Sermons
March 31, 2024 (Easter)
“I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out.”
Mark 16:1-8
I’m not a real big sports fan—other than college basketball, baseball, hockey…and curling. Most of those I am happy to watch on TV, but not hockey.
It’s just not possible for the camera to be in the right place when the fight starts. And there’s always a fight. I think they’ve done a bit to reduce that over the years, and fighters do have to do their time in the penalty box, but hockey is an intense game and there is at the very least a good amount of aggressive shoving of opposing players into the walls of the rink.
But if you’re watching on TV, chances are you’re going to miss it—just like we’re almost never looking in the right place when lightning strikes.
That’s sort of how I feel reading the resurrection narrative in Mark’s Gospel…at least the original one, what we’re looking at today.
Many scholars do believe this is how Mark’s Gospel originally ended. If you’ve read the end of Mark you’ll have noticed that there is quite a bit more after verse 8—maybe a “shorter ending” and a “longer ending,” or maybe it just goes right on with verse 9.[1] But those who study the Gospel of Mark for a living have noticed that the language and style of verses 9-20 are nothing like the rest of the Gospel, but actually look like they were lifted and adapted from the other three Gospels. Scholars who have worked with the most ancient manuscripts we have of Mark’s Gospel[2] tell us that they end with verse 8—but people who have studied the writings of the early church fathers, like Irenaeus and Hippolytus, say these writings demonstrate knowledge of the longer ending, so if it was added, it was done by the second or third century.
We will probably never know for sure, until the day we meet up with Mark in the New Jerusalem, and we can ask him.
But if verses 9-20 were added later, which I and most scholars suspect they were, they were added for a perfectly understandable reason: The original ending of Mark, at verse 8, is unsatisfying.
Nobody sees Jesus himself in these eight verses. There’s only an open, empty tomb, and a young man who may or may not be an angel, who tells the woman Jesus has been raised and will see them and the disciples and Peter in Galilee. The women run away terrified, and don’t tell anybody what they have seen. And that’s it.
It’s unsatisfying, open-ended, ambiguous—there’s no closure.
“Closure” is what the women were seeking when they went to Jesus’ tomb that Sunday morning. They had one more thing they needed to do for Jesus: anoint his body properly after the hurry-up burial he’d gotten before the sun set on Friday. After that, it was all over, and they could move on. They were looking for closure.[3]
But there was one thing that needed to happen first. Somebody was going to have to open the tomb for them. It was tightly closed, sealed with a huge stone that even the three of them working together would not have been able to move.
As they walked along, they were talking among themselves, wondering who they’d be able to get to open the tomb, so they could get to Jesus’ body, so they could have closure. When they get there and look up, they see that the tomb is open—but there is no closure to be had, because the body they came to anoint was gone! In its place sits a young man—was he an angel, or just a kid who happened to drift by and sit down in the cool cave for a moment’s rest?—and the young man tells the women that Jesus has been raised from the dead.
They run away terrified, and it says they don’t tell anybody anything.
But if that’s true, how did we get from there to here, two millennia later, dressed in our finest and proclaiming, “The Lord is risen indeed!”? Like I said, it’s an unsatisfying ending, and I can totally understand why somebody would want to add some resurrection appearances and a commissioning to it. The longer ending provides some closure, puts a bracket on Jesus’ time on earth—he was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.
But I would argue that closure is precisely the opposite of what Mark wanted us to have at the end of his Gospel.
Closure is a tomb sealed with a stone, the body inside left to return to dust, just as it says in Genesis. Closure is Peter in desolation, lying awake nights remembering that, after he promised he would stay with Jesus even if it meant dying with him, he turned around and instead denied knowing him—not once, but three times. It can’t be changed; he just has to live with it, and there is no chance for reconciliation.
Closure is everybody getting up and going back to the lives they had lived—as far as they could—before they had been captivated by Jesus, putting their time wandering with their Teacher behind them, settling into the routines of ordinary life.
Closure is exactly the opposite of what Mark wants us to get out of his Gospel. He neither needs nor wants his story to be wrapped up and tied with a bow. Mark’s story is open-ended; verse 8 stops in mid-sentence, even.[4]
It is interesting that Mark doesn’t, in this original ending, include any accounts of the resurrected Jesus appearing to anyone. But we know he can’t have been unaware of such appearances, because Paul, who wrote his first letter to the Corinthians twenty or thirty years before Mark’s Gospel, relates the tradition that, even at that early date, was being passed from one believer to another, one community to another:
…that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time. …Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.[5]
If that tradition was already circulating by the time Mark wrote his Gospel, then he knew about the post-resurrection appearances—maybe he was even there for one of them—so why didn’t he include them in his Gospel?
I think it goes back to that closure business.
If Jesus appears to some of his disciples after he was raised—the implication is, perhaps, that once he ascended into heaven there would be no more appearances (Paul’s experience on the Damascus Road being a notable exception), no more in-person encounters with Jesus. Once we move a generation or two beyond the original followers of Jesus, that chapter of the church’s life with Jesus is clearly closed.
What if Mark actually intended to reject the notion that Jesus no longer appears to his followers, to reject the idea that there is some closure to Jesus’ life among us?
The tomb is open, and Jesus has been turned loose. He goes ahead of you, and if you will follow him, you’ll see him, just like he said you would.
Easter isn’t about closure. Easter is about an open tomb, an open door, an open invitation, an open life.
[1] The NRSV, NIV, and Common English Bible all have verses 9-20 bracketed off and a note that they were most likely added later. The King James Version does not bracket them off, but continues right on, although the Scofield Reference Edition, originally published in 1909, does note that vv. 9-20 are not found in the most ancient manuscripts.
[2] We do not, at present, have any original manuscripts of anything in the Bible. The closest we have gotten thus far have been second- or third-generation copies. The Dead Sea Scrolls contain some manuscripts older than anything we had had up to the time of their discovery, but even these are not originals.
[3] This “closure” is something I don’t believe is real or to be expected. You can’t just take a traumatic experience or a loss, shut a door on it, and go on with life as though it never happened. Life doesn’t work that way.
[4] This is one way to read verse 8, because it does indeed end with the conjunction gár (for). But New Testament Greek is an inflected language; the part of speech of any given word in a Greek sentence is indicated by its ending, which means that words can be in almost any order and be understood.
[5] 1 Corinthians 15:3b-7. Note that Paul describes Jesus appearing to “the twelve,” where Matthew and Luke both take to calling them “the eleven disciples,” because both relate Judas’ death after he betrays Jesus. Note also that Mark says nothing about Judas at all once the betrayal has been accomplished.