One of my favorite moments in the Gospels is in the Gospel of Mark. The authorities arrest Jesus and everyone deserts him and flees. Then this line: “A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.” Mark is by far the most sparse of the Gospels, so this moment isn’t just strange in its own right—it’s a level of precise, tangential narrative detail that you find nowhere else in Mark, apparently totally gratuitous in the otherwise hurried telling of the tale.
I once asked a New Testament scholar about this moment. He told me: “Scholars have long been puzzled by that naked man.”
I am surely the only person who thinks this but I find it to be one of the most beautiful lines in the Gospels. It feels to me like its own allegory about love, a bit different than Paul’s version: Love is embarrassing, love flees. It’s the spareness of the mystery, I think, that gets me. There is something humane and important about the detail, which makes me think of Melville’s Pip at sea, and lonesomeness, and fear, and abandonment, and dignity, and the smallness of the self and the bigness of the world. And it’s funny, because naked people running are funny. It makes me think of our funny little tragedy: The soul is eternal and the body ain’t.
We never hear from the naked man again in Mark or anywhere else in the New Testament. We follow the hero. And the magic of the messiah is interesting, maybe endlessly interesting if you let it be—but also unknowable, at least to poor me. The man who runs away and leaves his linen cloth behind: That is a story that I know in my belly.