He Is Useful to Me

The ship came in at Perga, on the south coast of what is now Turkey, and one of the three men on it went home.

Luke gives it one sentence. After setting sail from Paphos, Paul and his companions came to Perga in Pamphylia, where John left them to return to Jerusalem.

No reason. No scene at the dock. No word about what anyone said. The young man had come along as their helper, and partway through the trip he turned around.

His name was John, also called Mark. His mother had a house in Jerusalem big enough for a crowd to pray in. His cousin was Barnabas, one of the two men he was traveling with. The other was Paul.

Barnabas is worth knowing before the story goes any further. His real name was Joseph. The apostles gave him a nickname, and Luke stops to translate it. Barnabas (meaning Son of Encouragement). The first thing he does in the record is sell a field and lay the money down for people who needed it. Later Luke calls him a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith.

And the most important thing he ever did, he did for Paul.

When Paul first came to Jerusalem after his turn on the Damascus road, the church there wanted nothing to do with him. They had good reason. He had spent the last stretch of his life hunting them. They were all afraid of him, not believing that he was a disciple. Every door was shut, and every one of them was shut for a sensible reason.

Then Barnabas brought him to the apostles. He stood up and told the story for him: what Paul had seen, what had been said to him, how he had spoken in Damascus. He vouched for the man nobody would vouch for. He put his own name next to Paul’s when Paul’s name was the last one anybody wanted.

So when Mark got off the ship at Perga and went home, Barnabas was the one person in that party who knew exactly what it looks like when everyone gives up on someone.

The trip went on without him. It was hard. The record of it includes being run out of town and Paul being stoned and left for dead. Then the two men came back, and some time passed.

Some time later Paul said to Barnabas, “Let us go back and visit the brothers in every town where we proclaimed the word of the Lord, to see how they are doing.”

Barnabas said yes, and he said one more thing. He wanted to take Mark.

Paul said no. But Paul thought it best not to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not accompanied them in the work.

It’s worth slowing down here before taking a side, because the text doesn’t take one. Paul wasn’t being petty. He had just come through a trip where people tried to kill him. He needed someone who would be there on the bad day, and the last time the bad days started, Mark wasn’t. That’s a reasonable judgment. Plenty of good people would make it.

Barnabas made a different one. He had once been the only man in a room who would stand next to someone with a bad record. He wasn’t going to stop now, and this time it was family.

Their disagreement was so sharp that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.

Two good men, who had been through everything together, split up over a young man who quit. The text doesn’t make either of them the villain. Paul goes one way and strengthens churches. Barnabas goes another, back to Cyprus, the island he was from. He took the young man home with him, and kept him in the work.

That’s the last time Barnabas appears in the story Luke is telling. He sails off the page with Mark beside him.

The rest of it happens years later, in other books.

Paul wrote letters. Some of them were written from prison. In one of them, to the church at Colossae, he sends greetings from the men who are with him, and one of the names is Mark. Mark the cousin of Barnabas. You have already received instructions about him: If he comes to you, welcome him.

Paul, of all people, is telling a church to make room for Mark. In another short letter, to a man named Philemon, Mark’s name is on a list Paul calls my fellow workers.

And then the last letter Paul ever wrote, by most accounts, near the end of his life. He’s in chains. Most of his people have gone. He writes to Timothy, and near the end there’s a short, plain line.

Only Luke is with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, because he is useful to me in the ministry.

Get Mark. The young man who once left them at the dock is the one Paul asks for at the end.

The text never tells us what happened in between. It doesn’t say how Mark changed, or whether he changed at all, or whether he and Paul ever talked about Perga. It doesn’t say whether Paul and Barnabas made it up. All it shows is the two ends. At one end, Paul won’t take him. At the other, Paul sends for him by name. In between are the years Barnabas kept him close, when there was no promise it would come to anything.

Paul mentions Barnabas once more, too, in a letter to Corinth, and he puts their two names side by side. Or are Barnabas and I the only apostles who must work for a living? Whatever the split cost them, it didn’t turn into a feud on the page.

Barnabas never got to see the letter to Timothy, as far as the record shows. He kept believing in Mark during the part of the story where believing was the unpopular position, and he didn’t live in the book long enough to be proven right.

Someone who left once is not someone who leaves. Barnabas seems to have known that from the day he walked Paul into a room full of frightened people. He knew it again on the day he sailed for Cyprus with a cousin nobody else would take.

Where this meets your week

When they quit in the middle. A program, a marriage, a job, a faith, a plan the two of you made together. The one you’re waiting for got partway in and turned around, and you don’t know why. Luke doesn’t say why Mark left. Nobody ever recorded his reason, and Barnabas took him back without one. If you’ve been waiting for an explanation before you let yourself hope again, set that condition down this week. Write one line to them about something that has nothing to do with what they left.

When the people around you have given up. Somebody you respect thinks you’re foolish for still believing in them. Maybe they have a point, the way Paul had a point. You don’t have to win that argument, and you don’t have to make the other person wrong. Barnabas and Paul went separate ways and both kept working. The next time someone says the one you’re waiting for will never change, don’t defend them and don’t fight. Just say, “I’m not done with them,” and leave it there.

When you can’t prove you’re right. There may be years where nothing you do looks like it’s working. Barnabas sailed off the page before Paul ever wrote get Mark. He didn’t get the ending. He just kept the young man in the work. Find one small, ordinary way to keep the one you’re waiting for in your life this week: a seat saved, a recipe sent, a name kept on the list.

When they’re the one in the room nobody trusts. Every family has one. The one whose name makes everybody tense. Barnabas once walked into a room where everyone was afraid of the man beside him, and he told that man’s story out loud. At the next gathering where their name comes up, say one true, good thing about them, and stop.

Tell one person who quit something that you still think they’re useful.

Not a speech about potential. Not a reminder of what they walked away from. One sentence, the kind Paul finally wrote: you’re useful to me. Say what for, if you can. Help with the garden, the way they explain things, the way the kids light up when they come. Send it this week. Then don’t ask for anything back.

The apostles gave Joseph his nickname, and Luke stopped the story to translate it. Son of Encouragement.

He took Mark and sailed for Cyprus. Years later, from a prison, the other man asked for Mark by name.