NOTES for Mar 1:16-22

Today's Gospel reading is devoted to Jesus' confrontation with evil: possession and sickness. The world was created by God in wisdom and perfection; there was no place in it for death and disease. The Book of Revelation says that at the end of time death and disease will be conquered. Today's passage tells of the beginning of this battle. We see that Jesus does not remain indifferent to the fate of suffering people, but conquers sickness and frees a person from the power of dark forces.

The Kingdom of God and evil are incompatible. This excludes every defense of death and sickness as some kind of good that God brings upon people for their correction. God permits the existence of evil as a consequence of the sinfulness common to humanity, but He does not create evil; He conquers it. We too must take part in this victory if we want to be co-workers with Christ. The sickness and bondage of people are a task for us as well. We must "overcome evil with good": relieve the sufferings of our neighbors, free ourselves from the power of sin, and free the world from it.

In describing the events of the Savior's earthly ministry, Mark is very restrained and sparing with details. The preaching in Capernaum, the healing of a possessed man, and the healing of Peter's mother-in-law follow one after another; the scenes change as in a kaleidoscope. This flickering of events is a feature of the author's perception. It happens, and if not everyone, then many people know this experience. As a rule something similar occurs when a person inwardly distances himself from what is happening.

For example, he goes through some event that is very important for him, and its result is a special inner state that takes in the whole person and creates around him a kind of shell through which he interacts with the surrounding world. The shell may be absolutely transparent, but it almost always becomes a kind of lens that changes the person's perception of what is happening outside. Such a shell is in itself a psychological structure, but its origin can be very different, from purely physiological to spiritual. Any contact with spiritual reality changes a person's perception, at least for the duration of the contact, and sometimes for a much longer time.

Most often the change has to do with the scale and speed of events in the outer world: they seem to move farther away, the flow of time that contains them speeds up, and that very kaleidoscope effect appears. At the same time, if the psychological shell that produces this effect has a spiritual origin, if it is connected with spiritual processes in which the person is caught up, it also functions as a kind of filter, singling out in the swiftly running stream the events that are related to the spiritual process that produced the shell.

In this way, from the stream of events those are singled out that are connected with a person's spiritual state; he begins to see more clearly what corresponds to his state. A person who has experienced a revelation of the Kingdom can in this way see the stream of events both in the present and in the past, insofar as the past has been preserved in his memory. This is how the evangelist sees events: for him, after all, the meeting with Christ became a revelation of the Kingdom, and he experiences the Kingdom as the reality that changes his perception of present events and of past ones, as far as he remembers them.

One of the main themes we encounter in the Gospel of Mark is the theme of calling and our response to that calling. This is not a matter of spontaneity: these four men had apparently already met Jesus (this is one way to understand John 1:35-51). We ourselves are not reading these lines for the first time either. What is striking here is something else: how briefly the evangelist speaks of it. Calling and conversion are, after all, only the very beginning of the journey. The words and deeds of Jesus, the disciples' doubts and denial, and the joy of the Resurrection will be recounted in much greater detail. Yet, on the other hand, without this episode there would have been no Gospel at all. What would have happened if no one had followed Jesus? Christ's action in this world continues in our own time. And this time the disciples, without whom nothing would happen, are you and I. That is why it is so important for us today to realize once again that the Lord has called us to follow Him—and to find within ourselves the courage to climb out of the boat and go after Him.

Mark describes the calling of the apostles sparingly, concisely, in a few words. He called - they went. Other evangelists mention certain details in some cases, give dialogues that unfolded between Jesus and His future disciples. Dialogues, of course, did take place, because to call means to make oneself heard and answered, and here dialogue is impossible to avoid; here words must certainly be spoken. For Mark, however, they are not important. He sees the main thing: that response to the Savior's call which in the end and in essence could be reduced to one thing alone, to the fact that the one called leaves everything and follows the One who called. This is the main thing, and everything else is only the embodiment, the expression of the main thing, an embodiment necessary insofar as we live not only in eternity, but also in time.

The main thing lies in the relationships that bind the disciples to Jesus, just as they bind us, if of course we are Christians not only in name. In essence, these relationships are completely impossible to express, just as it is impossible, for example, to express the experience of one's own existence, what is sometimes called pure self-consciousness. Just as pure self-consciousness can be experienced but is completely impossible to express in words, so it is impossible to express a true relationship in words; it is no accident that poets of all times and peoples have maintained that for true, deep love, for example, it is completely impossible to find adequate words that would express it.

This, however, does not mean that love or another deep and authentic experience is in principle inexpressible. They are expressed and embodied perfectly well, but not at the level of abstract description; rather, in the context of those same relationships, at the level of interaction between people who love one another. So too true relationships of disciple and teacher are indescribable, but fully expressible in the context of the interaction that becomes for them a kind of outer covering, just as shared life in marriage for spouses who love one another becomes the outer covering of their love.

In this case, however, the evangelist pays very little attention to the covering; he is interested in the essence of the matter. He called - they went. Nothing more can be told here; the rest is hidden inside this "went." The story becomes a hint, a hint at what cannot be expressed in words but what everyone can experience as the reality of his own life when a meeting with Christ takes place in it. The very meeting without which there is no Christianity.