Dropped Cloths Series

Again, I will spare you all the reasons why it could be Mark, telling us his own experience, but it could be. It is consistent with what we know of Mark from other places in the Bible. Here in this little footnote is a young man who came out to the garden, awakened from his slumbers, and who got close to the action, but who faltered at the key moment. Here is a young man who had followed Jesus, maybe even closely, but who went back home to sleep when things got tough. He pulled back to the safety and security of a closeted, insulated life, and came out to watch, only from a distance.

And if it be true that Mark is the one, just as he did later on, according to the Book of Acts, he ran. He bolted. When the going got tough, he got going, but not because he was tough. Far from it. He got going because he was afraid. He got moving because he was immature and not ready for what was coming. He got to his feet and ran because he had not yet awakened to all that Jesus wanted to do in him. He ran and exposed his immaturity.

As we do. As we run. We too go to sleep. We too cut short what we could experience. We too start to follow Christ but find Him too complex, too much. And so we go to sleep, and we run from Him.

Some of us are still hazy and lazy about the Christian faith. Some of us do not get it about what it means to be a Christian. Our prayer lives have not advanced beyond, “Now I lay me down to sleep.” Our church lives have not moved beyond drowsing through the occasional sermon. Our giving lives have not passed beyond tossing a coin to a beggar or sending a minimal check to some charity or church. Our relationship lives have not matured beyond feeling more lust than love. Our moral lives have not encompassed anything but a tarnished Golden Rule, and our political lives have not become anything more than wearing party labels. We are asleep. We could be so much more as Christians, but we just have not grown up.

And so, like Mark, we go about in our sleepy-time night-gear, not aware that we are called to be children of the light. We need to drop the cloth of ignorance. We need to drop the cloth of incompleteness. We need to let go of the life of near-nothingness and commit to grow in Christ. Otherwise we will find it mighty cold out there, with nothing to protect us.

Conclusion

Dropped cloths. The rich man, or Lazarus, or Mark. Take your pick. Each of them exposes us. Dropped cloths that will strip away all the ways we hide ourselves.

For, you see, in an empty tomb there is another linen cloth. In a garden not far from the place of betrayal there is another dropped cloth. Behind the stone, within the grotto, a young man robed in white points to a place where they had laid the body of the crucified Jesus, buried in a linen cloth. “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid Him … Go, tell his disciples …”

And from that place and from that linen cloth dropped there indeed they did go and tell. They told of one who freely gave His life, that all might live. They told of one who broke the chains of death itself, that we might all be free.