence somehow, eventually, against everything, opened their mouths.

We do not live in an easy time. Violence comes through the screen each morning. Neighbors are set against neighbors over things we did not used to fight about. And underneath all of it, a loneliness no screen can fill. Whichever side of any of it you find yourself on, none of us comes home unscathed.

Even when we want to do right, we cannot always see what right is. We act, and only afterward see what we should have done. We remember things we cannot undo. The wisdom we have arrives a day late.

Our bodies do not help us. The young have bodies running ahead of their minds, full of energy that has not yet been schooled. The old have bodies falling behind their minds, knowing what to do and no longer able to do it. Either way, we are not the people we wish we were when the moment comes.

The garden of Gethsemane is not a place we visit only in Holy Week. We live there.

Whether it is you who have failed, or someone who has failed you, there is a way back. Tell his disciples and Peter. The denier is named first. The fleeing young man finds his answer in the young man clothed in white. The river that drowned you is the river that holds your mantle. The gospel does not move by those who never fell. It moves by those whom God reaches down and pulls a second time out of the water.

Mark was such a man.

So was Peter.

So was every saint whose feast we keep.

The mantle is falling. It is falling now. It is falling here. It is falling on you.

Catch it.

Amen.