RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD
Prayer of the Day: God of mercy, we no longer look for Jesus among the dead, for he is alive and has become the Lord of life. Increase in our minds and hearts the risen life we share with Christ, and help us to grow as your people toward the fullness of eternal life with you, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Mark 16:8.
So ends the gospel of Mark the Evangelist-or does it? To be sure, nearly all biblical scholars agree that the above sentence concludes the original gospel and that vss. 9-20 are later additions to that work. I assume that is why the makers of the lectionary exclude them from our gospel lesson for Easter Sunday. This raises two interesting questions. First, why does the Evangelist end the gospel on such an ambiguous and inconclusive note? Who is the young man dressed in white at the scene of the tomb? An angel? Perhaps, but the text does not say so specifically. Why does the Evangelist not include the resurrection appearances recorded in the other gospels? Did he not know about them? That seems unlikely. The gospel of Mark was written well after 70 C.E. But as our second lesson demonstrates, these accounts of encounters with the resurrected Jesus were commonly known throughout the church as early as 50-60 C.E. when Paul composed his letters. Was the end of the gospel “lost” or was Mark somehow prevented from completing it? That seems unlikely.[1] We are left, I believe, with the conclusion that Mark ended the gospel in precisely the way intended.
Secondly, then, what are we to make of the material in vss. 9-20? My New Testament professors in seminary urged us to ignore them. They are, after all, much later additions and thus further away in time from the “Christ event.” Moreover, they detract from the striking ending the Evangelist gives us and blunts its impact. Disciples of the historical critical method (HCM) as they were, they tended (whether intentional or not) to model an approach to the Bible based on skepticism. The gospels are, after all, not historical documents. They are theological works more concerned with the church’s claims about Jesus than Jesus himself and his teachings. If the way through the gospels to the true Jesus is already fraught, how much more these spurious addendums.
I believe biblical scholarship has left the HCM behind. So also have I. To be clear, I continue to value textual criticism, source criticism, redaction analysis, form criticism and all the other components of HCM. I believe it is important for us to understand how the Bible came to us. Thus, I have no problem with the “historical” and “critical” pieces of HCM. It is the “method” part I have come to reject. I do not view the Bible as a haystack through which one must sift to find the needle of relevant truth. However frustrating to our modernist sensibilities, the Bible is the oldest witness we have to the God of Israel and our Lord, Jesus Christ. So the real question is whether this messy, diverse and contradictory collection of narratives, poems, sermons, parables and sayings composed, written, edited and woven together over centuries of time and stemming from varying historical and cultural contexts manages to “get the God of Israel and Jesus right.” Neither HCM nor any other hermeneutical method can answer that question for us.
That said, I believe there is a way we can respect Mark the Evangelist’s gospel and the startling end to which he brings it while including within its sweep the alternative endings found in vss. 9-20. In order to do that, let us rewind the tape to the beginning of Mark’s gospel. The Evangelist opens his narrative with this stark announcement: “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Mark 1:1. Granted, this “beginning” could refer to the ministry of John the Baptizer whose appearance comes immediately thereafter. But I think it just as likely that the “beginning” refers to the gospel as a whole. In other words, Mark’s entire narrative constitutes but the beginning of the good news. In this respect, Mark is consistent with the other three gospels. John’s gospel ends with the observation that “there are also many other things that Jesus did” and that “if every one of them were written down…. the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” John 21:25. Luke writes a sequel to his gospel demonstrating that the good news of Jesus Christ continues through the ministry of his church. Matthew concludes with the promise that Jesus will be with his disciples to the end of the age. Matthew 28:20.
Mark points us into the future by inviting us to complete his narrative. Obviously, the women must have spoken up at some point. Obviously, the disciples must have been convinced by them to go to Galilee where they encountered the resurrected Christ. If the woman had remained forever silent, if the disciples had remained in hiding, we would not be reading Mark’s gospel. Can we read vss. 9-20 as faithful responses to Mark’s invitation to finish his story? And can we be encouraged by them to further develop the “Old, Old Story” with new episodes of encounters with the resurrected Christ in our own lives and ministries? Will we remain enslaved to our fears and doubts? Or will we find the courage to speak of what we have experienced and step out to meet Jesus where he has promised to meet us?
Here is a response to Jesus’ resurrection that further extends this good news into our literary present.
When Jesus early rose and breathed
The pungent air of new-dug earth,
Passed the stone, and passed the flesh,
Passed the mourners of his death,
(and left them dazed, but following)
He rose with such a limpid flight
As wind or wings could only clutter,
And left no scratches on the world,
No broken twig or parted cloud,
To draw our eyes away from him.
(c. 1972 by Joyce Hernandez) Joyce Hernandez is a teacher, nurse and poet living in Yakima, Washington whose publications include The Bone Woman Poems (c. 2009, pub. by Allied Arts and Minuteman Press). She is also, coincidentally, my sister.
[1] For those with a yen for conspiracy theories, the late Columbia University professor, Morton Smith’s book The Secret Gospel, provides an intriguing, if unpersuasive, explanation for Mark’s abrupt ending. His suggestion is that the gospel was abridged because it was too shocking and scandalous for the early church. You can read a thorough account of Morton’s book, his conclusions and the evidence with which he supports it in “The Secret Gospel,” an article in the Atlantic, April 2024.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 