Every time I read this story I am surprised by the ending. I am not going to spoil it for those of you who have never read it all the way through to the end but this is one of the best illustrations I know of what happens when we read Scripture in snippets and verses. We miss the bigger picture. We miss the details of a life that so influenced the formation of not only the early Church but the Church universal. However, you would never know it from just reading this account.

Who is this young man who was the cause for such a split between Barnabas and Paul?

He has an interesting story – especially for late bloomers, early failures and parents of late bloomers.

His mother, Mary, was wealthy and influential. Her house was the central meeting place for the early church. It’s likely that it was her upper room that was the setting of the Last Supper as well as the place the disciples were gathered when Jesus first appeared to them after the resurrection. It was the home to which Peter returned his miraculous release from Herod’s prison.
“When this had dawned on him, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying.”

As a young man, he was surrounded by the apostles and heroes of the movement. He had access to relationships and advantages that were rare. Nothing happened in the movement that did not include him. You could not have had more exposure to faith, miracles, heroic figures, and the first days of the greatest events in the history of the world.

But…he is more than likely the young man who ran naked out of Gethsemane rather than be arrested with Jesus.

He flees the early persecution of the church and goes to Antioch.

But his cousin Barnabas is influential and powerful and secures him a place with he and Paul on the first missionary journey. It’s one of the first unpaid internships and just another example of how privileged John Mark was as a young man.

But he leaves them in Pamphylia because the work is too hard and goes back home to Jerusalem. In doing so, he misses all the hardships and successes of that first journey. The stoning and being called gods. The miracles and the persecution. Still, he had to listen to all of the accounts at the Council when they returned several years later. You can imagine how uncomfortable that must have been knowing he had dropped out and run home.

Barnabas and Paul split over him and he goes to Cyprus with Barnabas. Paul and Barnabas has two different ways of seeing John Mark. For Paul, he was clearly a deserter and almost considered him a traitor. Paul didn’t want anyone with him who could not live up to his expectations. Barnabas had a great nose for raw talent. After all, he was the one who brought the brash new convert Saul to the apostles and vouched for him. He saw the potential in people and, I suspect, Paul had little patience with people who did not measure up. They split in anger. The words here describe an argument in which they both were in fits and recoiled from each other. It was not a mild disagreement. It was a fight that split them from each other for the rest of their lives. They never see each other again.

We know that Barnabas is martyred by stoning in Cyprus in 61 AD. After that, we lose track of John Mark for almost ten years. We know nothing about this period of his life. He is in limbo. However, given his pattern of running and quitting and weakness we would not expect much of him. He would just fade away and self-destruct – a child of privilege with unused potential. A protected species like so many who grow up with advantages and opportunities but not able to handle hardship or challenges.

Thayer Willis told her story in Tyler a couple of years ago. She was the daughter of one of the founders of the Georgia-Pacific corporation. She grew up like John Mark did. All the advantages and privileges of social connections, wealth and protection from consequences.

She talked about the three top things that make family wealth a curse.

– “Too much too soon. My wandering 20s were an example of too much too soon. My parents wanted me to enjoy the freedom of youth. They meant for my financial ease to be a gift. Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me to do anything with my life.

– Too much financial focus. This focus can be so big that families neglect human, intellectual and social capital in the family. As a result, there’s no balance. Instead, the emphasis is on the dollars, the assets, the strategies and the money managers. Family meetings only cover financial concerns. Some of my wealthy clients have spent years looking for a way to bring up family communication, relationships, and effective parenting.

– Ingratitude. We all know what this looks like. It is the attitude of entitlement and arrogance. Ingratitude is insidious, based on fear and anger. It leads to low self-esteem, insecurity and the self-doubt that comes from never having become good at anything.

Many people who aren’t wealthy think it would be great to not have to learn to do anything, or just to learn what one chooses. Perhaps they don’t recognize the value of feeling confident and building a purposeful, meaningful life. The only way to get there is to tough out mistakes and failures. Though inheritors are given many things, no one is given a meaningful life. For that we all have to work.”

However, ten years later, Paul says to Timothy, “Be sure to bring Mark with you because he will be so helpful to my ministry. Everyone else has deserted me. (2 Tim 4:11) What happened?
In those silent ten years Mark had attached himself to the one person in his life – Peter – who could relate completely to a young man who had deserted, failed and betrayed. In Peter, John Mark finds a father, a fellow sinner and a friend. Someone completely different from Paul and Barnabas. But something else happened. He began to write down Peter’s recollections of Jesus and in doing so he was changed.

J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter series was the commencement speaker for Harvard in 2008 and part of her address is on the value of failure.

“I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment. However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown. Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew. Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality. So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece in the New Yorker magazine titled Late Bloomers and he describes several things that are common in their stories.

“For example, we sometimes think of late bloomers as late starters. They don’t realize they’re good at something until they’re 50, so of course they achieve late in life. But that’s not quite right. Late bloomers bloom late because they simply aren’t much good until late in their careers. On the road to great achievement, the late bloomer will resemble a failure. Prodigies advertise their genius from the get-go. Late bloomers require forbearance and blind faith. (Let’s be thankful that Cézanne didn’t have a guidance counselor in high school who looked at his primitive sketches and told him to try accounting.) A late bloomer needs a patron. If you are the type of creative mind who starts without a plan and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level. This is the final lesson of the late bloomer: His or her success is highly contingent on the efforts of others. Late bloomers’ stories are invariably love stories, and this may be why we have such difficulty with them. We’d like to think that mundane matters like loyalty, steadfastness, and the willingness to keep writing checks to support what looks like failure have nothing to do with something as rarefied as genius. But sometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after 20 years of working at your kitchen table.”

John Mark didn’t become good at something until later in life. His life looked more like a failure.

John Mark needed a patron – someone who had the patience and empathy to believe in him.

John Mark needed someone to give him a task to accomplish.

There are two major characteristics of the gospel of Mark: First, we know more about Peter’s flaws than any other book. His fears, his denial of Jesus and his desertion of the disciples.
Second, in it Jesus is primarily a man of action – not words. He has authority and strength. He is a man of energy and courage and command. No one tells us more about the emotions and the humanity of Jesus. He is the Lion of Judah.

What did Mark discover as he wrote the gospel? He discovered himself and a Jesus that changed his life. Peter’s flaws were the same as his and Peter’s Christ became his. In “The Jesus I Never Knew” Philip Yancey writes, “Jesus, I found, bore little resemblance to the Mr. Rogers figure I met in Sunday School. He was the undomesticated Lion of Judah.

So, what is the rest of the story?

Mark is sent by Peter to Alexandria to become the first bishop of the Church in Egypt. He is the founder of the Coptic (Greek for “Egypt”) Church. In fact, in spite of persecution there are about 12 million Coptic Christians there today. I have been in the church in Alexandria where he is buried. It was on Easter a few years ago and I could not have planned it that way.

In 68 AD on April 24th/25th he is martyred by being dragged for two days behind a horse until all of skin is removed. Many years later it is said that the founders of a city in Italy, Venice, want a saint’s relics and they steal his head and take it back to Venice. There it becomes the most precious relic of one of the most famous cathedrals in the world – St. Mark’s. He becomes the patron saint of the city of Venice.

But here is what I find interesting. Something he would have never believed and we could have not predicted when we first met him. The early church gave him the symbol of the winged lion and it is the flag of Venice still today. It is a symbol of power, authority and strength. The Lion personifies the voice of John the Baptist in the introduction of the Gospel. The wings are from Ezekiel 1:10. The Lion holds the scroll because he is the author of the earliest gospel and the inscription reads, “Peace to thee, Mark, my evangelist.” Peace and courage – not fear and running away. The boy who ran away and became a lion – just like Jesus the Lion of Judah in his gospel.

Don’t ever count anyone out. God doesn’t. We all will have a flag one day that will symbolize who we are and what we have stood for. In Mark we can celebrate the redeeming of early mistakes, the forgiveness of failure and God’s ability to turn young, spoiled boys into men with hearts of lions.