To be sure, history has seen some astonishing snubs. Apparently, The Shawshank Redemption didn’t win a single Oscar. We all remember Kanye West’s infamous response to Taylor Swift beating Beyoncé to the Best Female Video award at the MTV VMA’s in 2009. And I for one cannot fathom why so many people are so negative about the glorious batting of Ian Bell.

But for the most undeserved shade cast in liturgical history, my money goes to the BCP lectionary, which assigns a reading from John’s Gospel for today, St Mark’s Day. Mark did, I’m sure you’ll remember, write a 16 chapter Gospel before it was cool, but apparently, the compilers of the Lectionary couldn’t find a single passage in it that they thought would be more appropriate today than John 15:1-11. Epic shade.

To understand why Mark gets so little love from the lectionary, we must look to the interpretation of Mark in the Early Church. For the Fathers, the two most beloved Gospels are Matthew and John. Matthew, which almost everybody in the Early Church thought had been written first, was especially loved for its ethical teaching – those five long discourses of which the Sermon on the Mount is the first – and for its many parables. John, on the other hand, was loved for its deep Trinitarian theology. Mark was often seen as being akin to an abridgement of Matthew. Yes, you got the basic story of Jesus, but all that wonderful teaching was lost – so why would anyone read Mark when you’d got Matthew?

Two changes in modern thinking catapulted Mark to prominence in the 19th Century. One was the rise of historical consciousness. To briefly summarise a huge and complicated shift, over the course of the development of modernity it felt increasingly urgent to most western academics to try to apply scientific methods to the study of history, with a view to establishing as objective an understanding of the past as possible. This was often combined with a suspicion towards traditional accounts of Jesus, fuelled by a belief that ‘what really happened’ had been embellished over time by layers of theology and church politics. Academics studying the Bible became increasingly concerned to get back to the real ‘historical’ Jesus who lay behind the four Gospels either to reimagine him independently of the Christian faith, or to try to prove that the Jesus of the Gospels was indeed the real Jesus of history.

The other change which happened in the 19th Century is that, for reasons I won’t go into here, academics worked out that it was almost certainly Mark who wrote his Gospel first. Far from being a slightly disappointing abridgement of Matthew, Mark’s Gospel was actually one of the key sources for Matthew and, for that matter, Luke. And just like that, Mark went from being the least interesting Gospel to being the most interesting one!

If you’ve read this blog before, it probably comes as no surprise that I am convinced by those who argue that we have every reason to believe that all four Gospels present to us the real historical Jesus. There are, in any case, some serious issues (philosophical, practical and theological) with the 19th Century’s quest for historical ‘objectivity’. But I’m a modern person too, and I appreciate the genuine advances we’ve made in our understanding of history. I find it thrilling that Mark puts you so close to the events. If scholars are right to say that he wrote in the mid to late 60s (and earlier dates are just about possible) then Mark is no more removed from the events he is describing than we are today from my birth just before the end of the Cold War. Virtually every eyewitness account my wife’s Polish relatives have ever told me about life under communism (and boy, do they have some stories!) is more remote from the present than Mark is from Jesus. About ten years ago, the eyewitness nature of Mark (on which see especially Richard Bauckham’s work) was a huge boost to my own faith as I read it in depth during a significant period of doubt.

Modern study of Mark’s Gospel has corrected the under appreciation it has suffered in the tradition. Mark not only gives us the earliest access we have to the life of Jesus*, but it’s clear that Matthew and Luke adopt his story as the basic backbone of their own accounts. Even John, so different in many ways, may show signs of being written with people who already know Mark in mind. So the whole Scriptural portrait of Jesus’ life is shaped by Mark’s work. We have so much to thank God for in his work.

But if the traditional approach gave Mark shorter shrift than he was due, it gets at least one crucial thing right: We don’t read the Gospels simply for historical information and apologetic reassurance. They are written to reveal God to us and teach us to be Christ’s disciples. Here too, Mark has proven a far richer source than was previously appreciated. In his depiction of Jesus, Mark weaves together the ancient promises of the Davidic King and the suffering servant with hints that Jesus cannot simply be understood in human terms (e.g. 2:1-12, 2:19-20, 12:35-37 etc)**. The section from 8:31-10:52 is a profound exploration of the way of the Cross.

These days, many people in Conservative Evangelical settings get to know Mark as their first introduction to Jesus on a Christianity Explored course. For others, grappling with Mark in the first year of home groups (often based on the Read Mark Learn materials) is a turning point in their own discipleship. Year after year, I find it loses nothing of its freshness, its vividness, the punchiness of the narrative. Thank God for Mark and his Gospel!

The lectionary may fall well short of giving Mark his due, but the collect is a good one to help us celebrate the day:

O ALMIGHTY God, who hast instructed thy holy Church with the heavenly doctrine of thy Evangelist Saint Mark: Give us grace, that, being not like children carried away with every blast of vain doctrine, we may be established in the truth of thy holy Gospel; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

*Sort of. Paul’s letters give us snippets like 1 Cor 11:23-26 and 1 Cor 15:3-8 decades earlier.

**Incidentally, this is one of the problems with the attempt to reconstruct the ‘historical’ Jesus. If we take passages like these seriously, Jesus is claiming that to understand him purely in terms of his historical situation is to fundamentally fail to grasp who he really is.

P.S. Mark is, among other things, the patron saint of Venice, so we had a traditional Venetian St Mark’s Day dish for dinner, Risi e Bisi.

P.P.S. In the end, I needed to take a holiday, but more Easter material, including the three collects we’ve had so far, will, God willing, be appearing in the next week or so.