NOTES for Mar 1:16-45

Today we read in the Gospel of Mark about the calling of the disciples and their response to that calling. This is far from being about an ability for spontaneous actions: apparently, these four already knew Jesus. That is how John 1:35-51 can be understood. After all, we ourselves are not reading these lines for the first time. What is surprising here is something else: how briefly the evangelist speaks about it. Indeed, calling and conversion are only the very beginning of the way. The words and deeds of Jesus, the disciples' wavering and denial, and the joy of the Resurrection will be described in much greater detail. On the other hand, without this episode there would have been no whole Gospel. What would have happened if no one had followed Jesus?

In our time Christ's action in this world continues. And the disciples without whom nothing would have happened are, this time, us. Therefore today it is so important for us to realize once again that the Lord has called us to follow Him and to find in ourselves the courage to climb out of the boat and follow after Him.

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.

What is this "unclean spirit"? This question often gives us no peace. Often the question of fighting the unclean spirit becomes the central point of spiritual books and of spiritual life as a whole. For many people today, when the traditions of ritual purity regulated by the book of Leviticus have receded into the distant past - and that is the book with the highest concentration of the word "unclean" in the whole Bible - the fear of being defiled has not disappeared at all; it has simply shifted from certain concrete things to an unclean spirit understood in some particular way.

And this is a very dangerous path. Because the center of our life should be not the struggle against the unclean spirit, but Christ. This may be the most important seed of meaning that today's reading gives us. The mere appearance of Christ in our life is enough for the unclean spirit to "cry out with a loud voice and come out" of us. We only need truly to let Christ into our life, and this is possible only through reading and prayerful meditation on the Word of God.

But how often one sees a person who, instead, plunges into reading penitential canons and prayers from a very particular Byzantine monastic tradition, for which we are, of course, endlessly grateful because of its amazing example of communion with God, but which cannot be copied mechanically for our own communion with God, because our life is completely different, and simply because communion is a living, dynamic process that accepts no ready-made patterns or formulas.

But when one sees such a person, it becomes very sad. His life has truly turned into a struggle, and even, it would seem, a struggle against evil; but what is the fruit of this struggle, and who is made better by it? Yet all that is needed is to let Christ into one's heart, to make Him the center of one's life, and the problem will resolve itself.

Yes, but evil exists; we must not close our eyes to it. We should not close them, but let us look straight at Christ, and at everything else with peripheral vision.

The brief Gospel reading is a summary of what God chiefly does when He comes to people. Prayer, preaching, and immediate, prompt help in everything. The sick, the infirm, the demon-possessed - all come to Jesus for liberation. The city gathers at the house where He is staying because this encounter grants healing, the recovery of lost wholeness. There is no other way to receive it.

What happens after health, soundness of mind, and new life return? How do people behave when they receive what they wanted most? Some leave, some stay to watch what is happening, some follow Him everywhere. But Peter's mother-in-law immediately begins to serve the One who entered her house and, by touching her, healed her.

There is, of course, nothing surprising in the fact that the sick and the possessed long for healing and deliverance. Something else is interesting: exactly how the evangelist describes such events. He tells some of them in detail, for example the healing of Peter's mother-in-law; others he mentions briefly, as he mentioned the many healings Jesus performed in Capernaum. Of course, this difference could be explained in purely literary terms: by speaking of an event in detail, the evangelist thereby sets it apart, while in general terms he speaks of events that turn out to be a kind of background for the separate episodes. But in the Gospel there are no unimportant or insignificant parts; even the background matters here. And what first catches the eye in descriptions of such background events is the mass, the crowd, the multitude.

It is quite possible that all these healings did not happen at one single moment, that the brief mention of many healings is brief only in the evangelist's description, while in reality the healings described took more than one day. But even if that is so, the difference in how the events are described is still obvious: on the one hand, a single event; on the other, something mass-scale, where the individual person cannot be distinguished.

But perhaps the issue here is not literary composition alone. Perhaps it is the very nature of the Kingdom: the Kingdom in which there is no place for illness or possession, and therefore everyone it touches is delivered from both one and the other, if only he has even a drop of trust in the One who brought this Kingdom into the world. But deliverance from illness is only the first step. After that life begins, that new life in the Kingdom in which nothing simply happens by itself anymore, where one must serve so that this life becomes for the person who has shared in it not only an external fact, but also the inner content and meaning of his own existence.

And this is already a strictly individual and deeply personal process. Here it is not enough simply to come into contact with the Kingdom; what is needed is a spiritual process that cannot take place without the person's own conscious and purposeful participation. And while there are always many who want to be healed and freed from the power of dark forces, there are generally far fewer who make the effort to move forward on the spiritual path.

This is why, perhaps, there are not so many Christians among those healed by Jesus. Healing, after all, is only the beginning. It is a beginning that requires continuation. Otherwise the life of the Kingdom will never become reality for the one who has been healed.

In antiquity leprosy was considered a terrible disease, incurable and very contagious. A leper became an outcast; he was unclean and had no right to enter cities or villages. Even on the road he was required to mark his presence, so that no one would accidentally touch him or even touch one of his things. Everything a leper touched also became unclean. And then such a person comes to Jesus and falls on his knees before Him. "If You are willing, You can cleanse me," he says.

This person had probably faced many times the fact that people specifically did not want to have anything to do with him; they did not want not only to talk with him, but even to be near him. That is why Christ's gesture appears so shocking. After all, He could simply have said: "I am willing; be cleansed." But besides His will to heal, He also reveals His mercy. As the evangelist writes, "moved with compassion" ("having had mercy" in the Synodal translation), Christ stretched out His hand and touched the leper. He touched the one whom no human hand had touched for many years. Christ's mercy is directed not only toward this man's flesh, but also toward his heart.

And at the same time the Lord neither abolishes nor violates the Law of Moses, as He Himself said more than once. Therefore He sternly orders the leper to do everything that the law prescribes for one healed of leprosy. The verb used by the evangelist, besides the meaning "to speak sternly," also carries the sense "to growl" and "to grieve." It may be that the evangelist had in mind not only sternness, but also an agitated, sorrowful request. The Lord's words are connected with the fact that if the healed leper began telling people about the miracle, unbelieving Jews would consider Christ defiled, unclean. The evangelist reports that this is exactly what happened, and after that Christ could no longer enter a city.

This is the picture that stands before us today: the infinitely merciful touch of Jesus, and the betrayal of a man who did not fulfill such a simple request.

Human joy sometimes expresses itself in strange ways. A person who has suffered for many years from an incurable disease comes to a Prophet unknown to him, whom he most likely sees for the first time. This Prophet heals him and says: keep silent, do not chatter about Me on every corner; go and do what the Torah prescribes for cleansing. But the healed man, instead of doing what he was told to do, joyfully shouts on every corner about what happened to him, plainly blurting out what he had been asked to keep silent about.

What is this: talkativeness? Neglect and disrespect toward the One who healed him? It is hardly either one. Rather, not everything, sadly, is serious for us that really is serious. Or better: for us, only what is serious to us is serious in earnest. For the healed man, throughout the whole time of his sickness, the sickness itself was at the center. It blocked out the whole world for him, and he can hardly be blamed for that.

But now his life changes: Someone enters it who is able and ready to deliver him from sickness, to heal and cleanse him. What then: should all attention be given to Him? Surely it should. If He delivered him from sickness, if He is from God, then he should listen to Him and do everything exactly as He commands.

Why then does the healed man act otherwise? Perhaps precisely because he has not yet truly been healed. His body is already healthy, but his attention is still entirely focused on the sickness that is no longer there, but whose memory is alive. And the healed man shouts on every corner: not about God and not about the One who healed him, but about the sickness that is no more. He shouts so much that he even forgets what the mysterious Savior asked of him.

These words sound unusual: if You are willing, You can make me clean. We are used to every petitioner putting his own desire first. And when we see this request, we understand that this man's rejection has produced in him an immense and genuine humility. In fact, this is the ideal of petitionary prayer.

And when one thinks about this, it becomes all the more terrible to see this man's behavior after his healing. Why can he not fulfill a simple request, at least out of gratitude?! This is hard to understand; each person has to struggle painfully with this text.

But it is not by chance that the Church chooses for us what is included in the Gospel reading. Let us notice the words with which the reading begins: and in the morning, rising very early, He went out and departed to a deserted place, and there He prayed. These words immediately soften in some way the storm of the soul caused by the former leper's behavior, and one remembers another petitionary prayer: Your will be done. It is not so difficult to say the best prayer in the world; it is much harder afterward to ascend the cross. This is exactly what does not happen with the leper, and sometimes with us.

The Gospel repeatedly contains episodes in which people healed by Jesus begin to spread word of His powers despite His direct prohibition. The same pattern constantly repeats in our lives: the Lord helps us—we act according to the proverb, “Once things are good, do not seek anything better”—He forgives us—we ask Him for help—He helps us—and it all begins again. Another frequently repeated episode is when Jesus tries to be alone and pray; the disciples find Him and once again call Him “to work,” which continues until late at night. It is the same pattern: people respond to Jesus’ boundless mercy and generosity with ingratitude and simply use Him for their own benefit. Of course, we cannot live without God’s help, and Jesus “came for this purpose,” to preach and to heal—you and me. So we cannot relate to Him entirely “without self-interest.” But at least we can avoid being ungrateful! At least we can try to obey Him and fulfill the commandment of love that He gave us. Otherwise, the result is somehow unbecoming... and this “unbecomingness” greatly clouds and darkens our relationship with 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.