St. Mark

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

He said to them, “Go out into the whole world, proclaim the Gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned” (Mark 16:15-16). These are among the last lines of St. Mark's Gospel.

Mark, although he had a Roman name, was Jewish by birth and was also sometimes known by his Hebrew name John. Although he wasn't one of the Twelve Apostles, it's more than likely that he knew Our Lord personally.

Many ecclesiastical writers see a sort of hidden signature of Mark in his Gospel, in the episode of the young man who let go the sheet and fled away at Jesus' arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane.

It may be significant that Mark is the only Evangelist that mentions this incident.

This tallies with the fact that he was the son of a woman named Mary, who seems to have been a wealthy widow in whose house the first Jerusalem Christians used to meet (Acts 12:12).

According to an ancient tradition, this house was in fact the Cenacle, the place where Our Lord celebrated the Last Supper and instituted the Blessed Eucharist.

Mark was a cousin of Barnabas (Col. 4:10). He traveled with St. Paul on his first missionary journey and was with him at the hour of his death (2 Tim. 4:11).

In Rome he was also a disciple of St. Peter. Mark has written the Gospel that Peter preached. In his Gospel, he expounds faithfully, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the teachings of Peter, the Prince of the Apostles.

According to St. Jerome, after the martyrdoms of Saints Peter and Paul under the Emperor Nero, St. Mark went to Alexandria, whose Church claims him as its evangelizer and first bishop.

In the year 825, his relics were transferred from Alexandria to Venice, where he is now venerated as Patron of that city.

From his early youth, St. Mark belonged to that group of first Christians of Jerusalem who had lived with Our Lady and the Apostles, all of whom he knew well. His mother was one of the first women to provide for Jesus and the Twelve out of her means.

When he went with Paul and Barnabas on their first apostolic journey, when he arrived in Cyprus, he felt he was unable to carry on any further. At that point, he left them and went back to Jerusalem (Acts 5:5,13).

Paul was not happy at Mark's inconstancy, to the extent that when later on, Barnabas and he were planning their second journey, Barnabas wanted to bring Mark with him, but Paul wouldn't hear of it because of the way that he had let them down on the previous journey.

The argument that ensued between Paul and Barnabas waxed so intense that eventually they went their separate ways and undertook separate apostolic missions (Acts 15:36-41).

We shouldn't be surprised when we see disagreements in the course of the history of the Church.

About ten years later, we find Mark in Rome, this time helping Peter, who refers to him as “my son Mark,” thereby testifying to a long-standing close relationship (1 Pet. 5:13).

At that time, Mark was acting as a type of interpreter for Peter, and this provided him with a privileged vantage point, which we see reflected in the Gospel that he wrote a few years later.

It's often been pointed out that Mark includes in his Gospel things that would have been embarrassing to Peter, like ‘Get behind me, Satan” (Matt. 16:23).

Other Gospels don't mention these sorts of things so much. Only Peter would have preached these. That highlights the fact that Mark was writing the Gospel that Peter preached.

Although St. Mark doesn't provide us with a record of Our Lord's great discourses, he makes up for it by giving a particularly vivid description of the events of Our Lord's life.

He has almost double the number of miracles in his Gospel than the other evangelists, and in a much shorter version.

In his accounts we find ourselves in those little towns on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. We can sense the hubbub of the crowds that follow Jesus. We can almost converse with the inhabitants of those places and can contemplate Our Lord's wonderful deeds and the spontaneous reactions of the Twelve.

We find ourselves witnessing the events of the Gospel as if we were actually there among the crowd.

Through his vivid descriptions, Mark manages to imprint in our souls something of the irresistible yet reassuring fascination that Jesus exercised on people, and which the Apostles themselves experienced in their life with Our Lord.

He gives us a very faithful account of Peter's most intimate recollections of the Master. With the passage of the years, his memories had not grown dim, but became ever more profound and perceptive, more penetrating and more fond.

You could say that Mark's message is the living mirror of Peter's preaching.

St. Jerome tells us that Mark was the disciple and interpreter of Peter and that he wrote down his Gospel at the request of the brethren living in Rome, according to what he had heard Peter preach.

“Peter himself, having heard it, proved it with his authority to be read in the Church,” so said Jerome (St. Jerome, De Viris Illustribus).

You can see that without doubt, the writing of this Gospel was Mark's principal mission in life—to transmit Peter's teachings faithfully. This was his life project.

We can also ask ourselves—What is our life project? What is the biggest, most important mission or job that God has given us to do?—so that we may continually be focused on that job and its successful completion.

When we look back over twenty centuries, we can think of the good that has come from Mark's correspondence to that mission down through the centuries. We don't know how God is relying on each little thing we do to influence the course of future humanity.

Today we can thank him for the love that he put into his work, and for his fidelity to the Holy Spirit.

His feast is a good opportunity to consider how well and how lovingly we do our daily Gospel reading, which is God's Word directed to us personally, often coming through the auspices of St. Mark.

We can also ask ourselves how we act out the role of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32) or make our own that prayer of the blind Bartimaeus, “Lord, that I may see” (Mark 10:51), or the prayer of the leper, “Lord, if you want, you can make me clean” (Luke 5:12, Mark 1:40).

We may have often felt in the depths of our souls that Our Lord is looking at us and inviting us to follow Him more closely, perhaps asking us to overcome a habit that separates us from him, or, like faithful disciples, to be more charitable with those we find a bit more difficult to get on with.

We can ask St. Mark to help us to be good instruments of God always, like he was; always ready to make a new beginning.

Mark spent a number of years in Rome, where, as well as assisting St. Peter, we find him collaborating with Paul in his ministry (Philem. 1:24).

Somehow, they had made up. The man for whom Paul could find no use on his second missionary journey is now “a comfort” (Col. 4:10-11) and a faithful companion for him.

Later, in the year 66, the apostle writes to Timothy saying, “Get Mark, and bring him with you, for he is a great help to me” (2 Tim. 4:11).

It's a lesson for us not to dismiss people; to always give them a second chance. See perhaps if they have other talents or abilities which we hadn't initially recognized.

The Cyprus incident, which at the time seemed to loom so large, is now completely forgotten.

Lord, help me to always give everyone around me a second chance, not to compartmentalize people and excessively judge them.

Always keep an open mind. Find the ways and means that different people can make their contributions.

Paul and Mark are now friends and collaborators in the all-important venture of extending the kingdom of Christ.

We need all the people that God has placed around us to fulfill our mission. This is a great example for us: never to write people off conclusively, and a wonderful lesson, if we should ever need one, on how to reconstruct a friendship that may seem to have been ruined forever.

We have to reach out to all sorts of people, touch them, bring them closer, be better friends.

The Church proposes St. Mark to us as a model. It can be a source of hope and consolation to contemplate his life, because in spite of our weaknesses, we can trust like him in divine grace and in the assistance of our Mother the Church.

Our failures, our defeats, our acts of cowardice, be they small or great, have to help us to be more humble, to unite us more closely with Jesus, and to draw from Him the strength we find lacking in ourselves.

Our imperfections should not cause us to turn away from God or to abandon our apostolic mission, even though at times it may be true that we fail to respond properly to God's grace, or that we've wavered when we were being relied upon not to.

In these and other circumstances, if they occur, we should not be taken aback because, as St. Francis de Sales says, “there is nothing surprising about the fact that sickness is sick, or that weakness is weak, or that wretchedness is wretched.

“Nevertheless, detest with all your strength the offense you did to God, and with confidence in His mercy, follow courageously the path of virtue that you had forsaken” (St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life).

Failures and acts of cowardice are important, and that's why we turn to Our Lord asking His pardon and help. Precisely because He trusts us and because we can count on receiving His grace anew, we ought to begin again immediately and make up our minds to be more faithful in future.

If Mark had not done all of these things, he might never have written his Gospel. There was a great contribution that was to come at the end of his life, after all these ups and downs, which was to last through the centuries.

Possibly our greatest contribution may also come in our final years, and likewise, those that God has placed around us.

With Our Lord's help, we learn to draw good from our weaknesses, especially when the enemy, who never rests, tries to dishearten us or to get us to give up the struggle.

Our Lord wants us to be His in spite of any previous history of weakness that we might have had.

We're told, “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel to the whole creation” (Mark 16:15). This is our apostolic mandate.

Moved by the Holy Spirit, later on St. Mark testifies to the fact that this command of Christ was already being fulfilled when he was writing his Gospel.

We're told, the Apostles “went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that attended it” (Mark 16:20).

These are the closing words of his Gospel. He was faithful to that apostolic mandate that he heard St. Peter preach so frequently, “Go into all the world.”

He himself, personally and through his Gospel, was an effective leaven in his own time, as we have to try and be in ours.

Many people are called to order the temporal realities of society. That's our place. It's good we ask ourselves, What national or international organizations am I involved in? Where do I have an influence?

How, in the coming ten years, can I have more influence and maybe make that greater contribution that God is expecting of me in my life?

In the face of his first reverse, if Mark had not reacted humbly and energetically, perhaps we would not have the treasure of Our Lord's words and deeds on which we've so often meditated, and which many men and women would never have known—that Jesus is the Savior of mankind.

Mark's mission, like that of the Apostles, like the mission of evangelizers of all times, and like the example of every Christian who tries to live up to his or her vocation, was certainly not an easy one, as we can see from his martyrdom.

He must have had many wonderful experiences, as well as his fair share of opposition, weariness, and danger in following Our Lord's footsteps.

We can thank God, and also the men and women of the apostolic age, that the strength and joy of Christ have been handed down to us in our day.

It can make us think of the apostolic opportunities that we have to try and find.

There is a story years ago of a large shoe manufacturer who sent two sales representatives to the Australian Outback. The company's crazy sales manager thought that he could drum up shoe business among the Aboriginal tribes living off the land.

Sometime later, telegrams arrived from both shoe representatives. The sales manager tore them open.

The first one says, “No business is possible, natives don't wear shoes.”

The second rep said, “Great business opportunity, natives don't wear shoes.”

You could imagine that a visitor to the second salesman's territory would have seen plenty of the native people in shoes. Where one sales rep saw a dead end, another saw opportunity.

Opportunity abounds if we choose to see them in the high calling of our daily work. St. Paul says to the Galatians, “Therefore, as we have opportunity, let us do good to all people, especially those who belong to the family of believers” (Gal. 6:10).

There was a story in a book called Dare to Care Like Jesus that tells the story of a Christian baroness living in the highlands of a certain country. She told of a young local fellow who was employed as her houseboy.

After three months, he asked the baroness to give him a letter of reference to a friendly sheik some miles away. The baroness, not wishing the houseboy to leave just when he'd learned the routine of the household, offered to increase his pay.

He replied that he wasn't leaving for higher pay; rather, he had decided he would become either a Christian or a Muslim. And that was why he had come to work for the baroness for three months—he had wished to see how Christians acted.

Now he wanted for three months to work for the sheik, to observe the way of the Muslims. Then he would decide which way of life he would follow.

The baroness was a bit stunned, and she began to recall all the many, many blemishes in her dealings with the houseboy. She could only exclaim, “Why didn't you tell me at the beginning?”

St. Matthew says, “You are the light of the world. A city built on a hilltop cannot be hidden” (Matt. 5:14).

We're also told, “In this way we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments. Whoever says ‘I know him’ without keeping his commandments is a liar, and truth has no place in him,” says St. John.

“But anyone who does keep his word, in such a one God's love truly reaches its perfection. This is the proof that we are in God” (1 John 2:3-5).

Whoever claims to remain in him must act as he acted.

In every generation of Christians, every individual is called upon to receive the Gospel message and pass it on in turn with our words, with our actions, with our example.

God's grace is never lacking. “The Lord's hand is not shortened” (Isa. 59:1).

St. Josemaría says, “The Christian knows that God works miracles, that he performed them centuries ago, and that he still works them now” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 50).

Each one of us is called, with God's help, to bring about those miracles in the souls of relatives, friends, and acquaintances, as long as we remain united to Christ in prayer.

We can ask Our Lady, Queen of the Apostles, to help us to see the opportunities and then to seize them, to use them, and to have always before our eyes this great goal of passing on the treasures that we find in the Gospel of St. Mark, and in the other Gospels, to all the people around us who are wishing to hear those wonderful ideas.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW