Following Jesus in Mark’s Gospel

Maria James

Mark, the author of the gospel with this name, was the apostle Peter’s interpreter in Rome and one of his closest collaborators. Early Church writers tell us that Mark wrote his gospel at the request of the Christians living in Rome and that he based it on the preaching of Peter. We are told also that Peter personally approved Mark’s work. To read Mark’s gospel, therefore, is to be drawn to the side of Peter and to experience the person of Jesus as Peter experienced him.

Mark wrote his gospel more than thirty years after the death and resurrection of Jesus. Peter had had all this time to ponder what he had experienced with Jesus. Peter had also been at work during all this time doing what Jesus had asked him and the other apostles to do, and that was to preach the gospel. In Mark’s gospel we find Peter’s years of experience distilled for us, his experience of being a disciple of Jesus and a servant of his gospel. And what the gospel reveals to us about Peter is that he was a man who had been deeply humbled by what he had experienced.

By the time of Jesus’ ascension and the beginning of their work, all the apostles were well aware of their faults and failings. After the night of his betrayal of Jesus, Peter was especially aware of his. Bearing in mind that it is the voice of Peter that we hear in Mark’s gospel, it is surely important for us to notice that there is no mention, for example, of those texts which speak about Peter’s primacy among the apostles and his leadership role in the Church. What we find highlighted instead are the serious limitations of Peter and the other apostles. In Mark’s gospel the apostles are shown to us as repeatedly failing to understand Jesus; repeatedly failing to believe in him and trust him. If there is one truth Peter came to understand from all that he had experienced, it was his personal need for grace, that grace fully and freely available in the person of Jesus.

The person of Jesus presented and proclaimed in the gospels is God’s answer to humanity’s most fundamental need. Jesus is God’s answer to the most fundamental need of each individual, and that is the need for grace. If we are to be attracted to the person of Jesus, if we are to receive what he alone can give and which he is so willing to give, then surely we must be brought to where Peter was brought and that is to an awareness of our own sinfulness, and through it to an awareness of our personal need for grace. It is not without significance that Jesus began his public life with the words, ‘repent and believe’ (Mark 1:15). We never grow beyond the need to take these words to heart. Jesus himself declared that he came not to call the virtuous, but sinners (Mark 2:17). The seeds of God’s grace find their most fertile ground in a broken, humble heart (Mark 41-20). God’s grace is at its best in weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9).