Get Up and Walk · Week 3 · Sunday

Meet John Mark

Most of us know the names. Peter. Paul. Barnabas. The names you would put on a Christian hall of fame.

You probably do not know John Mark.

He shows up first in Acts 12, at his mother’s house, where the early church gathered to pray after Peter escaped prison. Young man. Connected. The son of a woman whose home was a hub of the apostolic movement. He had ringside seats to the formation of the early church.

Ringside seats to the formation of the early church.

Biblical Backdrop

In Acts 12:25, Barnabas and Saul return to Antioch and take John Mark with them. In Acts 13, they are sent out on the first missionary trip. The text in Acts 13:5 says they had John “to assist them.” The Greek is hypēretēs. Literally an “under-rower,” from hypó (under) and erétēs (rower). On Greek ships, the under-rowers were the lowest-rank sailors, below deck, providing the power. That was John Mark’s role on the first mission. He was the kid below deck.

And then, somewhere in the middle of the trip, in the city of Perga, he quits.

The Bible does not tell us why. Scholars guess at homesickness, at fear, at disagreement with Paul’s strategy, at the brutal terrain ahead, at a young man whose nerve broke when the mission got harder than he had been told. None of it is in the text. What is in the text is the verb. Left them. The Greek there is apochōreō, from apó (away from) and chōreō (to make room, to go). A strong word. He withdrew.

The Worse Part

Worse comes a few years later. Paul wants to start a second missionary trip. Barnabas wants to take John Mark again. Paul refuses.

The Greek for “sharp disagreement” in verse 39 is paroxysmos. English gets the word “paroxysm” from this same root. It is not a polite word. It is not a professional disagreement. It is a paroxysm. Two of the most important men in the early church had a paroxysm over whether John Mark deserved a second chance, and they split over it. Paul took Silas. Barnabas took Mark and sailed away to Cyprus, and Barnabas effectively disappears from the book of Acts.

By every metric the early church would have used to evaluate a man, John Mark was finished. He quit his first mission. He caused the fight that broke up the Paul-Barnabas team. He was the cautionary tale.

And Then

Years pass. Maybe a decade. Maybe more.

Paul writes a letter from prison to a young pastor named Timothy. It is the last letter Paul will ever write. He knows he is going to die soon. He is making his final list of who is still with him, who he wants near him for the end. After noting that Demas has deserted him and Crescens has gone to Galatia, Paul writes five short words about another man on his list.

“Get Mark.” The man Paul refused became the man Paul sent for. The Greek for “useful” is euchrēstos. From eu (well) and chráomai (to use). The word’s opposite is achrēstos, useless. Paul takes the very word that describes what John Mark had been and prefixes it with the word for “well.” Well-used. Useful. The man Paul once called unfit for the work has become useful for the work.

Tradition holds that John Mark, after his failure, became Peter’s protégé. The Gospel of Mark is widely understood to be the recording of Peter’s preaching, written by the young man who had quit and come back. The kid who failed his first mission ended up writing the book that taught the church how Jesus succeeded.

The Theme of the Week

Most of us are walking around with a failure we are sure was the final word on us.

A marriage we walked out of emotionally for a season. A son we lost the trust of. A presentation we choked at work. A faith we let go quiet. A community we burned. A friendship we ghosted. A confession we never made. The thing we did or did not do that we have been certain disqualifies us from the next chapter.

John Mark says otherwise. The failure was not the final word.

Tomorrow · Sent a Second Time