BY DR. KENNY CAMACHO / SERMON DELIVERED 13 NOVEMBER 2022 FOR REVOLUTION CHURCH
This week, we are wrapping up our series on the Gospel of Mark, and I’m excited! Here’s why: like most Christian churches, we tend to teach the ends of gospel stories–which is to say, the parts of the gospel stories dealing with Jesus’s death and resurrection–in the spring around Easter. This makes sense: it’s the right time for them. But because we tend to look at these texts during that season, we often choose to see them in a specific “Easter light.” As we noted last week, in our haste to get to the miracle of the resurrection on Sunday, we rarely dwell for long on Jesus’s death on Friday, and this can shortchange our appreciation for how the end of Jesus’s life offers guidance for how we can face suffering ourselves. And similarly, in our haste to get to the Great Commission–which is this moment some 40 days after Jesus rises from the dead, when he gives a mission to the Church–we rarely spend much time on the fear and confusion of those first moments after Jesus’s resurrection is discovered. This, I want to contend, shortchanges our appreciation for two other things, namely:
- The awe of the Resurrection event itself
- The adaptability of the gospel stories
Today, because we’re reading Mark outside the Easter season, we can spend some time on these things. I’ll warn you: it’s a bit disjointed this morning! But I think if you come along with me, there will be some things that matter here.
So, let’s start with the first one: the awe of the Resurrection event itself. The last chapter of the Gospel of Mark ends strangely. If you have a phone with you this morning with a Bible app on it, I actually want you to look it up–the reasons why will be more clear in a few minutes, but this will still help us to get started. Here’s what we have in verses 1-8:
When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.” 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 16:1-8
Alright, stop there for a moment. I mean it! Don’t peek at what’s next!
So, what do we see? There are a few things to note. First, the story picks up after the Sabbath, which means the early morning hours of the Sunday following the Friday of Jesus’s crucifixion. As we saw last week, Jesus died at noon, after which his body was taken down and placed in a nearby tomb belonging to a rich man named Joseph of Arimathea. When this happened, his body was not properly prepared for Jewish burial, and this was a source of offense for his remaining followers (all of whom, we should note, were women). But Sabbath customs would strictly prohibit doing anything about this on Saturday, so it would seem a plan was made for honoring Jesus’s body as soon as possible, which was Sunday morning.
Now, as this passage makes clear, no one is expecting Jesus’s body to be missing. This means that these women are planning to anoint the body of a man who has been dead for no less than 42 hours, and in the Judean climate, Jesus’s body would already be in a state of significant decomposition. I bring this up because we need to see these actions as part of a deep love and respect for Jesus. They do not have to do this! But they are doing it anyway.
Nonetheless, when they arrive, not only is the stone gone, but there is no body. In and of itself, this doesn’t mean anything miraculous: anyone’s assumption would be that the body was stolen. But this assumption is countered in the text by the announcement of this figure in white, who says the body isn’t gone but alive: Jesus “has been raised,” he says, and he has now gone on to Galilee where he is waiting for you.
So, the women have come to the tomb out of deep love for Jesus, they have found him gone, and they are now told to share that news. Thus far, we’re familiar with the story! But then we get to verse 8, which creates a mystery: “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.”
And that’s it: that’s the end of Mark’s gospel. That’s the end of what Mark wanted to say to the Christians in Rome facing imminent threats to their lives. That’s the end of his witness about what is important in the Jesus story to remember: the women flee, “for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
We have no choice but to wonder: what is Mark doing?
Last week, we spent considerable time trying to remind ourselves about Mark’s audience. Let’s do that again: Mark’s readers are already Christians, which means they already believe in Jesus’s resurrection. They don’t need to be convinced! They’re currently staking their lives on it. They are also afraid–in their situation, who wouldn’t be? There is a natural parallel, then, to the experiences of these first witnesses to Jesus’s miracle: there is always encouragement to be found in remembering that even those who were there, who knew Jesus, experienced confusion and fear.
In any tradition, it can be tempting to lionize and “hero-ify” our founders. But the gospels aggressively combat this tendency. The key thing to remember seems to be that the people there at the beginning were just people. Which is to say, they were just like you. The reason this matters in Christianity is because we’re not building a faith to worship ourselves as we grow, we’re building a church set on following after him, even at great cost. There’s just one hero… and the truth is that we don’t always understand him. Even more than that, Mark 16:8 reminds us that his actions sometimes terrify us.
I said at the outset that one of the things we don’t spend enough time on when we look at the resurrection story is the awe that story is meant to inspire. That’s what this verse gets at: what Jesus has done is awe-full, in the most literal sense of that word. “Awe” does not mean “to be amazed,” it means “to be filled with a mix of fear and reverence.” It is to see simultaneously the smallness of ourselves over and against the grandeur of something else. The churning ocean is “awful.” The vastness of space is “awful.” And the resurrection of Jesus from the dead is “awful,” because it is evidence of a Power not only greater than the power of death (which is the power we most supremely fear), but a Power capable of undoing the power of death. Of making a mockery of death’s power.
The Jewish women at the empty tomb–which is also to say, we should pause to note, people with the least power in the Roman world–are confronted with the most power ever seen on earth. The gap between them is incomprehensible! Their terror is understandable. But, crucially, it is also relatable to Mark’s readers (many of whom were also women), because they, too, knew what it was to feel small against the might and strength of a greater power. To be afraid. And so, in that context, what a wonder and an encouragement it would be to be reminded of the drama of what Jesus has done! After all, the most power Nero can wield over anyone is the power of death. But as frightening as that power may be, how much less awful is it than the power of resurrection? To our ears, the end of Mark’s gospel is a mystery: why would he want to close by telling us Jesus’s resurrection is scary? But to Mark’s readers, it is an ending focused on the supremacy of the Savior upon whom they depended.
There is one more wonder to behold before we move on, and yet again, it asks that we keep those early Christians in view. It’s best framed by a question: is verse 8 true? “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.”
As written, it can’t be, because every person huddled in that Roman catacomb listening to this gospel being read aloud knows this story already. The women could not have “said nothing to anyone,” or else the story would have ended with them. Which means, then, that even their fear was eventually no match for the wonder of what they had seen. The wonder won. The miracle could not be kept quiet.
One of the strange motifs in Mark (to use a word we introduced a few weeks ago!) is that Jesus often instructs those who are the recipients of miracles to keep quiet about what has happened and who he is. Some critics refer to this as the “Messianic Secret” in their studies of this gospel. But of course the point is not that Jesus is being shy about who he is: the point is that wonder keeps winning! Over and over he tells people to keep quiet, but they can’t do it! What has happened to them is just too amazing! It is a short line between that motif in the stories and what Mark wants his readers to understand: a real miracle can’t be contained. You won’t be able to help yourself. I’m stretching a bit into conjecture, but I can’t help but think this is a message that resonates with a person soon to be interrogated over their faith who might be wondering, “will I stay strong? Will I deny my Savior?” The people who met Jesus were never able to stay quiet about it. Won’t that be true of you, too?
The ending of Mark’s gospel is a mystery its context helps to solve. Even more than that, the ending of Mark’s gospel calls us to wonder, calls us to awe, in response to the Resurrection event. Nothing like this has ever been done, and if we can find the courage to follow after the risen Jesus, Mark tells us that we will find him. In fact, he is waiting for us.
So, that’s the first thing we can find new appreciation for this morning: the gospel teaches us to feel an awe that can trivialize the hardships we face by reminding us of the wonder of our God. We miss that, when we rush on to the mission of the church in Easter sermons! But it’s so, so important: simply on its face, the resurrection radically transforms who and what we fear in the world. There is hope for us in that this morning. In the words of the man in the tomb, “Do not be alarmed”–not today, and not ever.
But what about the second thing here? I want us to turn to the adaptability of the gospel stories.
Get your Bible apps back out! If you can, adjust your translation to the New Revised Standard Version, which helps to make this more clear. Got it? Okay, so what happens after verse 8?
That’s right, it’s “problem time”! You should be staring at a strange bracketed bit of text labeled “The Shorter Ending of Mark.” It has no verse identification, but it reads like this:
And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.
Mark 16:X
Weird, right? What you’re looking at is an addition to Mark’s gospel which does not seem to begin appearing in manuscripts until the second century. Even at first glance, you can tell it’s odd: so, the women “don’t tell anybody”…and then “tell Peter briefly”? Which is it? If you’re not very satisfied by this, it would seem that you’re not alone: what comes next?
Right! Something labeled “The Longer Ending of Mark”! I won’t read the whole thing here, but if you give it a glance, you’ll see it includes the following: Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, then to two disciples on the road, then to the disciples at a table where he gives them the Great Commission, and then Jesus ascends.
So, what’s going on here? Which is the real ending? What are we supposed to believe happened?
Let’s get scholarly first: the overwhelming consensus is that the earliest copies of Mark’s gospel end with verse 8. “Verse X” starts to show up some time later, presumably because verse 8 leaves how the resurrection story gets out unclear. And then the longer ending is added after that in an attempt to better harmonize Mark with the other gospels.
Now, all of this can feel really troubling for us as modern readers… but I want to push back on our fears by remembering a few important things:
First, as we have discussed, the original point of the early gospels wasn’t evangelism, it was reassurance: they were written to specific communities to help answer specific questions about Jesus and to offer specific comforts. This is because those communities already knew and believed the Jesus story! At least a decade before Mark is written, Paul writes in his letter to the Corinthians,
For I handed on to you [what I] had received: 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 in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to [Peter], then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
1 Corinthians 15:3-7
The resurrection story was already a core part of the early church’s beliefs, and the additions in the longer ending aren’t “creating” something new. Rather, they are documenting a story that was already trusted.
Second, there were multiple gospels, and very few early Christians had access to more than one of them. When later copyists made additions to a gospel like Mark’s, their point wasn’t to cause trouble, it was to provide a reader who may never hear another gospel with a more complete accounting of significant events.
And third, the gospels were not considered Scripture for at least another hundred years. This doesn’t mean they weren’t considered important! Their existence, from copy to copy, meant they were treasured. But it wouldn’t have been thought improper to do what has happened here with the Longer Ending, because the focus of the text is on offering living Christians clarity and reassurance.
“Okay,” you might be thinking, “but this is a strange way to end a sermon!” Perhaps! But hear me out:
I’m bringing this up because I want us to understand something incredibly important about Mark: just because Mark was written to a particular audience doesn’t mean it’s not written to us, too. What’s amazing about these gospels is that they have proved to be adaptable witnesses to Jesus, speaking in different ways to different people. I’ve really enjoyed digging more deeply into the context of the Roman church, and this work has led me to appreciate the gospel so much more deeply. But Mark’s gospel isn’t just a history lesson or a literature lesson: it’s a God lesson, and one of the most amazing things about God in the gospels is that He comes to us. Mark writes to his readers not because they don’t know Jesus’s story, but because he wants them to see how Jesus’s story prepares them for the crisis they are in. Similarly, the early church worked to get the Jesus story out to people in all the ways it could: this is what the revisions at the end of Mark reveal. The Church’s hope in that work was the same as Mark’s hope: that, by some Divine miracle, the story of Jesus might bring life to people who are dying. That Jesus would do that work.
I didn’t want to skip over this part of our conversation about Mark because I want to seize this opportunity to remind you that the Bible is worth engaging deeply. Too often, we react to it the same way the women in Mark’s original ending react to the empty tomb: what we don’t understand, we fear. But we also know that Mark’s ending isn’t their ending. Those women overcome that fear and do as they were instructed: they tell the disciples what they’ve seen, and even though they weren’t “authorities” in their culture, something about the depth of their personal witness and experience won people over. If that was not so, we would not know the tomb is empty!
So, we can be similarly bold. Our God is still speaking to us, the stories of Jesus are still moving among his people, and there is living hope in them for us. They are awe-full, in the strict sense of that word! Overwhelming wonder is their point…and the source of our hope. The Jesus story is an ongoing miracle, both because he is alive, and because the texts keep living, too.
We can be a church of people who are seeking amazement. Who are actively on the lookout for it, as our God keeps working. And you can be a person with a similar imagination and eager curiosity, too. What does a living Jesus mean for the way you see the world? What does it mean for your fears? What does it mean for your ability to be generous, or to be patient, or to be forgiving? If Jesus is alive, what changes for you? What is possible in our world?
Our purpose, I think, is to try and find out.
Revolution Words 