The Lie That No One Is Worth Trusting

If you’re new, welcome! I am walking through Mark’s gospel of Jesus, one verse and scene at a time.

More Like Jesus is a slow walk through Mark’s gospel. Most Bible studies fly over the text and see major features. By going slow, we can discover things we’d otherwise miss.

If you’re new, you can start at the beginning here and just click next to catch up.

Today, we begin the final scene of the second season.

In our final scene, the needs around Jesus seem endless.

Crowds press in from every direction, as the broken and the desperate try to touch him. Some religious authorities have begun his death. The establishment wants him gone and the crowds want him to solve their problems.

Everybody wants something.

The whole scene is dangerous, like a drowning man who, in his desperation, brings down both himself and his helper.

Yet nothing seems to move Jesus. The danger doesn’t force him out of the public eye. When the unclean spirits fall at his feet and cry out the truest thing said all day—You are the Son of God—he orders them silent. Nothing in the scene seems to move him, perhaps because he doesn’t lean on anyone to tell him who he is.

A man who needs nothing from the crowd has nothing to protect. So Jesus doesn’t retreat to safety or thin his circle down to the few who won’t wound him. He doesn’t hire bodyguards to walk him down to the sea.

In fact, he does the opposite. He models what he just asked of the man with the withered hand in the previous scene: stand up, here, in front of everyone. Free of the need to guard himself, he can simply be present—and presence is the thing that actually helps.

A Harvard-trained psychologist, after thirty years of practice, says the same: what heals people isn’t technique but presence, one nervous system meeting another.^[i] Honesty. Vulnerability. No one pretending.

My first instinct is the reverse of his. If you’ve lived long enough, you develop a conviction that getting close to other people is how you get hurt. There’s an old joke among those in ministry that goes, I love people, but it’s just people I can’t stand. The joke reflects the arrows a pastor takes. So like many people, pastors learn to protect themselves. The irony is, the more you protect yourself, the less you’re able to help others.

Underneath the guarding sits a question. What do you do when everyone eventually disappoints?

What changes the internal equation is not finding people who won’t fail you. It’s that underneath all of them stands one who doesn’t—who has never once betrayed, abandoned, or walked out the door. Build on him, and everyone else’s failures stop holding so much weight. The crowd stops having a vote.

The question threaded under the entire sequence finally emerges: will I trust him? You don’t need a risk-free life. You just need to be willing to trust someone beside yourself.

Remember, at this point, the disciples didn’t know who Jesus was. They couldn’t say, well I trust him because he’s without sin. He’s perfect.

Perhaps you don’t really know this to be true yet, either. And that’s okay—the trusting comes before the knowledge.

If you say yes to Jesus, you may find you will become strangely hard to threaten or offend by criticism, by doubt, by loss, or even by obscurity. It is what the disciples are about to learn: a self that stands on Jesus starts to become like Jesus, who no longer needs the room’s approval.

And one last thing: the trust question may feel solitary. But a “yes” does not stop. It turns outward. Having found the one worth leaning on, you become free as Jesus is to turn toward the very people you were once bracing against. In the end, the one that needs nothing from the crowd is the only one with anything to give it.

As we shift to the next season, the disciples will begin to see this. What may start as a private matter of the heart turns out to involve other people. The needs of other people is not a task added onto trust, but its destination.

Wesley named it three centuries ago: the gospel of Christ, he wrote, knows “no holiness but social holiness.”^[ii] Solitary faith was never the offer.

The Lie: No one is worth trusting. If everyone eventually disappoints, why lean on anyone at all?

The Wound: “Can I really trust no one—not even Jesus?”

The Real Issue: I’ve been betrayed too many times to believe anyone is actually good.

The Invitation: Every human may fail me, but Jesus never will.

^[i] Tara Cousineau, Substack note, July 2026, https://substack.com/@drtaracousineau/note/c-289228805. Dr. Cousineau is a Harvard-trained clinical psychologist on staff at Harvard University’s Counseling and Mental Health Service.

^[ii] John Wesley, preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (1739).

This is the last scene of season 2, The Way to Trust. The next season is 3: The Way to Follow.

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