The Scars Prove the Healing--March 5, 2021

 The Scars Prove the Healing--March 5, 2021

"Aristarchus my fellow prisoner greets you, as does Mark the cousin of Barnabas, concerning whom you have received instructions--if he comes to you, welcome him." [Colossians 4:10]

One of my favorite recurring details from the post-Easter resurrection appearances of Jesus is how often the risen Lord shows people the wounds in his hands.  The scars are proof to frightened disciples that the one standing before them is the same one who had been through the hell of Good Friday.  The wounds are evidence that he has been through the worst--and come through it, healed and alive.

Well, this is one of those moments in the New Testament as well, because it's a moment where healing and reconciliation are hinted at, and we are given the signs that relational wounds have been healed over, too.

In this verse, Paul names two people who are with him (quite possibly in Rome while he is awaiting trial, probably on charges we would call "treason" or "sedition").  The first, Aristarchus, is also named as a prison, and the second, Mark, is named as "the cousin of Barnabas."  And he's the one with whom Paul had had some, let's call it "unpleasantness."  The book of Acts tells about how Paul and Barnabas had gone on an adventure around the Empire (well, Asia Minor mostly) sharing the Good News of Jesus and starting new communities of disciples (congregations) as they went. Barnabas brought his cousin Mark along, but at some point, Mark flaked out on them when the going got tough, and he gave up on the work. A bit later on in the story of Acts, Paul wants to go and visit the congregations they had planted, and Barnabas had been willing if he could have brought Mark along.  Well, Paul knew the old saying about being fooled twice, and so he didn't want to bring Mark along, because he didn't want to rely on someone who had shown they weren't always... reliable.  So Barnabas was the one wanting to give Mark a second chance, and Paul was the one who was once bitten and twice shy.  The argument was so heated that Paul and Barnabas themselves parted ways, and each went on separate trips with separate companions.  Barnabas and Mark went one way, and Paul took along Silas.  And in the book of Acts, we never hear about any reconciliation between any of them.  In fact, we don't hear about Mark again in the whole book of Acts.

But then there's this moment.  Here at the tail end of Colossians, Paul gives us a hint, not only that Mark is with him, but that he and Mark have made amends.  Instead of warning the Colossians, "Don't you put your trust in Mark, or he'll bail out on you!" Paul directs the Colossian Christians to welcome him.  The fact that Mark is there with Paul sending greetings through Paul not only suggests that they're in the same place (and are on speaking terms), but strongly suggests that they have reconciled.  We don't know how that conversation went, but we do have this sentence, like a healed-over scar, that shows the relationship has been resurrected.

Moments like this in the New Testament are really important, because we don't have a lot of really good examples of how to repair broken relationships well, especially between two people who are equally fallible and who each bear responsibility for the estrangement.  When Peter denies Jesus, no one blames Jesus--we put that all squarely on Peter's shoulders, and rightly so.  But with Paul and Mark, or Paul and Barnabas, we're given a powerful tool to look at our own fragile and flawed relationships.  Because honestly, as much as we may be conditioned to assume Paul was always in the right (after all, he wrote a good chunk of the New Testament, right?), he could be stubborn, insecure, ornery, and standoffish, too.  At some point, Mark must have felt like he wasn't given even a chance to make amends when Paul just up and decided to partner up with Silas instead, and in an era without email or cell phones, it might have felt like he was never going to get the chance to even apologize or try to do better.  In fairness to Mark, it was probably scarier going out into a hostile world as the Christian movement was just beginning than he had bargained for.  And in fairness to Paul, Mark's desertion probably felt all the more devastating exactly because of that danger.  

The fact that Mark and Paul could eventually not just work together again, but seemingly to mend their wounded relationship, gives me hope for the strained and wounded relationships we are all living with.  And we are, aren't we?  We are living in a time when our differences and disagreements feel like they get salt poured in the wound regularly--by voices in the media looking to provoke culture wars, by the bigoted uncle or in-law in the family who always seems to want to stir things up, by the algorithms of social media that are designed to get us to attack each other, and by the stresses that twelve months of pandemic are putting on the durability of our patience.  And all of that is on top of the estrangements we had been living with before--the person whose casual lie cost you the ability to trust them, the people who lost your respect when you heard them say something bigoted or espousing some conspiracy theory, the person who bailed out on you and left you feeling like chopped liver when you needed them, the time you cut off from someone else for whatever reason and just stopped answering their phone calls. We're living with a lot of very fragile relationships, and I'm sure with some of them, we feel like there's no possible way there could be reconciliation this side of glory.  Maybe one day in heaven, we grudgingly admit (and tell ourselves that the OTHER person will finally admit they were wrong!) we could reconcile, but we have a hard time seeing it as a possibility in this life.

And yet here are Mark and Paul--evidence of a resurrected relationship, brought back from the dead when they had parted ways at the end of Acts.  Their ability to restore their relationship--however long it took and however complicated or difficult it was--is evidence to us that it can be done and that it doesn't require a superhuman miracle, only the willingness to risk loving truthfully.  We don't get a blueprint for how they did it, or how many tries it took.  And we aren't promised that they became the best of friends, either.  But they did come to see at least that the same Christ who had reconciled each of them to God loved both of them, and that their own estrangement between one another could not be greater than the infinite chasm of sin between humanity and God that God had already bridged in Christ.  In short, they must have at some point realized that their disagreement, however real, could not be more real than the reconciliation God had already accomplished in Christ--for both of them, and for the whole world.

Maybe that's not a bad place to leave things for today.  Mark and Paul won't give us any more relationship maintenance secrets from just this verse, but maybe it's time for each of us to look to the people with whom we are in strained relationships--or those we have given up on ever healing at all--and to see if there might be the possibility of starting over.  Doesn't mean we will be best friends with folks who have deeply hurt us.  Doesn't mean you have to get married to an ex who still hasn't gotten their act together.  But maybe the notion of healing--which had seemed impossible before--has just become as possible as a resurrection from the dead.

And resurrections are possible, of bodies and of relationships--the presence of healed scars prove the healing.

Lord Jesus, you who have reconciled us with God already, give us the courage to dare to imagine reconciliation in our lives in the places we have felt it beyond the realm of possibility.