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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 632. His Second Chance
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His Second Chance
But Mark's position was worse than that: his cowardice had been branded by Paul and made known to the whole Church of Antioch; Paul had written “unworthy” across his name; he had departed with no “bene discessit”; churches had been warned against him; he was to go down to all ages as the man who had failed at a great crisis. What a crushing position to have to face! how great the temptation to despair and apostatize from this new hard religion! But Mark did not despair, did not apostatize; he boldly faced his position. It was not his now to play the part which would have brought him most before the eyes of the world and to be the companion of the great missionary, so he would accept the humbler role; he would go back to his old home of Cyprus, he would stay with his relative Barnabas, and he would do such work as was possible there. Thence, later on, we find him advanced to higher work; he becomes the follower, the interpreter, the favourite pupil, “the son” of his mother's friend Peter; he follows him to Rome; he makes notes of his preaching; he interprets it to his Latin hearers; he prepares the Gospel; and probably while he was there the reconciliation came with Paul.
How long it took we do not know, but the cure was thorough. The man who had shrunk from possible dangers and disagreeables in Asia became brave enough to stand by Paul the prisoner, and not be “ashamed of his chain.” So far had he won his way to Paul's renewed confidence, and made himself indispensable by service and sweetness, that the lonely Apostle, with the headsman's sword in prospect, feels that he would like to have him at hand once more, and bids Timothy bring Mark with him, “for he is useful to me for ministering”; he can do a thousand things that a man like me cannot do for himself, and he does them “all for love and nothing for reward.” So he wants Mark once more. Not only Paul's generosity but Mark's patient effort had pasted a clean sheet over the page that told of his desertion, and he became useful for the very service which he had petulantly and with cowardice flung up.
Some men have even made their future out of failure. Could anything seem more hopeless than to be a convicted forger, to be torn from wife and children and sent to penal servitude? Yet a man redeemed that black episode in his life. He wrote a book called Five Years of Penal Servitude, which contained, not the expression of regret for the past and recognition of the justice of his sentence, but certain hints of how to make prison life more beneficial to the criminal in a moral sense and less savage in some of its aspects. The man was asked to come and help to carry out his reforms. He even became a prominent prison official, and doubtless many a poor hardened wretch would feel there was a strange note of sympathy in the words of that official and know how past experiences of punishment had produced softening. Good in that case came out of evil. 1 [Note: F. Hastings.]
Have ye look'd
At Edyrn? have ye seen how nobly changed?
This work of his is great and wonderful.
His very face with change of heart is changed.
The world will not believe a man repents:
And this wise world of ours is mainly right.
Full seldom doth a man repent, or use
Both grace and will to pick the vicious quitch
Of blood and custom wholly out of him,
And make all clean, and plant himself afresh.
Edyrn has done it, weeding all his heart
As I will weed this land before I go.
I, therefore, make him of our Table Round,
Not rashly, but have proved him everyway
One of our noblest, our most valorous,
Sanest and most obedient.1 [Note: Tennyson.]
2. We do not hear that John Mark ever tried to do any work in the way of preaching the gospel. His business was a very much humbler one. He had to attend to Paul's comfort. He had to be his factotum, man of all work; looking after material things, the commissariat, the thousand and one trifles that someone had to see to if the Apostle's great work was to be done. And he did it all his life long. It was enough for him to do thoroughly the entirely “secular” work, as some people would think it, which it was in his power to do. That needed some self-suppression. It would have been so natural for Mark to say, “Paul sends Timothy to be bishop in Crete; and Titus to look after other churches; Epaphroditus is an official here; and Apollos is a great preacher there. And here am I, grinding away at the secularities yet. I think I'll ‘strike,' and try to get more conspicuous work.” Or he might perhaps deceive himself, and say, “more directly religious work,” like a great many of us that often mask a very carnal desire for prominence under a very saintly guise of desire to do spiritual service. Let us take care of that. This “minister,” who was not a minister at all, in our sense of the word, but only in the sense of being a servant, a private attendant of the Apostle, was glad to do that work all his days.
That was self-suppression. But it was something more. It was a plain recognition of what we all ought to have very clearly before us, and that is, that all sorts of work which contribute to one end are one sort of work; and that at bottom the man who carried Paul's books and parchments, and saw that he was not left without clothes, though he was so negligent of cloaks and other necessaries, was just as much helping on the cause of Christ as the Apostle when he preached.
Mark as he stood by Peter when the shadows closed around him; Mark, the old, sturdy, eager Apostle's “son,” has upon him at the last just that cordon of faithful service-to have been profitable. To hold firmly to truth as you see it-not to surrender the treasure committed to you for the sake of peace-not to yield it even to those whose honesty you know to be sound as your own, whose powers perhaps you know to be higher, whose leadership it seems almost a disloyalty to reject-that is the claim on us, that is the sacrifice we may have to offer to the highest.
Such in outline was the story of this man “of like passions with ourselves”; this Evangelist, this writer (for such he was) of our wonderful oldest Gospel, yet also this poor frail man, more than restored by the loving power of God. Shall not his experience of self, and of grace, cheer us about others now? Shall it not cheer us about ourselves?
“Useful to me for ministering”-that is a striking commendation and one which anyone of us would be proud to have earned-εὔχρηστος εἰς διακονίαν-readily used for acts of service, a “handy man,” quietly adequate for all emergencies, prompt, alert, willing, loyal, efficient-in Dante's phrase “a noble soul that makes not excuse, but makes its will of the will of another”; it reminds one of the praise which the Commander-in-Chief gave to Henry Havelock and his soldiers in the Indian Mutiny-“Call out Havelock's saints; they are always sober and can be depended on and Havelock himself is always ready.”1 [Note: W. Lock, The Bible and Christian Life, 215.]
One day an accident happened in the laboratory of the celebrated chemist Faraday. A workman knocked a silver cup into a jar of strong acid. In a very short time the cup entirely disappeared, being dissolved in the liquid. One after another the workmen gathered around and regretfully watched the melting of the beautiful cup. All said that it was utterly lost, that no particle of the silver could be recovered. But Faraday, being informed of the accident, brought some chemical mixture and poured it in the jar. Gradually every particle of the silver was precipitated to the bottom and at length the great chemist drained off the acid and took out the silver, now a shapeless mass. He sent the lump of metal to the silversmith who had made the cup, and in a few days it came back restored to its former shape, a wonder and delight to those who had watched its apparent destruction.1 [Note: J. Buckham, The Heritage of Life.]
Once like a broken bow Mark sprang aside:
Yet grace recalled him to a worthier course,
To feeble hands and knees increasing force,
Till God was magnified.
And now a strong Evangelist, St. Mark
Hath for his sign a Lion in his strength;
And thro' the stormy water's breadth and length
He helps to steer God's Ark.
Thus calls he sinners to be penitents,
He kindles penitents to high desire,
He mounts before them to the sphere of saints,
And bids them come up higher.2 [Note: Christina G. Rossetti, Poetical Works, 174.]