Today, as we know, is the feast day of St Mark, the patron of this church and parish, and we’re here tonight to give thanks for his life and example. But, having said that, there’s not a great deal that we actually know about Mark’s life, and what we believe about him, is based largely on tradition rather than hard historical evidence.
St Mark may have been the young man who fled naked from Gethsemane on the night of Jesus’ arrest. None of the other evangelists mention this and there’s seems very little point in mentioning it, so it’s sometimes seen as perhaps a little autobiographical insert by the author. If that was St Mark, then he must have been one of Jesus’ earliest disciples. St Mark is also often identified as the Mark, or John Mark, we read about in the Scriptures, and so we believe that he was a cousin of St Barnabas, that he accompanied St Paul on his first missionary journey, and later he made missionary journeys with his cousin, Barnabas, and was with St Paul again, when Paul was imprisoned in Rome. It’s believed that St Mark was St Peter’s interpreter and that the Gospel he wrote is based on St Peter’s teaching and witness in Rome. Church tradition also credits St Mark with founding the Church in Alexandria in Egypt. And that’s about it as far as St Mark’s life goes but, of course, his great claim to fame, and his greatest influence in the Church, is that he is the author of the Gospel that bears his name, which was almost certainly the first of the Gospels to be written.
And the influence of St Mark’s Gospel has been a great one. We believe that both St Matthew and St Luke used it as the basis and starting point for their own Gospels because they both contain all of St Mark’s stories, which they expanded on and added to, with stories that St Mark didn’t use. So, whichever of the synoptic Gospels, as these three are collectively known, we read, we are, in many cases, reading St Mark’s Gospel.
That’s the general influence of St Mark’s Gospel, but his Gospel has also had a great influence on individual Christians through the years. And I include myself among those individuals because, when I returned to the Church in my late teens, I was advised to read St Mark’s Gospel before I moved on to any of the others.
I must admit that I was told not to expect too much from St Mark’s Gospel because his Greek wasn’t very good, and his writing wasn’t up to much either. I’m sure that at least some of us here will have been told at school that, when you’re writing, you don’t string parts of your story together simply by putting the word ‘and’ in between them. I know I was. But St Mark does it constantly. As in this passage from chapter 1 of the Gospel:
‘Passing alongside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew the brother of Simon casting a net into the sea, for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.” And immediately they left their nets and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, who were in their boat mending the nets. And immediately he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants and followed him.
And they went into Capernaum, and immediately on the Sabbath he entered the synagogue and was teaching. And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes. And immediately there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit. And he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying out with a loud voice, came out of him. And they were all amazed, so that they questioned among themselves, saying, “What is this? A new teaching with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” And at once his fame spread everywhere throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee.’
Something else that we notice in this passage from the Gospel is St Mark’s tendency to use words and phrases such as ‘immediately’ and ‘at once’. What that does, is keeps the story of Jesus’ ministry moving at a very fast pace and makes St Mark’s perhaps the most exciting of the Gospels to read. I certainly found that when I first read it. After what I’d been told about the Gospel, I must admit that I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from it when I started to read it for the first time. But once I’d started, I couldn’t stop reading and I read it through in one go. Having spoken to other people over the years, I’ve found that many others had the same experience of reading St Mark’s Gospel for the first time.
Something else I’ve found out over the years too, is that academically speaking, St Mark’s Greek wasn’t all that bad, and neither was his writing. In fact, St Mark’s style, if we can call it that, simply reflects popular storytelling of his day and we find it in the works of Homer, for example, which are regarded as classics of Greek literature. So St Mark was by no means a bad writer. His style might not be very good when we translate it into English, but in Greek, it’s a perfectly acceptable way of writing that was used to create a sense of urgency and excitement.
Something else we also notice in St Mark’s writing, is how the pace changes after Jesus enters Jerusalem. In Galilee, when Jesus is in full control of events, he moves around from place to place, very quickly. But, after he enters Jerusalem and opposition to him grows, the pace slows down dramatically. And when it comes to the final day of Jesus’ earthly life, it slows almost to a crawl that some people have likened to a death watch, a vigil kept with someone approaching death or awaiting execution.
So St Mark’s Gospel is far more than simply the basis of the longer and more detailed Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke. It’s a well thought out and well written portrayal of Jesus’ life and ministry that both set the scene for the later Gospels and has also inspired countless numbers of Christians since it was written almost 2000 years ago. It may lack some of the Gospel stories that we know and love, but that doesn’t mean St Mark’s Gospel is in any way inferior to the others. People remember stories and especially well told, exciting stories and St Mark wrote his version of Jesus’ story well and in an exciting way. So through the Gospel he wrote, St Mark’s also teaches us that we don’t have to know everything about Jesus to tell people about him and bring them to him. St Mark shows us that the way we tell what we do know about Jesus is just as important as how much we know about him.
St Mark was the first of the evangelists, and the work of an evangelist is to proclaim the Gospel and bring people to Christ. That’s something St Mark has been doing for most of the past 2000 years and is still doing today. We may not know very much about St Mark’s life, but we do know about the great influence he’s had, and continues to have on the Christian faith, on the Church and on individual Christians, through the Gospel he wrote.
He is worthy of our thanks and praise for that. He’s worthy that we should recognise his work for the Lord and remember him and praise him for that. He’s a worthy example to us and to all Christians of the proclamation of the Gospel that’s an essential part of our calling as Christians. For all reasons, St Mark is a worthy patron of this church and worthy of this feast day commemoration in his honour.
Amen.
The Propers for St Mark’s Day can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 