ST MARK : INTRO - St Mark’s gospel is the shortest of the four and the earliest to come down to us in its present form. We cannot be certain who Mark was since it was a common name at the time. We do not know if he was the disciple of Paul and cousin of Barnabas of that name, or if he was John Mark at whose mother’s house, in the Acts of the Apostles 12:12, the early Christian community in Jerusalem used to meet. He may even have been the young watch-man in the family garden of olive trees who fled when Jesus was arrested there. It is believed that the Mark who wrote the gospel was with Peter in Rome. It might be the same Mark in all cases.

His gospel was probably written around the year 70 AD for the Christians in Rome who had just endured the savage persecutions of the Emperor Nero (died 68 AD) which, it is believed, caused the martyrdoms of St Peter and St Paul. It is not unlikely that, faced with the reality of the deaths of important eye-witnesses, it began to seem urgent that written accounts of the life of Jesus should be available to believers. Because of this Mark devotes much of his writing to persecution, conflict and rejection. Although the system of education laid much more stress on the importance of memory than is now customary, people in the Christian groupings of the time, mostly small and far from the Holy Land, would have felt the need for such support. Because of this reliance on memory various accounts of the life of Jesus would have been in circulation already: miracles, stories, sayings, the Passion, and so on. It was understandable that the need to standardise and authenticate began to make itself felt as witnesses died. Mark’s gospel can give us frank observations on people’s reactions that the others do not.

How does one set about writing a gospel? One must decide what is so important that it cannot be omitted. That of course will depend on what one aims at in the writing. The snag with a gospel is that it cannot be simply a listing of historical events. The gospel aims to convince, to start the readership thinking and wondering: “Who is this man and how important should he be to me?” The aim is theological before it is historical, but it must also describe the events or it will be rejected by those who have some idea of what happened. Furthermore, since it is being written for real people facing real difficulties, it must bring some message that will help them make sense of what they are going through. The Church would decide to accept or not.

One result of these choices is that the gospels do not address subjects that we would like to know something about, like: “What did Jesus look like?” “What did he do in Nazareth?” “Was he fun to be with?” “How did Mary like it when he left home to preach?” “Tell us about Judas.” The list of questions, and the resulting gospel, would be of course endless.

FIRST SUNDAY OF ADVENT

Year B : Year of Mark : 27 November 2011

Advent means ‘coming’ or ‘arrival’ and suggests the need to prepare a greeting. Few of us at this stage of November wish to be reminded of the inexorable approach of Christmas. Many of us will even be concerned about whether we can afford Christmas, given the trend of events, but then our people have celebrated happily when they had even less than us. What today’s gospel suggests is that we might like to adjust our focus a little.

On hearing the gospel today we might be pardoned for thinking that we have heard it all before, and quite recently, during the final Sundays of the last liturgical year, the Year of Matthew. But then waiting is how we spend a great deal of our time anyhow.

St Mark suggests that the person for whom we should be waiting is the One who will help us make sense of our lives, and this person comes at different times and in different ways. The Church Year helps us to think about these ways in bite-size pieces. In this way we are helped not to take everything for granted as we do all too often. We can get used to the idea of Christ coming to us in Holy Communion. We often do not concentrate when He speaks to us through his Word at Mass. We do not notice when we experience his love in the love we receive from our family or from friends. As a result we need times like Christmas to remind us that the Son of God became man so that we will know how much God thinks about us. God became man two thousand years ago, but that will be of little importance to anyone if He does not become incarnate in my life and yours.

So we need to be alert, to keep watch and wait, with something of the expectancy of a mother making preparations for the birth of her child, because a new world can be born through the modest efforts of each of us together. In our case, fortunately, the master of the house only seems to have gone away. Like the doorkeeper we have been commissioned to do our share in charge of the house and cannot afford to be caught asleep on the job. The feast of Christmas reminds us the master is still willing to do most of the work—if we are there to allow him in the door.

• Today’s gospel comes at the end of a passage where Jesus foretells gloom and doom, the destruction of Jerusalem, the tribulations that people will experience, ‘wars and rumours of wars’, ‘the abomination of desolation in the Temple’ (probably a statue of a Roman emperor, worshipped as a god), and so on. St Mark is reminding his readers that things will be bad. There will be conflict and rejection, as happened to Jesus, but the suffering would end in glory with the risen Christ. Mark ends with a quiet call to vigilance today to help us find sense, direction and purpose in life. Is it worth talking over?

• Is there one something worthwhile that I might try to bring about with my family, or within my family, this Advent?

• Somebody in every family carries most of the pressure of seeing to others at Christmas? Who is it in my family? Can I set about planning now what I intend to do to ease the load? Do I think there is plenty time yet?