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Devotion by N.T. Wright
And after some days Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us return and visit the brothers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, and see how they are.” Now Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul thought best not to take with them one who had withdrawn from them in Pamphylia and had not gone with them to the work. And there arose a sharp disagreement, so that they separated from each other. Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and departed, having been commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord. And he went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches (Acts 15:36-41).
There is no point beating about the bush with this one. There are times in church work when leaders, including Pastors, really want to knock two people’s heads together and tell them not to be so pig-brained (though actually most pigs wouldn’t dream of behaving like this), and I imagine every generation of readers has felt like that about Paul and Barnabas at this point. In fact, if anyone suggests that Luke, writing this book, is trying to whitewash early church history, or make out that the apostles were fledged angels, they should think again. This is a shameful episode, and the fact that it stands in scripture should not make us afraid to say so. On the contrary, its scriptural status should be interpreted as a sign that the Bible itself is warning us against allowing such a thing to happen. When Paul writes, as he often does in his letters, about the dangers of anger, bursts of rage, and so on, he must many times have looked back on this incident and hung his head in shame.
In case anyone supposes it wasn’t after all as serious as all that, they need to have a look at the word at the beginning of verse 39, the word I have translated ‘a sharp disagreement’. The word in Greek is paroxysmos, when the word is used in a medical context it can mean ‘convulsion’ or refer to someone running a high fever. It carries overtones of severely heightened emotions, red and distorted faces, loud voices, things said that were better left unsaid. A sorry sight.
Part of the trouble is, as usual in this kind of thing, that both men were, in a sense, in the right. Paul was thinking back to what had happened in (Pisidian) Antioch, Iconium, Lystra and Derbe. John Mark hadn’t even, as the Americans say, made it to first base in the Turkish leg of the trip; supposing a mob set on them again? Supposing stones and rocks were flying around once more? It would be much harder for him to run off back to Mum in Jerusalem once he was in the central uplands of southern Turkey. Paul knew he desperately needed people he could rely on totally, whatever happened (look at what he says about Timothy in Philippians 2:19–24!). Is it possible, as well, that there was a suggestion that Mark, a young Jerusalemite, might not have liked the fact that Paul seemed keen on moving out of strictly Jewish circles and into Gentile territory and Gentile evangelism?
At the same time, Barnabas—the ‘son of encouragement’, living up to his name as usual—could no doubt see that John Mark was only a youngster and that he’d simply panicked on the previous trip. He had probably now had a chance to settle down, and needed another opportunity to show he was up to it this time. I’d be prepared to bet that Barnabas had spent a quiet hour or two with John Mark during the visit to Jerusalem. They were after all cousins, according to Colossians 4:10 (quite a few people in the early church were related to one another). He had probably figured out that Mark had matured just a little bit, perhaps grown in his own spirituality as well. So of course he should have a second chance.
For Barnabas himself—just to indulge further in the dangerous game of trying to think inside someone else’s head at the distance of two thousand years and several major changes of culture—there would be anger as well. Paul, after all, had been his protégé. He had introduced him to the Jerusalem apostles when they had all been suspicious of him. He had fetched him from obscurity in Tarsus and given him the chance to become a famous preacher and teacher in Antioch. He had taken the lead in their first missionary expedition, and if Paul had more or less taken over as the chief speaker after that there was still a sense that Barnabas was a senior figure. Paul surely owed him something. Could he not bend on this point?
I doubt if there is a senior church leader anywhere who does not look at this scene and say, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’, or as it may be, ‘There despite the grace of God went I.’ It is all too easy to see. At the same time, we should note—since grace is after all one of Luke’s great themes at this point in the book—that something fresh came out of it all. Two missionary journeys instead of one, with Barnabas and Mark going off to Barnabas’ native Cyprus to consolidate the work there, and Paul taking Silas—a Roman citizen, as it happened, which was going to be important in ways neither of them could have imagined at that point—on a trip which turned out to be far more than a revisit to Syria and Cilicia, but instead a whole new venture into uncharted territory both geographical and theological. (Silas, by the way, is the same person as ‘Silvanus’ who appears in the two letters Paul wrote to Thessalonica, and who is also mentioned in 2 Corinthians 1:19. The God who makes human wrath to serve his praise has done it again (Psalm 76:10). That doesn’t excuse sinful human wrath, of course. It simply shows once again what the gospel message itself massively demonstrates: that God can take the greatest human folly and sin and bring great good from it.
That is a humbling and necessary lesson for the church to learn in each generation. Luke could quite easily have found a less embarrassing way of explaining the new missionary pairings. I have a hunch that he told this shocking little story partly at least because he wanted this lesson to be heard and taken to heart.