Not too many years ago, Easter was the day on which everyone trotted out new clothes. It was on Easter that spring dresses sprung off the racks for young girls, and starched collars irritated the necks of young men. I don’t miss the starched collars, but I do rather miss the elaborate display of feathery hats that used to greet the Easter morning preacher!
We may not dress for Easter in the way we used to. But we do send signals with our clothing. We do communicate what we feel about ourselves. We send signals about our self-image. Clothing sends a message.
Some wear uniforms so that we can easily identify their authority. If he wears a firefighter’s slicks, get out of his way so that he can do what he must. If she wears a nurse’s coat, let her take your vital signs and give your meds; she knows what she is doing. Uniforms proclaim authority. We wear clothes to tell others who we are and what we are about.
Some communicate with their clothes not just who they are but who they hope to become. In the wake of the “dress for success” idea, groups that serve jobless people offer them not just counseling, but also business suits and tailored dresses. That way when they go for an interview they can look the part. Some dress to communicate who they are and some who they want to become.
And then there are all those subtle things that clothes communicate. Clothes tell others that we are together and organized; or that we just don’t get it. My wife likes to tell about when she was a chaplain at The American University, whenever there was a public event, she tried to dress appropriately. She tried to be as fashionable as our budget would allow. But fate seemed always to dictate that she be placed next to the wife of the university president, who had a knack for flinging a simple scarf around her shoulders and looking absolutely fabulous. Clothes can even intimidate.
Or then there was the time I was to participate in an ordination service, along with a number of other ministers. I put on my most somber suit, as befits a solemn occasion, only to be greeted by one of my fellow pastors, who sniffed, “Gray? At an ordination?” I didn’t think his suit was that many shades darker than mine, but I was evidently not up to par! Now you know why I’m wearing this pulpit robe; clothes send signals!
There is an intriguing little footnote about that in Mark’s Gospel. It comes during that stormy scene in the 14th chapter, when in dark Gethsemane Jesus prayed alone, alone because His closest intimates would not stay alert. Only an instant later, Judas and a crowd of thugs approached Jesus. Then the betrayer’s kiss, the arrest, a brief scuffle, and – what poignant words! –“All of them deserted Him and fled.” All of them! But now the intriguing little footnote: “A certain young man was following Him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”
After that, the narrative continues: trials and denials, prisoner releases and floggings, mocking and parading, and, in the end, crucifixion. Death. Dramatic death. Darkness and death. Terrible things that beg for more reporting.
So why does Mark waste his ink on this certain young man, wearing nothing but a linen cloth? Why tell us about a person who was almost snatched by the soldiers, but who pulled out and ran away naked? Who was this young man and what does this mean? Does his dropped cloth send a message to us?
It does. In fact it may send several messages. For just as clothing sends a message and what we wear sends out signals, so also what we leave behind marks out a new identity. What we drop off permits us to become something new.
Who was the young man whose bare behind we glimpse skittering through the olive trees of old Gethsemane? There are several possibilities, and each possibility represents a different way of understanding that dropped cloth. Each of these dropped cloths may fit some of us.
I
Some think that the young man may not be anyone we can name, but that he may have come from a well-to-do family. Linen was expensive, and so if he was wearing linen out there in the garden at night, when you might have expected informal clothes, that might suggest that he had wealth he wanted to show off. If this theory be correct, this young man came close to Jesus, and almost got caught up with Him, but he ran because he could not risk losing his money, his status, his station in life. He dropped his cloth, his fine linen cloth, and ran away naked.
That is a metaphor for some of us, isn’t it? We have watched Christ from afar. We have listened to Him, but skeptically, because He teaches things that are hard for us to hear. We have trusted in our success in business or in our profession, but He speaks about losing our lives in order to find them. We have accumulated 401K’s and IRA’s and CD’s and stock options, but He tells us that if we want eternal life, we will have to sell all that we have and give it to the poor. We have built fine houses in Montgomery County, but He speaks of His followers as those who have no place to lay their heads. We have gathered so much stuff that all over town they build storage units so that we can keep it secure, but He tells a parable about a fellow building bigger barns, only to find himself called a fool. We can’t get too close to this Jesus, not as prosperous as we are. He demands too much.
If it is correct that this young man is a man of means, clad in fine linen, then symbolically that night, as he came close to Jesus, he had to drop that cloth. And you and I hear a hard lesson – that the meaning of life does not consist in the abundance of the things which we possess; that our dollars and our degrees do not earn us anything; and that in the sight of God, as the Bible says it, all our righteousness is as filthy rags. All the stuff we have will deteriorate. All the achievements we have accomplished will fade. And the façade we present to the world will crumble. All that matters, at the end of your life and mine, is whether we have come to Christ. All that matters is whether we have done more than simply approach Him and wonder about Him from afar. What matters is that we know Him and acknowledge Him and live with Him and for Him.
Yes, it is a hard thing to hear in our prosperous, achievement-oriented community. But hear it nonetheless, “Whoever will save his life will lose it; but whoever will lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s will gain it.”
That means we have to drop the cloth of prosperity. That means we have to leave behind the pallium of pretension. Brothers and sisters, whoever we are – behind our pretty clothes, our brick veneers, and our well-manicured lawns there lies nothing but the naked truth, that we are desperately needy. And only Christ can satisfy our need. We must drop the cloth of pretension.
II
But then, maybe it was not a young man of wealth. Maybe that theory is incorrect. Maybe it was someone we can actually name, that young man losing his cover in the garden. I will spare you the long story, but for good reasons some Bible students think that this certain young man was Lazarus. Lazarus, the man whom Jesus had raised from death a little while before. Do you remember the story of Lazarus and his sisters Mary and Martha, good friends of Jesus? And how Jesus arrived at their home in Bethany after Lazarus had been dead for four days, shrouded and buried? But Jesus stood at his grave and commanded, “Lazarus, come forth!” And indeed he did. The Bible story reports that they had to release the grave clothes and let him go.
Now just suppose that the young man in these little verses is Lazarus. And more than that, suppose that this linen cloth is his burial garment. True, it no longer binds his arms and legs; he is free to move about. But is he still wearing that shroud? Is he still running around town in the same cloth used to wrap his cold dead body? How bizarre is that? How peculiar would that be?
But I tell you that even if it is bizarre, it is not unusual. Even if it is peculiar, it is not uncommon. The truth is that many of us continue to wear our grave clothes. Many of us exhibit the relics of a death from which we have been freed. Many of us continue to act as though we were trapped in the past rather than embracing the future. Like Lazarus, we have been offered new life by Jesus Christ; but, again, like Lazarus, we do not shake off the things that bind us and hold us back.
Some of us are bound to old habits that are nothing more than death walking, even though we have been shown the path of life. We hold on to old prejudices, finding some sort of perverse comfort in looking askance at those whose skin color is different or whose accent suggests that they are strangers. We hang on to a dependence on some drug, whether alcohol or painkiller or a street concoction, knowing that we are slowly killing ourselves. We stick with a lifestyle that we know will likely lead to disappointment at best and AIDS at worst. And yet who of us does not know that in Jesus Christ there is a way, a truth, and a life – a life that brings freedom? Why would we choose death over life? But we do. We do.
Oh, I tell you, some of us need to drop those cloths that are the shrouds of death. Lazarus, raised from death, had not yet thought life through and embraced his freedom. He had not yet taken in all that it meant to be given life by Christ. And so here he is, on the night of trial, lingering on the very edge of the garden, but not yet ready to go and die with Jesus. Why should Lazarus fear death? He has already been given life, and should understand that the One who gave Him life once can do it again. But Lazarus is living in a shroud, and had to drop that shroud and expose his frail limbs.
Sad for Lazarus! And sad for us if He who has begun a work of salvation in us is not allowed to bring it to completion. Sad for us if once we said “Yes” to Christ and His offer of new life, but have done nothing with it for years and years. It means we are still wearing grave cloths. We must drop the cloth that binds us to the past.
III
There is a third theory. There is a third possibility about who our anonymous young man might be. This is the one that intrigues me, not only because I think it has historical credibility, but also because it speaks most pointedly to me.
Who is the young man who dropped his linen cloth and ran off exposed? It might have been that nameless rich and accomplished young man, who could afford a linen cloth; or it might have been Lazarus, still wearing his burial shroud; or it may have been Mark himself, the author of this gospel. It may have been a very young Mark, writing this account, not wanting to name himself, but telling us that he was present. He was a witness – but in his nightshirt. Night clothes, pajamas if you will, were sometimes made of linen.
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.
They told those who had depended on wealth and status and prestige that they could drop that pretension, for Christ is alive and gives life freely, without price or payment, to all who will trust Him. He dropped His cloth and He lives!
They told those who were living in the past, with the smell of death and disappointment about them, that they could drop that habit, for Christ is alive and gives new life freely. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things are passed away and all things become new. He dropped His cloth and He lives!
And they told us who are so immature, so incomplete, so far short of what we could be, that we can drop our masks, we can forget our thin veils. For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that whosoever believes on Him has everlasting life. And whosoever includes even such a child as I. He dropped His cloth; He sends a message. He lives! And because He lives, we too can live, and live abundantly.
Drop that cloth. Right now, drop that cloth of yours, and live!
