We are fortunate in this church that there is so much to look at, which tells a story.
The stained glass window in the All Saints’ Chapel next to the altar is very fine piece of work.
It is by Brian Thomas, born in 1912, he died in 1989. He has work in St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey, St Andrew’s Holborn, St Vedast’s Foster Lane and a fine mural at All Hallows by the Tower.
I have mistaken this window as you can see it is a memorial to King Edward VII. I had assumed it was redone after the War as the reredos had been. Instead it replaced a Gothic window which was destroyed and lost. It was paid for with War Reparations money in 1958, when much of the newly built St Mark’s had been designed. It was the first of a planned series of four, which did not go further there would have been:
Augustine and Monica
Frances and Clare
Two Oxford Movement heros, unspecified in the history, Keble and Pusey, perhaps
And here two greatest of all Peter and Mark.
Before coming to my main point – forgive discursiveness, this Church’s dedication to Mark is quite interesting.
In the 1840s this area burgeoned, from farmland, suddenly in 10 years a suburb had grown. The original church, a temporary structure seating 600 sat across the road from here, on the corner of Princess Road and Regent’s Park Road. Poverty, malnutrition, disease, poor housing surrounded the parish. William Brown Galloway, curate of St Pancras, was appointed by his vicar Dr John Dale, as the new vicar here. His task was to raise the funds for the construction of the Church which took place eventually in 1854.
Apart from the surrounding maelstrom of local social complexity, Europe had been convulsed in 1848 by revolutions in Denmark, Poland, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, Switzerland, France and Italy. England managed to avoid the worst of it.
Academia was being convulsed too. The Enlightenment had changed the way the Bible was studied. The Origin of Species in 1859 would present the biggest challenge perhaps of the 19th c, with ideas about Evolution. But before that, the established order was being rocked in other ways too, that it is easy to forget.
If you apply to the Bible a critical approach, if you ask not: what is God telling me about myself and my world? but: how and when was this written? the text becomes an object, a specimen, a relic, to be questioned and almost suspected.
Germany was the place the Scientific approach really took off.
Just as other ancient texts were being poked and prodded to answer the question: where did this come from? Scholars were coming to some answers they had never thought of before.
One of the earliest historians of the Church, Eusebius, tells us that Matthew – the Gospel writer we are reading mainly this year, was the first to write his Gospel. It tended to be the view thereafter that Mark then summarised what he read and that gave us the shorter, pithier second Gospel. But the historical method, came to a rather different conclusion.
Someone called Gottlob Christian Storr, a student and then professor in Tubingen, and Lutheran Pastor in Stuttgart, came to a radical conclusion. Perhaps Eusebius was wrong. Perhaps the abbreviated Gospel of Mark, was in fact the first Gospel, which Luke and Matthew separately then took on and elaborated. Storr’s avant-garde thesis of 1786 took some time to penetrate the mainstream but by the early 1830s, it was building up a head of steam in German Faculties. By the late 1840s, with the world in turmoil, it was almost Orthodoxy amongst the educated.
So what? You might say. Well, as the world was convulsed, but before it was turned upside down by Darwin, it could said that for some, St Mark held something of clue. His Gospel might well help us meet the historical Jesus. Papias, who was relied on by Eusebius, did say very early that Peter had dictated his memories to John Mark. This comment had been overlooked in scholarship, but was returned to with some seriousness.
May be Mark’s lively, breathless text was not just a boring distillation of Matthew, but its origin.
I like to think that St Mark’s name was invoked in the late 1840s when it was decided to found a church here because, they thought his wonderful Gospel took us closely to the events of Jesus’s life.
Now, you might ask, that is all very well, but isn’t our Gospel reading from Matthew this year? Should you be getting on with interpreting that? Well yes, perhaps I should BUT. Let us have a little reminder of this morning’s Epistle reading first. We don’t often get readings from the Second Letter of Peter. This may be because some of its contents even in the 5th AD were disputed as being by Peter himself. But this passage has something about it which is truly wonderful.
Just in reading the text, you hear the words, as if dictated by burley old Peter to the younger Mark; just as in that stained glass window:
we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. For he received from God the Father honour and glory, when there came such a voice to him from the excellent glory, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. And this voice which came from heaven we heard, when we were with him in the holy mount.
It is almost as if this tiny jotting of Mark’s dictation which Mark then later wrote up in his Gospel, is held here in fragmentary form, which some later clerk tidied into a more rambling Epistle about other things, and for a moment, rather than hiding behind the authority of Peter’s name to make some important points about the contemporary Church, for a moment, Peter’s actual voice, sentiments and feelings are conveyed; just as that picture illustrates with such vibrancy and immediateness.
Michael Ramsay was a great Archbishop of the 60s and 70s, before that he as a Theologian of great repute. He wrote one of the most wonderful books of academic scholarship about the Transfiguration. I remember reading it in the late 80s and being moved beyond anything I have ever encountered. John Hapgood, preached at Lord Ramsay’s funeral on the Transfiguration and said, knowing the impact this work had had on Michael Ramsay, that the Transfiguration “was a mirror within which all the events of the Christian mystery are seen together.”
Here is Jesus of his earthly ministry, but this is no earthly experience; here is Jesus of the resurrection; before his death had even happened; here is Jesus who is returning; before he had even gone away. The cloud out of which God speaks, is the cloud of God’s presence, the Ascension and the clouds of Judgement and return.
Peter had glimpsed this, had heard that voice; and for ever after was utterly changed. The significance only made sense after Jesus’s Ascension.
But Peter tells Mark all he can, so that we might know it too.
We are so fortunate in this church that there is much to look at, which tells a story.