As many of you know I’m often peddling books even in Church - Bart’s hosted the launch of my 30 walks from Brighton Station in January - but this evening I want to push a book that’s probably the widest read in human history written by Saint Mark whose feast we celebrate this evening.
Over my time I’ve handed this copy to scores of friends, enquirers, baptism families, couples preparing for marriage and so on with a plea they spend the 90 minutes it takes to read its 50 pages and find out who Jesus is, why God sent him and what it means to us today.
Likely as not a co-worker of Peter and Paul Saint Mark the Evangelist wrote the shortest of the four Gospels. From the earliest days of the Church Mark’s been associated with the lion, one of the four creatures worshipping the lamb of God in Revelation 5:6-14 symbolic of the four Gospel writers. This may be because his Gospel starts with John the Baptist, ‘a voice crying out in the wilderness’ recalling the roar of the desert lion.
When you read through the 16 Chapters of Mark - and I do commend the short exercise as a task for Easter season - you find the first half centres on who Jesus is climaxing in Chapter 8 verse 7 where Our Lord puts that very question to his disciples and Peter responds ‘You are the Christ’ going on to explain why God sent him, namely to suffer, die and rise again.
When Peter remonstrates with him - Mark writes almost with Peter at his shoulder, Our Lord goes on to explain how his coming invites extraordinary, wholehearted commitment in verses 34 and 35 of Chapter 8: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me. For anyone who wants to save his life will lose it, but anyone who loses his life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it’.
Today’s Saint has made the good news of a suffering Saviour sent to rescue us from sin accessible down through the centuries. The world isn’t as it should be because we’re not as we should be. The heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart. God’s Son was sent to earth to show us our sin and to show us his own heart and bring us, in Victor Hugo’s phrase, to ‘life’s greatest happiness’ which is ‘to be convinced we are loved’ for ever.
To give a short visual of Mark’s Gospel using the booklet: God made us for friendship. Sin made a barrier to this. Jesus died to destroy the barrier so restoring friendship with God.
Faith is an ongoing wholehearted choice for God and his provision in Jesus. In baptism Our Lord’s principle of losing life to gain it is impressed on us. The key is losing John Twisleton, Thomas Cotterill or whoever to gain the Holy Spirit living more inside of us who keeps us capable of living and being and sharing the good news of God.
This evening we thank God for Saint Mark the Evangelist who put the ‘Evangel’ or Good News into a 50 page paperback to make the astonishing love we celebrate in Easter Season accessible. That love we welcome at Mass, joined by two and half billion people the world over.
Let us spend a moment praying silently in union with Mark, Peter, Paul, Bartholomew and all the Saints for hearts to be opened in our circle to the same love and that we like Mark, armed with his Gospel, may be more effective evangelists announcing the love of God shown in our suffering and risen Saviour.
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