Nobody Writes Down Their Worst Moment

“A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.”— Mark 14:51–52

Every writer makes choices about what to leave out.

We choose the stories that show us at our best — or at least at our most redeemable. We omit the moments that are simply embarrassing. Not sinful, not dramatic. Just small and humiliating and ours.

Mark didn’t do that.

Hidden inside the Gospel of Mark, wedged between the arrest of Jesus and his trial, are two verses that appear in no other gospel. A young man following the mob in the dark, wrapped only in a linen cloth. They grab him. He wriggles free, leaves the cloth behind, and runs — completely naked — into the night.

Most scholars believe that young man was Mark himself.

Think about what that means. Mark wrote this gospel. He controlled every word of it. He could have left these two verses out entirely and no one would have known. Instead, he put himself in his own story at his absolute worst — not as a martyr, not as a broken man who later found courage, but as a man who ran away naked from the scene of the most important night in human history.

Why would anyone do that?

To understand, we need to know what that night looked like. It was Passover — a full moon hung over Jerusalem, flooding the olive groves with silver light. Into that light came Judas and his crowd: torches, swords, clubs. They were hunting a man who had never once raised his hand in violence, and they came armed as though they expected a war. When they seized Jesus and began moving him through the city, the moonlight caught the metal of their weapons.

Mark had been asleep at his house — the same house where the Last Supper had been held just hours before. He woke to the sound of that crowd. He didn’t stop to dress. He threw a linen cloth over himself and ran toward the noise, some desperate impulse telling him he had to warn Jesus, had to do something. But Jesus was already taken.

So Mark followed at a distance, hiding in the shadows, the full moon making that nearly impossible. When they spotted him — this strange figure wrapped in a sheet, trailing behind at the edges of the torchlight — they grabbed him too. And he left the sheet and ran.

He left the sheet and ran.

Now read the verses that follow. Jesus, in front of the same crowd, with the same weapons, with his hands bound — does not run. He answers their questions quietly. He is moved through one courtroom and then another. He is mocked, struck, spat on. He does not run.

This is the contrast Mark wanted us to feel.

Earlier that night, in the Garden, Jesus had prayed in a way that should unsettle every comfortable reading of the crucifixion: Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me. The cross was not inevitable in the sense that Jesus had no choice. He had a choice. The prayer makes that unmistakably clear. He could have walked away from Jerusalem. He could have done what Mark did — left everything behind and disappeared into the darkness.

He didn’t.

Not because he was unafraid. The gospel writers don’t hide his anguish — he was deeply distressed, troubled, overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. He was not a man walking calmly toward martyrdom. He was a man who saw exactly what was coming and felt it fully. And then he prayed the most costly prayer in history: Not my will, but yours.

Mark understood this contrast more deeply than perhaps anyone else, because Mark had lived the other side of it. He knew what it felt like to run. He knew the shame of that naked sprint through the moonlit streets. And he knew that Jesus, who could have done exactly the same thing, chose not to.

So he wrote it down. Both things. His own flight and Jesus’ resolve, side by side, separated by only a few verses — so that anyone who read it could feel the distance between the two.

There is a quiet theology buried in Mark’s honesty. The gospel is not the story of strong people following a strong leader. It is the story of people who ran — and a Savior who didn’t.

Mark wrote his worst moment into Scripture so that Jesus’ faithfulness would look as large as it actually was.

What would it mean for us to stop hiding our worst moments from ourselves, not to perform vulnerability, but to see how much grace it takes to cover what we actually are, and how faithfully it was given.

The deeper your valley, the taller the mountain it reveals.