Good Friday & the Young Man (1)

And they all forsook him and fled. And a young man followed him, with nothing but a linen cloth about his body; and they seized him, but he left the linen cloth and ran away naked. Mark 14:50-51

And entering the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, dressed, in a white robe; and they were amazed. And he said to them, "Do not be amazed; you seek Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has risen, he is not here; see the place where they aid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you. Mark 16: 5-7

Although some commentators may discount the connection between the "young man" of Mark 14:51 and Mark 16: 5 as speculation, for me, the parallel is almost too easy to miss, and Mark included these two important references for a purpose that the other gospels do not recognize. The young man is not in Matthew or Luke or John, even though the Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the gospels and predates the others by ten or more years.

The young man, identified as a follower of Jesus, runs off into the night naked. The would be captors, are left holding the linen cloth. There's an irony here, ridiculing the goons making their capture: just as the heavily armored troops arrest the One who is the Lamb of God, so they, with all their military hardware, are not able to catch this late night streaker.

Will Willimon well- notes the tradition, suggesting this little episode is Mark's prefiguring Jesus' victory over sin and death. Just as the young streaker slips out of the grasp of his captors, so will Jesus give both sin and death "the slip" in his death and resurrection. But even Willimon leaves it there, admitting that the inclusion of this young man in the passion narrative is as much a mystery as anything. He does not make any connections with the young man of the empty tomb.

In a much- loved older volume, written mostly for pastors, Hamilton sees a clear connection with the young man of both the garden and Easter. For him, the character is emblematic of the transformation of our ministry from the the pre-Easter discipleship phase to the Easter-Pentecost of life in the Spirit. The goal of discipleship attempts to copy Jesus, at which every one of us fails miserably. Discipleship finally ends in a mixture of betrayal (Judas), faithlessness (Peter), and scattering (all the disciples). Before that radical awakening, we're gliding along, much like Peter was at his great confession. Mark 8:29

The young man of Good Friday teaches us about ourselves. The young man's running away is also our way of running away from Jesus, and the stripping away of the linen covering is our complete disillusionment with the real Messiah who will be enthroned on a cross. All our hopes for our kind of messiah are stripped from us in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

The comment is one of grim reality: we run as fast as we can when we encounter the cost of actually following Jesus and loving the people he loves. It is there we are confronted with the death of our own power and kingdom and glory, and all that we thought would serve us well. But appreciating the twists and turns in John Mark's own story is yet another way to explore the young man in these two chapters of Mark. And so we'll take a look at Mark's story in the next post.

Honesty, Not Pretense, Makes Gospel More Accessible

Since Jesus described his way as both being difficult (Matthew 7:13-14) and less burdensome (Matthew with 11:28-30), which is it? Can't you just hear Thomas the Apostle, dogging Jesus with questions like this throughout Jesus' ministry? After all, Thomas was famous for being the one who brought his doubts before the gathered community of believers after Easter.

Or is this just one more of those paradoxes that we so often try to smooth over or just ignore. From "clarity evangelists," to prosperity preachers, we're promised big payoffs if we could only learn to simplify things a bit. For years, oft read and quoted church growth consultants have been telling us to emulate the powerful straight shooter, who can set forth the Gospel with certainty, clarity, admitting no doubts or paradoxes.

While there is real wisdom in clearing up what may be mixed or confusing messages, that's more about marketing and communication. Reckoning with the paradoxes in Scripture is just being honest. It's not usually very helpful to expect people to ignore what they already know is there

Some of the paradoxes in the words of Jesus can be explained by his context, his particular audience. For example, the crowds who were following him and his disciples formed the audience in Matthew 7, while in Matthew 11, Jesus addresses the "infants." NRSV For Jesus, the "little ones" are those with the least access to power: the non-priests, the unclean, the uneducated and illiterate, the sick, the disabled, and the poor.

Jesus also blesses those who are "poor in Spirit" in the first of the Beatitudes. Matthew 5:3. Much of Jesus' teaching was in the tradition of the prophetic mold, that is, it comprised of encouragement for the weak and downtrodden, and diatribes against the ones like us who can too easily use our power and religious position to make life harder on others. Making it easier for others to hear the Gospel requires more honesty, thereby encouraging more, not less, authenticity in everyone.

Herrick's To Keep a True Fast

Is this a Fast, to keep
The Larder lean?
And clean
From fat of Veals and Sheep?

Is it to quit the dish
Of Flesh, yet still
To fill
The platter high with Fish?

Is it to fast an hour
Or rag'd to go,
Or show
A downcast look, and sour?

No; 'tis a Fast, to dole
Thy sheaf of wheat
And meat
Unto the hungry soul.

It is to fast from strife,
From old debate
And hate;
To circumcise thy life.

To show a heart grief-rent;
To starve thy sin,
Not Bin;
And that's to keep thy Lent.

From Celebrating the Seasons, p. 153

Robert Herrick (1591-1674) was a Cambridge educated priest in the Church of England. He served rural parishes. His only volume of poetry was published in 1648.

The cross above is from the Monastery of Lindisfarne. It was founded in AD 635 by St. Aidan on a small outcrop of land, now known as Holy Island, laying among the sands a mile and a half off the Northumberland coast.