Scripture: Mark 16:1–8
Blade Runner.
Inception.
Doubt.
AI.
The Fellowship of the Ring.
Anyone know what all of these movies have in common? At the end of each, after a couple of hours of build-up and set-up to the big reveal of the conclusion, their stories are left…unresolved. The credits roll, and you have as many questions as answers:
Is Deckard a replicant?
Will the top keep spinning, or fall over?
Did the priest actually commit the crime?
Did David become a real boy?
Will we ever see Gandalf again?
Some of you have no idea what I am talking about, but others of you have left a movie theater after watching one of these films and asked, “What just happened?” We had a long conversation in the Two-Way [Sermon Discussion Group] about this last week. We determined that some of us think that this ambiguity at the end of the story is…kind of awesome! Some folks love the openness, the conversations they invite afterwards, and enjoy the lack of resolution.
And for others, it is totally unsatisfying. I had a conversation with a colleague a few weeks ago and she shared about her love for Hallmark movies. She loves a good open-ended movie like a lot of folks, but there are times when she needs to know exactly what is going to happen. She will start watching a Hallmark movie in the middle of it, never having seen it before, with no clue who the characters are, or what has happened for the last hour…because five minutes in she knows exactly how it is going to end. She appreciates the predictability and comfort of knowing what is going to happen.
Which I can appreciate. The Lunch and Learn finished their Lenten study this week, in which we asked where in our life we are yearning for certainty. Our physical health. World events. How much longer we have to live on this earth! There is something about us that wants that predictability and certainty and clarity and the comfort that it all gives us. Not having that is hard: when we are sick, when the news terrifies us, when we want to live a legacy of what is important to us. There is a reason why Hallmark is so popular: when so much of life is unpredictable, there is value in having 90 minutes of predictability.
The Gospel of Mark is…well, let’s say it is not a Hallmark movie. Perhaps my favorite quote from the Two-Way conversation last week is that Mark is “kind of not very satisfying.” But remember it has been that way from the beginning. Think way back to Christmas, and the “Christmas story” of Mark. Or lack of Christmas story. Remember, Mark has none of the stuff that makes the Christmas story feel like the Christmas story. His is the Gospel with zero shepherds. Zero wise men. Zero stable or star or frankincense or myrrh. Zero baby Jesus. Then, along the way, Mark is the Gospel that skips the Sermon on the Mount. Leaves out the Good Samaritan. Gives us no foot-washing story.
And, if all of that was not enough, look at Mark’s Easter story. Matthew’s is 20 verses long…Luke’s 53…John’s 56… and Mark’s is 8! There is no Mary softly crying in the garden. There is no Emmaus walk where Jesus appears on the road. No invitation to Peter to “feed my sheep.” No Great Commission. No women running back to the disciples, shouting “He is Risen!” In fact, in these whole 8 verses, there is NO JESUS!!!! Verse 8 in Mark 16 ends with these incredibly unsatisfying words: “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.” Scholar William Placher writes that even Mark’s grammar here is weird, that the way his last sentence is structured twists the syntax around in a weird way so that the Gospel sounds like it ends in the middle of the sentence.
What? I can literally remember where I was when I first read this passage and really understood the weirdness of it. (OK, total preacher geek. I know…Some people remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, or when 9-11 happened…I remember where I was when I first read the ending of the Gospel of Mark). I remember I was lying in my bed at home, reading my devotional reading for the day. It was probably in late high school or early college, and I was reading a thick Good News Bible with a red cover. And I read the end of Mark and thought that there must be a misprint. It’s like the credits were rolling too early. Easter is full of so much huge and amazing story, and Mark’s Gospel…just kind of ends without resolution. The Blade Runner edition of the Gospels.
Well, it kind of ends, and it kind of doesn’t. The other weird thing that I thought when I read this as a teenager was this extra stuff that the Gospel adds to the end. Most scholars believe that Mark was the first Gospel written, and then Matthew and Luke and eventually John were written, and somewhere in there, someone picked up the Gospel of Mark and said, “this will not do.” And so, they provided an edited version, probably around the Second Century. Two versions, actually. The first one is short and basically says, “that stuff with no Jesus? Well, obviously Jesus showed up, and everyone lived happily ever after. The End.” This addition is titled the Intermediate Ending in some translations. But then, that wasn’t quite enough, so there is an Option Three, for those who want something more like the other Gospels. This third ending is new and improved, WITH Mary in the Garden, WITH disciples meeting a risen Jesus on the road, WITH the disciples’ commissioning…and WITH drinking poison and handling snakes? OK. It is still weird, like a checklist of Jesus appearances, instead of anything resembling the narrative format of the original Gospel. And so most versions of Scripture see Options Two and Three as likely later endings, and thus lectionaries like the one that we are using often just include verses 1–8 because it seems like that is what the original author meant to include.
I bring all of this up, not just for the Bible trivia of it, but because even in the second century, folks wanted more resolution in Mark…and in the life of faith…and in life in general. The folks in the Two-Way put it bluntly: “can we still celebrate without the certainty of the other Gospels?” “Is Easter without the evidence presented in the other Gospels enough?
And maybe the reason why is as simple as the fact that Mark was the first Gospel, and he didn’t know all of the rest of those stories yet, so he gave a shorter, simpler story—from the beginning to the ending of his ministry.
But for a moment, I want to push a bit deeper this morning. Did Mark write a Blade Runner Gospel…on purpose? What could Mark be teaching in presenting the story in this way? What does Mark teach us that the other Gospels do not? I believe there is a reason why we have four Gospels, after all. What can we learn by this seemingly unfinished ending? Again, it was the folks in the Two-Way who suggested that maybe Mark is intentional about ending his Gospel without evidence of Jesus’ resurrection. Maybe this ending is jarring, on purpose. After all, isn’t that the reality that most of them were living? This was just a generation or so after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Many of the original disciples and followers had been killed. Many of the first hearers of this Gospel were probably in danger of being killed themselves, just for following Jesus. These were folks yearning for certainty, in a hundred different ways. Is the jarring ending jarring on purpose? I think Mark’s answer is “YES…we can we still celebrate without the certainty!” YES…Easter without the evidence of the other Gospels is still enough!”
Soren Kierkegaard once wrote, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” That sounds like some Markan wisdom to me. I love the other Gospels with their backwards-looking, hindsight stories of evidence of the Resurrection, evidence that inspired the Early Church to commit their lives to this Jesus mission. I love the fact that with 2,000 years of wisdom, and three more Gospels after Mark, we can sing and proclaim “Jesus is Alive!” And I also love the fact that Mark and his church were living forward. In faith. Without certainty. Reminding us that that is kind of what the life of faith looks like.
Because, here we are, Church, in the middle of the ambiguity:
• We don’t know the end of the story for a post-pandemic church.
• We don’t know how things will turn out with our growing relationship with AMOS Health and Hope in Nicaragua.
• We don’t know what is going to happen as we partner with Family Promise to buy a million-dollar building to house families, while our Executive Director is retiring.
• We don’t know the end of our congregation’s Purple Church story…with folks who line up more as conservative and folks who line up as more progressive, worshipping and serving together in an incredibly divisive political climate in our country.
• We don’t know what the next 169 years of our church’s history will be. We don’t have the ability to live backwards, through the stuff that we already know about. We are living forwards, just like the first disciples who heard Mark’s Gospel. Just like the disciples, alone and afraid in that upper room. Just like the women who ”fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them.”
We, too, are living in the Easter days of terror and amazement. The credits are rolling, but our adventure is just beginning! We have no idea what is going to happen next! Kind of exciting for some of us…and a little horrifying for a lot of us. But, that’s the point. As scholar Lamar Williamson suggests, this is actually at the heart of Mark’s Easter story. The young man tells the women that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee, and isn’t that the point? Robert Loane says something similar: “you never know enough about Jesus to know what he might do next.”
And that is the good news. The Easter news! Even though we don’t know how the story is going to end, we know who is writing the story alongside of us! Jesus is still going before you! And this isn’t just the guy leaving early to gas up the car and buy the Slim Jims…Jesus going before us means that he who has power over death and life itself is preparing the way for us and our mission on this earth. It isn’t about the things that we know or do…it is about the one who has conquered death itself! Who is living life forward with us!
Maybe it is just semantics, but I would make a distinction between a story that is unresolved and one that is unfinished. Mark’s Gospel seems to be unfinished business…there is still much more story to live before the credits roll. So, Easter church, I invite you to live into that story. Into that unfinished ending. Even live into the ambiguity of the experience of the women fleeing the tomb. Because that is the life of faith. That is the Easter story. And that is the adventure we are invited to join as Jesus goes before us!
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