Feast of Saint Mark, Evangelist

Eighth Grade Vocations Mass

April 25, 2024
Saint Patrick Cathedral
Fort Worth, Texas

1 Peter 5:5b-14
Psalm 89:2-3, 6-7, 16-17
Mark 16:15-20

Today is a great day in your lives and in the life of the Diocese of Fort Worth because this is the only time when all of you, the eighth graders of each school in the Diocese of Fort Worth, will come together for Mass, for lunch, and for some reflection and discussion about discerning your vocation: what Christ is inviting you to do with the time God has given you in your lives. I am certain that as eighth graders you are thinking a lot about time these days — the ever-shortening amount of time that you have with your teachers and with each other as junior high students, the end of your time spent at your schools and the time of transition into high school and from childhood into adolescence. In His generosity, God has given us this time together and on this wonderful Feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist.

            Saint Mark is so important in our life and history as the Catholic Church. He is credited with writing what most Scripture scholars believe to be the earliest of the four Gospels. Saint Mark also evangelized and brought the Catholic Faith to Egypt as early as 42 A.D. I remember this clearly from my time as a graduate student when I visited the small but very ancient Catholic Church in Egypt. I listened to the story that Saint Mark traveled to Alexandria in Egypt and after his long journey was in need to have his sandals repaired. He sought the service of a cobbler who while working on the sandals suffered blindness when a small splinter flew into his eye. The pious story tells us that Saint Mark healed the man and spoke with him about Christ. This man became a believer and was baptized into the Church. The faith rapidly grew in Egypt and Mark soon was ordained as the first Bishop of Alexandria by 44 A.D.

This date is important because it shows us that the Church was present and alive in Egypt even before the first Letters of Saint Paul were written. This also means that as the first Bishop of Alexandria, Egypt, Saint Mark celebrated the Eucharist with the Catholic Church in Egypt, including young people, before the Gospels or any of the New Testament were even written down. This is the same Eucharist I celebrate with you as your bishop here in this Cathedral of Saint Patrick in Fort Worth. The Holy Spirit reveals the authentic Scripture collected in the Bible through the Church.

Most especially, for our consideration today, Saint Mark offers us insight into the gift of time and the importance of sharing the Good News of Jesus Christ with other people through our lives. Tradition tells us that Saint Mark was younger than the Apostles. He probably first encountered and followed Jesus as an adolescent, not much older than you. After the Resurrection Saint Mark in his young adulthood learned from and listened to the Apostles explain the Gospel of Jesus and its significance for eternal life. Historians particularly identify Saint Mark as a junior associate of Saint Peter, and for a time as a student of Saint Paul. In his Letter to the Colossians, Saint Paul identifies him as a younger cousin of Saint Barnabas who closely collaborated with Saint Paul in his Apostolic journeys and ministry. The point is that Saint Mark spent time with the Apostles before and after Pentecost. He learned from them and then spent his time by sharing what he experienced of Jesus and learned from the Apostles with the younger generation of Christians who came after him.

Time is so precious. As you are learning right now at this point in your lives, time is about the most precious thing there is because it happens in an instant and then it is no more. Tempus fugit. Time is always fleeing away from us. So, the children of this world, whom Saint Mark identifies in today’s Gospel reading as those who decide not to believe and will be condemned, grasp desperately at this treasure of time believing that this is all there is and that the more quickly it moves, the more rapidly they are hurled towards death and non-existence. The result of this godlessness is that they either hoard time and refuse to share it with anybody let alone with God, or they waste time in loneliness without true friendship staring in a stupor at the small screen of their strangely named “smart phones.”

Yet, what we have learned and what Saint Mark knew and preached is the truly precious character of time. It has been given to us by God and has been transformed for us by the love of Jesus and His victory won by His Death on a Cross and His Resurrection. Time now becomes a pathway into eternal life — provided we offer our time and share it as Christ shared His precious time. This last Easter when we blessed the Paschal Candle in every Catholic Church throughout the Diocese and the rest of the world, the priest or deacon prayed in the Exultet:

O wonder of your humble care for us!
O love, O charity beyond all telling,
to ransom a slave you gave away your Son!
O truly necessary sin of Adam,
destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!
O happy fault
that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!

This means that God the Father cares so much for each and all of us that He thinks His Son is worth our salvation. He looks at us and says, “You are worth my Son.” His Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity and through the Incarnation, Jesus Christ then says, “You are worth my time.” So, we see, that in imitating Jesus we must share our time to Him, in prayer, at Mass, and in service to our neighbor. We can see now more clearly how offensive it is when praying or attending Mass to say, “Is this going to take long?” The time that Jesus gave us includes His thirty years at home with Mary and Joseph in Nazareth, His forty days in the wilderness battling temptation, His three years of public ministry, preaching and healing, His three hours on the Cross, His three days in the tomb, and His forty days after the Resurrection when He ascended into heaven to prepare a place for us. Each of these events compose the time that He has given us, but He continues to give us more through the gift of the Holy Spirit in the time He makes available for us when we pray to Him and go to Him with our joys, our fears, our contrition, our gratitude, and our love.

            Saint Mark received that gift of time with Jesus and then with the Apostles by listening, asking questions, and praying; then having received the answer of the truth of the Gospel, shared his time with others through service and in living the Gospel that God has forgiven all our sins by the love expressed by Jesus on the Cross and that death and sin do not have the last word, despite how loud the lion roars as described in the first reading from the first Letter of Saint Peter. Saint Mark heard the invitation to give his precious gift of time to Jesus and to his neighbor by telling the truth, healing the sick, and serving the poor and those most in need. He ultimately gave of his time as he suffered martyrdom at the hands of the Romans in Egypt by having a rope tied around his neck and dragged through the streets by a horse.

            Today, you are here, because God has given you the precious gift of time, time to listen to those who are a little older than you, and time to hear what invitation Christ is offering you to share your gift of time — the gift of a vocation. It is only in receiving the gift of time with gratitude and then freely offering our time when time stops fleeing from us and instead opens for us the door to eternal life where sin and death have no power and give us no reason to be afraid. It is then that we can truly sing the words of today’s psalm, “Forever I will sing the goodness of the Lord.”