Today is the feast day of St. Mark, the Evangelist, the author of the second Gospel.  Mark was young when Jesus was crucified and resurrected and probably never met Jesus in the flesh.

But he was obviously gifted and tasked with writing a Gospel directed to Gentile converts.

The first reading today stresses the need for humility.    This is something that I (and I suspect many others) struggle with.

It surely must have been a humbling task to write a Gospel recounting both the humanity and divinity of Christ.  Whenever I read Mark’s Gospel, I am always struck with the clarity and concision of his writing.

We are all good at something.  It’s no sin to assess one’s strengths and take on tasks best suited to them in order to help build God’s kingdom on Earth.  But true humility is recognizing that those strengths are not are own, but are given to us by God and to be used for God’s purposes.