Holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostle and Evangelist Mark
Yesterday we commemorated Great and Holy Wednesday and the feast of Saint Mellitus of Canterbury. It seems particularly fitting that the feasts of Saint Mellitus and Saint Mark should fall so close together; and even more fitting that the feast of Saint Mark this year falls on the remembrance of the Last Supper, the night in which our Lord Jesus Christ was betrayed.
Saint Mark, a Cyrenian Second Temple Jew and a nephew of the Cypriot-Jewish Saint Yousef bar-Nehmâ of the Seventy, lived with his mother Miryam in Jerusalem when Our Lord called him out to become His disciple. A junior of Saint Peter, at the time of Christ’s death, Mark was still a very young man (νεανίσκος). On the very first Great and Holy Thursday, the night in which Christ broke bread with His disciples for the Passover and was betrayed at Gethsemane by Judas, the Roman soldiery lay hold of Mark, who was wearing a linen cloth. The soldiers tore the cloth off of his body and Mark, naked, ran away from them.
Saint Mark was very close to Apostle Peter as well as to his kinsman Saint Yousef bar-Nehmâ mentioned above. After the Ascension of Our Lord, Mark worked closely with both of them to spread the news of Christ’s Resurrection. After the conversion of Apostle Paul, Mark was one of the Christians he met with in Antioch, and the two of them also worked closely together thereafter. He returned to his kinsmen’s home in Cyprus where he traversed the island with his two companions from east to west, preaching the Gospel from the Jewish synagogues. Mark was present when Saint Paul temporarily blinded the sorcerer (mágos) and false prophet Elymas bar-Yeshua before the proconsul at Paphos, as recounted in the Book of Acts.
After this, Mark embarked on a journey to Ægypt, where he founded the church in Alexandria. He is considered the founder of the Coptic Church, as well as of the Orthodox Church there. He made additional travels to Cyprus and to Mesopotamia; from which place Saint Peter sent a letter to the Christians of Asia Minor in which he calls Mark his son. Mark was also present in Asia Minor for a time himself – he was under the rule of Saint Timothy in Ephesus, and accompanied him to Rome, from which city he is believed to have written his Gospel between 62 and 68 AD. The audience for which this Gospel was intended is disputed: Church tradition holds that it was primarily intended for an audience of Gentiles, but Mark’s use of Aramaic idioms and imagery suggest instead that it may have been meant for an audience that included Palestinian Jews.
Travelling once more to Ægypt, Mark established the catechetical school at Alexandria which produced Holy Father Athenagoras, Saint Pantainos, Clement, Origen, Pope Heraklas, Pope Saint Dionysios and Saint Gregory the Wonderworker of Neocæsarea. Mark’s school, by the way, comes in for some rather hard ribbing by my classical Hebrew instructor Dr Paul Tarazi, who is very much not a fan of the sorts of speculative philosophical and theological turns for which these Ægyptians became known. He also makes much of the irony that it is his own people, the Arabs, who with their infatuation for philosophy ‘spoiled’ us here in the West!
At any rate, according to the Orthodox hagiography, Mark did venture further into Africa, and preached the Gospel in Libya before returning to his adoptive home in Alexandria. He happened to see a cobbler named Ananias, pierce one of the fingers of his hand with an awl and exclaim, ‘O the One God!’ Saint Mark healed the cobbler’s finger, and taught Ananias about Christ the living God, to whom Ananias had called out in his pain. Ananias welcomed Mark as a guest in his home, and he and his whole household were baptised in the name of the Triune God by the Holy Apostle. His home thereafter became a house-church and Ananias himself joined Mark in converting the Alexandrians to the Faith.
For seven years, Saint Mark and Ananias worked tirelessly in Alexandria. Saint Mark appointed three priests – Malchos, Sabinos and Kerbinos – and seven deacons to help Ananias, the converted became so many. All the while, he preached against the pagan gods of the city, and aroused anger against him among the wealthy Greeks and Romans who worshipped them. In that year the Pascha fell on the feast of Serapis, the main tutelary god of the Greeks in Alexandria. As Saint Mark and Ananias were celebrating the Pascha, a mob of pagan Greeks attacked the church and captured Mark, beating him, binding him about with a rope, dragging him through the streets and finally throwing him into prison. While in prison, our Lord Jesus Christ came to Mark in a vision and strengthened him before he was to suffer martyrdom. The following day the angry mob bore Mark out of his cell – but on his way there his bodily strength faltered. He cried out: ‘Into Your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit,’ and died before he could be brought to trial.
The pagans wanted to have his body burnt and his ashes scattered in ignominy. But as they lit the fire, the skies darkened, thunder crashed and the ground split open. The pagans fled in terror. The followers of Christ, led by Ananias, took up Saint Mark’s holy relics and buried them in a stone vault, over which two and a half centuries later a church was built. The relics were translated to Venice in 820, after the Muslim conquests, for safekeeping.
I am of course utterly devoted to Holy Apostle Matthew, my namesake and patron saint. With Saint Matthew I share not only a name, a certain kinship and a general love of genealogy, but also a certain love for Persia and sub-Saharan Africa. But there is still very much a soft spot in my heart for Mark and his Gospel as well – largely on account of Ched Myers and his socio-literary reading of the Gospel of Mark. Saint Mark’s Gospel emphasises Christ’s works of healing and exorcism, preaching and teaching in an unabashedly-political context where their subversive and prophetic subtext would be clear to either a Roman or a Palestinian audience. It is therefore rightly called by Myers a ‘manifesto for radical discipleship’.
The populist potentials of the Gospel are thoroughly understood and appreciated by Myers – populist, that is, not in a nationalistic sense, but in an œconomic one. The debt and purity codes of the Second Temple religion are cancelled or inverted in such a way that allows even the worst-off members of the society to participate, through the alternative community proclaimed in the ekklesia, in political and œconomic life. Myers unfortunately succumbs a bit to a certain Protestantising sensibility, possibly implicit in his project itself, concerned as it is with the original sensibility and context of the author. But the case he presents is substantial and worthy of careful study even by Catholic and Orthodox readers.
Ironically, the case is better made from a radical position, that it would be wrong to understand the empty tomb as merely symbolic or metaphorical. The empty tomb is not a ‘symbol’: it is the punchline. The entire project of Mark’s εὐαγγέλιον as a satirical-subversive ‘news of an Imperial victory’ is predicated on the actual defeat of death by Christ. If the victory over death proclaimed by Christ’s flesh-and-blood Resurrection were not really real, there would be no such ‘good news’. Death would have the final word. There would be no overturn of the logic of Empire, and there would be no point in any radical call to renewed discipleship. This is one of several reasons why the political witness of the mainline churches tends to be so limp-wristed and focussed on gratification. One could even potentially make the case that American empire and its mouthpieces are so invested in such moralistic therapeutic deisms and ‘symbolic’ interpretations of Christ’s death, precisely because such theologies take the edge off of any sort of radical resistance to it.
Myers would have us observe that the empty tomb which greets us at the end of the Gospel is in fact a call for us to return to the beginning, to return to Galilee where the first disciples were called. Mark is calling us, in effect, to pick up again the spiritual work – both the inward work of prayer, fasting and almsgiving; and the outward work of radical political witness and service to neighbour – that was abandoned by the disciples (one of whom denied, one of whom betrayed, but all of whom fled) on the original Great and Holy Thursday after the Last Supper. Ched Myers is emphatic that those of us in the West – those of us even in the middle and lower œconomic strata who are nevertheless seated amidst the affluence of capitalist and imperial plunder and the propaganda, whether ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’, of imperial vainglory – need to ‘read’ ourselves in the Gospel narrative in the literary persons of the rich young man and the scribe who came to question Jesus about the law. But the manifesto, the call to discipleship, affects us as well. The hymns of the Church assure us we are no better off, spiritually speaking, than the disciples in today’s Gospel readings: Peter (who denied Christ), Judas (who betrayed Christ) or Mark (who fled from Christ at His arrest). But we are called all the same to witness the risen Christ and return to Galilee to begin the work again.
Holy, glorious and all-laudable Apostle and Evangelist Mark, witness among the philosophers and the workers of Alexandria, caller of all to discipleship, intercede with Christ our God that our souls may be saved!
Of thy mystical supper, O Son of God,
Accept me today as a communicant.
For I will not speak of thy mystery to thine enemies,
Neither will I give thee a kiss as did Judas,
But like the thief will I confess Thee,
Remember me, O Lord, in thy kingdom.
From your childhood the light of truth enlightened you, O Mark,
And you loved the labour of Christ the Saviour.
Therefore, you followed Peter with zeal
And served Paul well as a fellow labourer,
And you enlighten the world with your holy Gospel!
Icon of the Mystical Supper
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