Sister Abigail Hester

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  • The Gospel of Mark (Part 1)

    🌿 The Gospel of Mark

    A Franciscan Clarean Commentary — by Sister Abigail Hester, OFC

    💫 The Wild Beginning

    Mark’s Gospel doesn’t start with cozy Christmas nostalgia. There’s no manger, no angels cooing over a baby. It starts in the wilderness — with a wild prophet, wearing camel hair, shouting about repentance.

    That’s classic Franciscan energy right there: God showing up in the margins, barefoot and untamed. The wilderness is where illusions fall away and simplicity becomes holy clarity. Mark’s Jesus bursts onto the scene not from a palace or temple, but from the desert. The message: God begins again on the edge of everything.

    🔥 The Urgency of Love

    Modern scholars call Mark’s writing “immediate.” Everything happens right now.
    From a Franciscan Clarean lens, this isn’t anxiety — it’s holy immediacy.
    The Gospel of Mark is breathless because love is urgent. The world is suffering, and compassion can’t wait until we’ve got our theology perfectly sorted.

    Francis and Clare understood that same pulse: mend what’s broken today. Feed the hungry now. Reconcile before the sun sets. Mark’s “immediately” is a heartbeat of divine action.

    💔 The Suffering Christ

    Mark’s Jesus bleeds early and often. He’s misunderstood, exhausted, betrayed, and finally screams in forsaken agony on the cross. Scholars see this as Mark’s theology of the Suffering Messiah — God revealed in pain, not power.

    We, too, know that mystery.
    The Franciscan Clarean path doesn’t chase prestige; it sits with the broken. It whispers that holiness often looks like vulnerability, like compassion that costs something.
    Mark’s Gospel turns empire’s logic upside down: greatness is service; glory is love poured out.

    🕊️ The Disciples and the Dance of Misunderstanding

    Let’s be honest — the disciples in Mark are a bit of a mess. They misunderstand nearly everything. They argue about greatness right after Jesus predicts his death.

    But Mark isn’t mocking them; he’s revealing us.
    Discipleship isn’t a test of IQ — it’s a willingness to keep walking, keep trying, keep saying yes even when you don’t get it.

    That’s the way of Clare: simple, stubborn faith that keeps loving even in the dark.
    That’s the way of Francis: joyfully failing forward in the company of Christ.

    🪞 The Messianic Secret

    Jesus tells people to keep quiet about his miracles. Why?
    Modern scholars call this the Messianic Secret. Mark’s Jesus refuses to be turned into a political slogan or celebrity. He wants hearts transformed, not crowds manipulated.

    For Franciscan Clareans, that’s spiritual humility in action — the quiet revolution of love without ego.
    Holiness doesn’t need to shout. It just is.

    🌍 The Politics of Compassion

    Mark’s story unfolds under Rome’s shadow. Power, greed, and violence define the world Jesus walks through. When he heals, eats with sinners, or touches lepers, he’s not just being “nice.” He’s resisting empire with compassion.

    Modern liberation and narrative scholars like Ched Myers and Amy-Jill Levine help us see that Mark’s Jesus is confronting systems — unbinding the “strong man” of domination.

    Francis and Clare did the same in their own century: they defied empire and Church wealth by living voluntary poverty and unarmed love. The Gospel of Mark is their manual for holy rebellion — the art of sacred disobedience.

    ✝️ The Silence at the Tomb

    The earliest ending — Mark 16:8 — leaves us hanging:

    “They fled from the tomb, trembling and bewildered… and said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

    That’s the punchline of the Gospel. No resurrection appearances. No tidy closure. Just silence and fear — and an invitation.

    Mark ends with a cliffhanger because the story isn’t finished.
    It’s our turn to proclaim resurrection — through mercy, through courage, through joy.

    Franciscan Clareans pick up that unfinished sentence every day.
    Our life is the continuation of the Gospel.
    Our compassion is its new chapter.

    🌈 Reflection

    Mark’s Gospel is not a book about belief — it’s a summons to transformation.
    It’s wild, fast, apocalyptic, and full of holy surprise.
    In a world obsessed with control and comfort, Mark calls us to holy poverty, fearless love, and radical hope.

  • Standing Against Violence, Standing for Democracy

    On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University. I need to be clear from the outset: I do not agree with Charlie Kirk’s ideology, his rhetoric, or the policies he so often championed. Many of his views, in my understanding, were harmful and divisive.

    And yet — in a democracy, he had the right to hold and express those views. That right is fundamental. Disagreement is not a license to kill. Violence is not an argument; it is an annihilation. When we choose murder over debate, we abandon democracy itself.

    Murder Silences Us All

    Kirk’s assassination is not just an attack on one man. It is an attack on the fragile fabric of public discourse. Violence sends a single chilling message: that persuasion has failed, and only force remains. That message corrodes democracy and endangers us all, regardless of political affiliation.

    If we normalize responding to speech with bullets, then none of us — left, right, or center — are safe.

    Guns and the Urgency of Reform

    This tragedy again highlights a crisis we have refused to face: America’s epidemic of gun violence. Every shooting, whether political or random, chips away at our collective safety. Every murder makes the world smaller, colder, more afraid.

    I am not calling for the end of responsible gun ownership. But I am calling for common-sense laws that honor both liberty and life:

    Universal background checks to keep weapons out of dangerous hands.

    Red flag laws to intervene when someone poses a clear risk.

    Safe storage requirements to prevent guns from falling into the wrong hands.

    Waiting periods to cool moments of rage before they turn irreversible.

    These are not radical ideas. They are life-preserving ones.

    Choosing Life Over Violence

    As a Franciscan Clarean, my faith teaches me that every human life bears the image of God. That truth applies to our friends and to our enemies, to those we admire and to those we cannot stand. It applied to Charlie Kirk. It applies to those who mourn him. It applies to every life cut short by a trigger pulled too soon.

    So today I stand — not with Charlie Kirk’s politics, but with his right to live, to speak, to be heard without fear of being gunned down. I stand against murder, against gun violence, and against the lie that death is the answer to disagreement.

    A Prayer for Us All

    I pray for Charlie Kirk’s family in their grief.
    I pray for his supporters, shaken and afraid.
    I pray for a nation that seems to be forgetting how to disagree without killing.
    And I pray that we will finally have the courage to enact sensible gun reform, so that fewer lives end in tragedy.

    May we learn to listen, to argue, to resist — but never to murder.
    May we remember that democracy lives only when we choose life over death.

  • Holier Than Honest, Holier Than Hype: A Reply (with receipts)

    In response to the following linked article:

    In Ignorance Concerning the New Testament

    The rebuttal to my article tries to swat away questions of New Testament authorship with some familiar apologetic flourishes: Satan made you doubt, Plato had fewer manuscripts, and Peter could totally spell. Let’s sort through this — with both humor and actual scholarship.

    1. “Satan made you doubt.”

    Apparently the devil isn’t busy enough with wars, greed, and injustice — he’s moonlighting as a textual critic in a dusty library, whispering, “Pssst… Mark 16:9–20 wasn’t original.”

    But Christians noticed textual variants long before Bart Ehrman. Origen (3rd century) admitted, “The differences among the manuscripts have become great” (Commentary on Matthew 15.14). Jerome complained about “various readings” in the Latin Bible. Even Augustine admitted some texts circulated “with additions” (On Christian Doctrine 2.12).

    So if doubt comes from Satan, then apparently Origen, Jerome, and Augustine were on Beelzebub’s payroll too.

    1. “But Plato, Aristotle, Homer!”

    Yes, Plato has 7 manuscripts, Aristotle 49, Homer 643. The New Testament boasts over 5,000 Greek manuscripts. But as NT scholar Craig Blomberg (an evangelical) admits, “The abundance of manuscripts does not mean we have no variants. Quite the contrary — it means we have hundreds of thousands” (The Historical Reliability of the New Testament, 2016).

    Quantity of manuscripts is evidence of popularity, not necessarily authorship. Nobody’s eternal destiny hangs on whether Homer actually wrote the Iliad.

    1. “We know who wrote the Gospels — their names are in Acts!”

    That’s like saying, “Of course J.K. Rowling wrote Shakespeare; her name shows up in a library record.” The Gospels are anonymous. The earliest copies don’t say “The Gospel According to Matthew.” The titles appear in the late 2nd century.

    As Raymond Brown (a Catholic scholar) put it bluntly: “The present titles, which ascribe the Gospel to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are not part of the original works but were added later” (Introduction to the New Testament, 1997).

    Acts mentioning “Matthew the tax collector” proves only that someone named Matthew was a tax collector — not that he wrote a 28-chapter Greek Gospel.

    1. “Paul wrote them all. Different style? Just handwriting mood swings.”

    The “multi-individuality of handwriting” defense is creative, but irrelevant. Scholars don’t base authorship on penmanship alone. They examine vocabulary, theology, and historical setting.

    For instance, Romans and Galatians pulse with Paul’s urgency. Ephesians and Colossians present a cosmic Christology and more structured Greek. That’s why most critical scholars (and even some evangelicals) classify them as “Deutero-Pauline.” Luke Timothy Johnson notes: “The differences in vocabulary, style, and theology are too great to ignore” (The Writings of the New Testament, 2010).

    That doesn’t make them fraudulent; pseudonymous writing was common in antiquity. It simply means the Pauline “school” carried forward his theology.

    1. “The Fathers quoted Paul, so that settles it.”

    Yes, Clement, Ignatius, and Polycarp cite letters attributed to Paul. But citing a text shows its authority, not its authorship. Eusebius himself (4th century) admitted debates about certain letters (Ecclesiastical History 3.25).

    Patristic testimony proves that by 100–150 CE, churches revered certain letters. It doesn’t prove Paul’s hand wrote each one.

    1. “Peter could spell. Show me a verse that says he couldn’t!”

    This is theological Uno: reverse card. The burden of proof isn’t on me to show Peter couldn’t spell. Acts 4:13 literally calls Peter and John agrammatoi (“uneducated”). That raises a fair question: how likely is it they wrote polished Greek treatises?

    Even conservative scholar Ben Witherington admits: “1 Peter’s Greek is too sophisticated for a Galilean fisherman… The hand of a secretary is almost certainly involved” (Letters and Homilies for Hellenized Christians, 2006).

    So sure, Peter could “spell” — with help. Inspiration doesn’t mean every apostle suddenly got Rosetta Stone.

    1. “But John’s Gospel and Revelation sound alike!”

    Actually, they don’t. The Gospel of John has elegant Greek; Revelation reads like someone who struggled with grammar. That’s why Dionysius of Alexandria (3rd century) argued they had different authors (Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. 7.25).

    Modern scholarship agrees. Craig Koester notes: “The differences in style and vocabulary are stark” (Revelation, Anchor Bible, 2014).

    If they’re the same author, then he went from writing like a philosopher to writing like Yoda.

    1. “You’re transgender, so you can’t be Christian.”

    This isn’t scholarship; it’s a playground taunt. My gender identity has nothing to do with whether Mark 16’s “long ending” was original. Attacking the critic instead of engaging the evidence is the definition of ad hominem.

    Conclusion: Faith, Facts, and Fear

    The New Testament is sacred, beloved, and central to Christian life. But pretending it dropped from heaven leather-bound in King James English doesn’t honor it — it cheapens it.

    Admitting that the Gospels are anonymous, that some Pauline letters are disputed, and that later scribes added a few passages doesn’t mean Christianity is false. It means the Bible has a history, just like every other ancient text.

    God’s Word isn’t fragile. If faith shatters the moment we admit Mark’s long ending was tacked on later, maybe the problem isn’t the manuscript tradition — maybe it’s our fear of facing the very human story of how God’s Word came to us.