Tuesday in the Third Week of Easter, April 25, 2023

The Feast of St. Mark

Mark 16, 15-20

Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”  Then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God. But they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.

St. Mark was the son of a woman named Mary who owned a large house in Jerusalem.  Since his mother is spoken of and her name given, the absence of any mention of his father leaves us to suspect that he was not alive by the time of the Lord’s last year of public ministry, at the latest.  During that time Mark would seem to have been young and not married, for we find later that he went off with the unmarried St. Barnabas and St. Paul to preach the Gospel in faraway lands.  His later break with St. Paul seems to have been caused by an urgent need to return to Jerusalem.  This may have come as the result of the death of his mother, who left him the house and other property.  While it is easy to take the side of St. Paul on this issue, Mark’s mother’s house was an important meeting place for the Christians of Jerusalem, and it probably served as a church for them as well.  Securing his rights as heir so that the house might continue to be used for this purpose would have made a compelling reason to return to the city.  St. Paul must have come around to this conclusion because we find him and Mark reconciled later on.  It is very possible that Mark became associated with St. Peter at his time.  Peter had made forays into foreign lands, such as to the Syrian city of Antioch, to preach the Gospel but regularly returned two Jerusalem before embarking a new expedition to preach the Gospel.  He may have been mindful of the Lord’s return in glory, which was thought for a long time to take place at Jerusalem or at the Valley of Jehoshaphat situated in the Judean wilderness, eleven miles of Jerusalem): “Let the nations come up into the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there I will sit to judge all nations round about” (Joel 3, 12).  Between the years 42 and 50, Peter made up his mind to go to Rome, and he took Mark, a seasoned proclaimer of the Gospel, with him.  St. Irenaeus (d. 206 A.D.) calls Mark “the interpreter and follower of Peter” which leads us to think that his Greek, if not his Latin, surpassed that of Peter, and to preach to the Romans would have required a fair ability in either language.  That may be so in terms of the spoken language, but his Gospel, written in Greek, is notable for its rough style.  It is clearly written by someone more comfortable In Aramaic or Hebrew than in Greek.  

According to Bishop Papias (d. 130 A.D.), whom the early Church historian Eusebius quotes, Mark wrote his Gospel at the request of the Roman Christians who desired a written record of St. Peter’s memories of the Lord Jesus.  Mark does this principally regarding the acts of the Lord, as Peter remembered them.  Mark tells the story of the very first part of the Lord Jesus’s public ministry’s beginning with his Baptism, then quickly moves through some of the early miracles and the calls of the first Apostles.  Much of his Gospel is devoted to the last journey of the Lord to Jerusalem, and his subsequent arrest, and Passion and Death.  His Gospel, as we now have it, tells us very little about the Resurrection of the Lord.  What we do have from him seems rushed and unfinished.  This may mean that he died before completing his Gospel, or that he suddenly had to travel and did not resume its composition.  Mostly it is thought that he finished his Gospel before Peter died and that Peter read it and neither praised nor condemned it, but let it be read by the people.  We might also conjecture that the people asked Mark to write the Gospel after Peter’s martyrdom in order to preserve his memories of the Lord.  

The Egyptian Christians have a firm tradition that Mark came to Alexandria from Rome and there are those who say he wrote his Gospel there.  By the time Mark arrived, the Holy Faith had already been introduced to the city and was spreading.  The Christians there, called the Copts, hold that St. Mark taught their ancestors how to celebrate the Mass, which was called “the Liturgy”.  This “Liturgy of St. Mark” is said to be the original Divine Liturgy of the Coptic Church In Egypt.  By the 500’s, however, the Copts composed liturgies in their own language (that of St. Mark being in Greek) and it fell into disuse, although it is still celebrated in certain places at certain times in the Church calendar.

St. Mark did not long survive his masters, St. Peter and St. Paul, and died in Alexandria in the year 68, dragged by a rope through the streets of that city by the pagans until he was dead.  His remains are said to be enshrined in Venice at the wonderful basilica.

The Church calls him an “evangelist”, from a Greek word meaning a messenger or herald of (usually good) tidings, especially regarding royal marriages, coronations, and battlefield victories. St. Mark is best known as the author of a Gospel, and you and I are also called to be evangelists, though we will never write Gospels.  We witness the Gospel that we have received.  We live out the good tidings we have heard.  We preach with word and deed that Jesus Christ is Lord.