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+ + + In Nomine Jesu + + +
Please join me in prayer: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from the Lord Jesus Christ.
As we last week heard read a section of the Divinely‑inspired St. Mark’s account of our Lord’s Passion for us and then considered something from that section that is unique to his account, so we again tonight heard read a section of St. Mark’s account of our Lord’s Passion and now consider something from that section that is unique to his account. As in last week’s “Lord’s Supper” section (Mark 14:1-25), so in tonight’s “Gethsemane” section (Mark 14:26-52), St. Mark arguably makes a number of unique contributions—including Jesus’s praying that specifically the “hour” might pass (Mark 14:35) and the disciples’ not knowing what to answer Jesus (Mark 14:40)—but we focus on the two-verse account of a young man who was following Jesus with nothing but a linen cloth about his body, and who, when they tried to seize him, left the linen cloth and ran away naked—a desperate hurrying away that, if nothing else, is a verbal echo of Joseph’s fleeing Potiphar’s wife (Genesis 39:12; Marcus, ad loc Mark 14:52, p.995).
St. Mark had just said that “they all”, presumably Jesus’s twelve disciples minus Judas, who not long before had all said that they would die with Jesus before they denied Him (Mark 14:31)—they all left Jesus and fled from the scene of Jesus’s arrest, as Jesus and Zechariah before Him had prophesied (Mark 14:27; Zechariah 13:7). So, the young man who ends up fleeing naked seems to have been someone else, who still may have been following Jesus after Jesus was arrested. Perhaps for that reason of still following Jesus, presumably those who laid hands on and seized Jesus tried to seize this young man, too. Peter and presumably John also followed Jesus, though apparently at a greater distance or at a later time that kept them safe (John 18:15; Mark 14:54).
Early on in Church history commentators suggested that the likely‑twenty‑to‑forty‑something young man was John or perhaps James, the so-called “kinsman” of the Lord, but later the consensus seemed to be that the young man was John Mark, held to be the author of this Gospel account, which account may retell Peter’s preaching (confer 1 Peter 5:13; 2 Peter 1:15). John Mark’s mother’s house at least later was a gathering place for Christians in Jerusalem (Acts 12:12; confer or compare Luke 24:33; Acts 1:13-15; 2:41), if not also the home with the upper room where the Lord instituted His Supper (Mark 14:15; Luke 22:12), and John Mark’s family may have put its garden olive yard at Jesus and His disciples’ disposal, so John Mark easily could have been spending the night out there in order to make room for others at the house in the city and, when hearing the commotion of the crowd, dressed hastily in a fine linen cloth typical of a wealthy family, a cloth normally worn both over an under‑garment and under an outer‑garment (John 18:12; Luke 22:39; confer Wenham, Enigma, 47-49 and corresponding notes on 148-149).
The other three Divinely‑inspired evangelists all seem to have included themselves, if only somewhat or fully anonymously, in the Gospel accounts that bear their names (Matthew 9:9‑13; Luke 24:13-35; John 13:23; 19:26; 20:2; 21:7, 20; confer 1:35, 40), so Mark’s including himself in his account would not be all that surprising. And, the vivid narration of an event for which there would have been no other Christian witnesses and the inclusion of such a personal reminiscence so “shame-filled” seems more likely to have come from “the person who had had the actual experience” (Terrance Klein). Some commentators think this identification of the young man as Mark and the corresponding associations are “imaginative flights of fancy” (Brown, Death, 299) that “reads too much” into the brief account (Mann, ad loc Mark 14:51-52, p.599), especially bad for supplying a name the author omitted (Lenski, ad loc Mark 14:51, p.652). However, we hardly need to make the particular identification and corresponding associations in order for these verses to matter to us.
Whoever the young man was, his body “was not the only thing laid bare that night, so was the depth of his discipleship” (Terrance Klein), and, if it was John Mark, it is not the only time that the New Testament tells of his unfaithfulness (Acts 13:13). The young man fleeing naked was far less than the ideal disciple who followed Jesus closely (compare Mark 5:37): in order to follow Jesus, Bartimaeus left his garment (Mark 10:50‑52), and the Twelve at least claimed to have left everything (Mark 10:28), but the young man in some sense left his garment and all in order not to follow Jesus but to flee from Him, in the process incurring great shame (Brown, Death, 303). The shame of nakedness goes back to the man and the woman’s first sin in a different garden (Genesis 2:25; 3:7, 10-11, 21; confer Exodus 28:42; Marcus, ad loc Mk 14:51, p.994) and extends to the shame and the death that we all face, coming naked from our mother’s wombs and returning to the dust of the ground (Job 1:21).
As both the Twelve and the young man who fled naked, who arguably should have let themselves be arrested and faced the consequences for following Jesus, so we cannot take our discipleship for granted (Terrance Klein). How have we fled the Lord in the past? How are we fleeing the Lord now? How will we flee the Lord in the future? The coming of the Lord brings judgment from which people are said to flee naked or without their outer‑garments (Amos 2:16; Mark 13:16), and God uses the certainty of such coming judgment in part in order to call and enable us to turn in sorrow from our sin, to trust Him to forgive our sin, and to want to stop sinning. So, we repent of our fleeing from the Lord and of all of our sin and of our sinful natures. And, as in the antiphon for tonight’s Psalm (Psalm 32; antiphon v.5), we acknowledge our sin to the Lord and do not cover our up our iniquity; we confess our transgressions to the Lord, and He forgives the iniquity of our sin. He forgives us for Jesus’s sake.
The sacrifice of animal flesh that God apparently made in the Garden of Eden in order to clothe the first man and woman and so hide their shame (Genesis 3:21) pointed forward to the sacrifice that God would make not to hide the shame but to take away the sin of the world. Out of His great love for us, God sent His Son into human flesh to die on the cross for us, in our place. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus struggled with His Father’s will for Him but ultimately submitted Himself to that will and let the Scriptures be fulfilled that told of the necessity of His death and resurrection for us and our salvation. Jesus’s fine garments were taken from Him (Mark 15:24), so that He hung naked on the cross, and He seemingly was only temporarily clothed in a new linen shroud for burial, rising from the grave naked yet without shame (Mark 15:46; confer John 20:6-7). An angel who appeared as a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side inside the tomb announced the good news (Mark 16:5; confer Matthew 28:2).
St. Mark’s Divinely‑inspired account of that young man dressed in a white robe seems in some ways related to his account of the young man who fled naked (for example, Mann, ad loc Mark 14:51-52, p.599). Certainly we know that God sends other messengers, as He later sent a redeemed John Mark (Acts 15:36-41), in order to read and preach the Gospel to groups like this and to apply the Gospel to individuals with water in Holy Baptism, with touch in Holy Absolution, and with bread and wine in the Sacrament of the Altar that are Christ’s Body given for us and His Blood shed for us, for the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation. The Church may no longer literally strip catechumens, baptize them naked, and afterwards clothe them in white robes, but we still believe, teach, and confess that baptism figuratively clothes us in the white robes of Christ’s righteousness that we are returned to by way of Absolution and in which we feast now, as we will for eternity (Revelation 7:9; confer Mann, ad loc Mark 14:51-52, p.599).
Tonight’s Office Hymn praised the Lord for Mark, “The weak by grace made strong”, it said, and the Office Hymn prayed that “we, in all our weakness, / Reflect [the Lord’s] servant life / And follow in [the Lord’s] footsteps, / enduring cross and strife” (Lutheran Service Book 518:15; Lutheran Service Builder at stanza 15 explicitly refers to Mark 14:51-52). As grace triumphed for St. Mark, or potentially for whoever the young man who fled naked was, so grace triumphs for us, no matter our deep regrets over our not following the Lord as we should and our deep regret over any other sin (Terrance Klein). God worked the Twelve’s and the young man’s failures for the goods of both their forgiveness and their lives of service, and God can and does work our failures for the goods of our forgiveness and our lives of service—that was good news for Peter’s original hearers, for Mark’s original readers, and it is good news for us today. No one who leaves possessions and people for Jesus’s sake and the Gospel’s will not receive a hundredfold now in this time and in the age to come eternal life (Mark 10:29-30).
A “self-flagellating” Mark (Brown, Death, 299), or whoever the young man was, is not a Biblical “streaker”, for by definition a streaker appears and runs nude in public on purpose. Yet, we have seen how St. Mark’s unique contribution of a young man fleeing naked to the whole of the narrative of our Lord’s Passion for us matters to us, showing us both our sin and our Savior from that sin. In the three weeks still to come, we will hear the three remaining sections of St. Mark’s account of our Lord’s Passion and then consider other things from those sections that are unique to his account. May the Lord bless us, as we do.
Amen.
The peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
+ + + Soli Deo Gloria + + +