My farewell homily to the St Catharines seminary, delivered on the day of St Mark AD 2024

St Mark 2024

John Mark is certainly a memorable figure on the second tier of the dramatis personae of the New Testament. Born into the priestly aristocracy of Jerusalem as a cousin of the Levite Barnabas, affording a sliver of comic relief as he streaks from the Garden of Gethsemane, enjoying the dubious distinction of falling under Paul’s heavy displeasure for a season, but then becoming for the aged Peter what Timothy was for Paul, finally happily reconciled to Paul before morphing into the author of the Second Gospel and the founding father of the Church in Egypt—yes, John Mark was a man of action who neither can nor should be scrubbed from the recollection of Christendom.

But Mark is also our mega-energetic contemporary to a greater extent than the political, religious, and cultural leaders of our time are our contemporaries. First and foremost is this the case because the Lord Jesus of whom he writes personally sprang the confines of the time and space of first-century Judaea. As the angel said to the stunned women at the tomb, ‘He is risen, He is not here.’ Secondly, he is our contemporary as one of the great cloud of witnesses who actually, not just metaphorically surround us. You remember how the portraits of dead relatives speak to the home dwellers of the Harry Potter novels? Well, from the communion of saints the now even more abundantly living writers of Holy Scripture speak their words to us in the present tense, which is precisely what Mark does for us in much of his Gospel narrative.

Unlike Luke, who stood at several removes from the earthly Jesus, Mark undoubtedly heard and saw the Lord in the days of His flesh, and Peter’s living testimony to the whole ministry of Christ resounded like an unending peal of bells in Mark’s soul. Hence Mark has a predilection for the historical present tense, for the kind of history that comes straight from the horse’s mouth and makes a direct impact on the hearers. Commentaries on Mark are well and good, but they can never replace an unvarnished dramatic recitation of his text along the lines of what Pr Miskus recently did here for the Sermon on the Mount, a recitation of the kind that was performed on a mostly bare and empty stage by the English actor Alec Cowan on the basis of the King James translation. Undiluted Mark has converted people and turned their lives around, which is what happened for the angry Russian émigré Anthony Bloom, an atheist physician in 1930s Paris who had decided to blow his brains out in a few months’ time if he didn’t discover purpose in his meaningless existence. Challenged by a priest to read one of the Gospels, Bloom, aware that he was running out of time and had none to waste, asked which was the shortest of the four. As he reached the third chapter of Mark, Bloom was aware of the presence of the living Christ, to Whom he bore unforgettable testimony in his many years as archbishop of the Russian Church in England. Yes, Mark’s Gospel unleashes power, which is why it is worth your meditating and your memorizing.

Oh dear, I find this morning’s Gospel reading an embarrassment, not because it contains untruths—those verses undoubtedly rest on a bedrock of authentic Jesus tradition—but because it simply cannot stem from the pen of John Mark, which is why James Voelz, whom I found a demanding and awe-inspiring professor and a formidable opponent on the squash court, refused to comment on it in his Concordia commentary. The shorter ending, with the empty tomb, the angel of few words, and the fear-struck fleeing women, is precisely what you would expect from a narrator like Mark who blows your preconceptions out of the water and initiates you into a wondrous reality that he refuses to arrange in a tidy systematic box.

Mark our contemporary refuses to be relegated to the files of history but demands an active role in the present where he remains a powerful protagonist. Perhaps this is why Dr Erv Brese, a pastor across the border who taught in the practical department during my earlier years here, used him as the main textbook in a pastoral theology course. And for the last fifty and more years Mark has played a significant role in my own theological, spiritual, and pastoral formation, which leads me to suppose that he can supply this service for you also. Those twits known as form critics tell you that each item of the Gospel tradition is a pearl broken from its string, with some pearls being more genuine than others, many of them being plastic fakes as mere fable, legend, or myth. So Dennis Nineham, the head of my college and my tutor for a term and half, wrote a commentary on Mark in which he downplayed the historicity of the whole narrative, maintaining that the rooster cannot have crowed on the morning that followed Peter’s denial, because he found somewhere in a work of Joachim Jeremias that the keeping of roosters was forbidden in Jerusalem at that time. Again, he argued that the body of Jesus was eaten by dogs or thrown in a common grave, not buried in Joseph of Arimathea’s tomb. David was thinking of such as Nineham when he declaimed, ‘Blessed is the man …who does not sit in the seat of scoffers.’ Conversely, Nineham’s predecessor in office, Austin Farrer, of whom the blessed Dr Feuerhahn remarked that ‘He could teach us Lutherans how to preach the Gospel’ and whose works influenced me greatly, argued that Mark is a great literary artist, whose narrative betrays clear pattern and arrangement. …The scholarly debate about Mark will continue till the end of time.

Oh how wondrous is the oral narrative technique of the father in Christ present with us on the other side of the altar today. The historical present tense evaporates the gap between then and now, as does the third person plural ‘they’ that Mark heard from Peter as ‘we the Twelve’. The teaching of Mark’s Jesus doesn’t just astound or astonish its hearers but, as Joseph Ratzinger argues, frankly ‘alarms’ (ἐξεπλήσσοντο, Mk 1:22) them or freaks them out because this man unselfconsciously speaks from the same level as God. Matthew and Luke give us the bare facts concerning the first leper cleansed by our Lord, while Mark intimates that when Christ sternly charged the leper not to blab about his healing the Lord ‘snorted at him like an angry horse’, which makes good sense when you consider that the leper’s loudspeaker technique made it impossible for Jesus to enter townships and forced Him to sleep out in the country, which shows you that the Lord’s suffering began way before His arrest; while your faculty and regional pastors, by way of contrast, just enjoyed lavish and very comfortable hospitality at Mount Carmel. And Mark supplies detail that bears witness to the vital role of every member of Christ’s mystical body: Simon of Cyrene, who helped carry the cross, ‘the father of Alexander and Rufus’, whom we know so well in the Church of Alexandria.

So, as I bid my liturgical farewell to this community of which I have been part for the last thirty five years, may past, present, and future students of this seminary lend their gifts and energies as sons and brothers in ministry of St Mark the Evangelist so that Christ the crucified and risen King may extend His reign among humankind ahead of His coming again to judge the living and the dead.