Mark 14: 51- 52
By Paul Nyssen
51. A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus. When they seized him, 52. he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.
The young man in Mark’s arrest scene feels, to me, like more than a passing extra: he is anonymous, half-clothed, seized; I assume he was raped and left exposed, which makes him read like someone already living under shame and dispossession. I believe he was a rent boy, which would make this detail hit with even greater force, because it becomes a moment of recognition—a life of being used, stripped of humanity, and then suddenly confronted by the possibility that he is not an object at all, but a sacred person. In that light, his flight into the night is not just panic, but more the collapse of a false identity, and Christ’s own refusal to flee becomes the deeper counterpoint: selflessness, suffering, and resurrection opening a space where the forgotten can be seen and restored.
I link this story to Miyamoto Musashi’s statement that we must sometimes descend into confusion to discover the way to enlightenment. The shock of realisation sent the young man fleeing into the night. The outcome might have been enlightenment; I think it had to be, and the young man became the anonymous patron saint of all those reduced to being a piece of meat for hire. When I was managing youth centres in western Sydney, a colleague who ran a creative arts centre in Sydney showed me an artwork made by one of his young male clients who had been a rent boy. The work was a panel onto which the boy had pasted pictures of meat cut out of a supermarket catalogue. Under each, he had written a description such as “Boy Fourteen-Years-Old Blond Slim Body.” A marketing company later bought the work for a few thousand dollars, which at the time was a lot of money. They obviously knew the importance of what was a statement of the reality of a homeless boy’s life and who just happened to be good-looking. Looks are not always an advantage; they attract the wrong attention, including serious criminals who know that the boy business is big business.
Of course many religious people would scream blasphemy at the suggestion Christ hung out with rent boys. But they are wrong in every way possible. Someone like the boy in Mark’s account of Christ’s arrest is exactly the type of person with whom Christ stands shoulder to shoulder.
