The rest of the story
Why did Mark never finish his gospel?
If you have a Bible with footnotes in it, you will see that Bible scholars say the Gospel according to Mark ended in the middle of a sentence, and all the rest was added by somebody else at a later date. While they all agree on the fact, of course they don’t agree on the reason. That’s the way it is with Bible scholars. This sermon is my own take, which is not original, but it makes sense to me, and, hopefully to you.
Do you ever like, you know, have somebody start telling you about like, well, you know, some event in their lives, and they’re all like, you know, rambling on and on and on, and, well, uh, you know, like acting like, uh, well, uh, you know, they’re never going to get to the point of the story in your lifetime?
Good story tellers know it takes three parts to make a good story.
First, they need a beginning to set the stage and introduce the characters. Good stories make us care what happens to the characters; we feel some affinity with them.
Once we know the setting and the characters, the story teller should move on to the body of the story to set up the problem, like a conflict or a crisis. There’s got to be a problem in there.
In really good stories, the plot might twist in some unexpected direction, letting some new problem replace the original one.
But then, the story teller needs to get to the ending to resolve the problems and conflicts, and show how the resolution affects the characters.
In Shakespeare’s day, if the story resolved the problem in favor of the good guys, they called it a comedy.
If the story resolved the problem with the death or defeat of the good guys, they called it a tragedy.
But either way, the pivotal point of a story rests on the resolution of the problem. That’s where the story needs to go.
At least, most of the time.
In today’s gospel lesson, we get Mark’s version of the story of the resurrection.
He starts with a good beginning. He sets the scene early at sunrise on Sunday, in a cemetery. He introduces us to three women, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome.
They’re going to the cemetery at this early hour to anoint Jesus’ body. Apparently, in order to avoid dealing with a dead body on the Sabbath, which would have made them unclean, those who put Jesus in the tomb got in too big a hurry.
They didn’t use the proper spices to prepare the body. Folks in the Middle East back then, and to some extent, even today, took a completely different attitude about dead bodies than we take.
In our culture, we use embalming fluids and sealed vaults to try to preserve a body as long as possible, in case we might need it for something, I guess.
But in their culture, they put a body in what amounted to a stone oven, letting the Mediterranean heat and the dry desert climate decompose the body as fast as possible.
But, of course, then they had an odor issue to deal with. So, to cover up the unpleasant odor of decomposition, they would wrap up strong smelling spices with the body. That’s what these women want to do. It’s a nasty, terrible job, especially several days after the death, so we know these women must really, really love Jesus. They’re going to be “good guys” in Mark’s story.
Then they identify the problem. The tomb they need to get into consists of a cave cut in the limestone hillside with a large, carved rock covering the entrance.
Typically, when grave diggers made a tomb, they would carve a little channel or groove in front of it running slightly uphill from the cave opening.
Then they would set this carved, stone disk in it, like a wheel in a track, and roll it up hill and chock it there. Once they put a body in the tomb, all they had to do was knock that chock out of the way and let the stone roll into place, sealing the tomb until the next funeral.
These stone disks often weighed more than a single strong man could move by himself. The tomb makers made them so heavy to discourage grave robbing. Clearly, these three women can’t move it by themselves.
And they know it, but they’re going to the cemetery anyway. Maybe that’s how they’re coping with their grief. They just feel the need to do something, without really thinking it all the way through.
Of course, it turns out it doesn’t matter. Mark gives us a plot twist. The stone no longer covers the tomb door. Somebody’s already moved it.
Now if this were a haunted house movie, this would be the point we would yell at the screen, “Don’t go in there!” But, just like in the movies, these women don’t listen to us, and they go in the dark cave.
And sure enough, there’s somebody in there – somebody’s who’s alive – somebody’s who’s not Jesus.
They’ve got a whole new problem now; a problem they never saw coming. Where’s Jesus? What happened to the dead body? What’s going on?
The man in the grave tells them. “Do not be amazed.” Actually, the original Greek says something closer to “Don’t get all freaked out,” which is something we might expect an angel to say. Maybe Mark’s trying to tell us something about this “man.”
He goes on to tell them, “Jesus has been aroused” or “raised up.” And then he tells them they should go tell Peter and the other guys to meet Jesus in Galilee. He seems to know an awful lot about Jesus’ followers.
And so now we’re ready for the resolution to the new problem so we can have the conclusion to the story. We expect the women to get excited. We expect them to celebrate. And then we expect them to go find Jesus. And then we can say, “And they lived happily ever after.”
But that’s not what we get at all. We get the women running for their lives, too scared to say anything to anybody about any of it.
And even though your Bible at home might have some more verses after this, stuff about drinking poison and handling snakes, the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark end it right here.
Most Bibles will put a footnote after verse 8 to tell us about this abrupt ending to the original story.
Some Bible scholars think the original ending got lost, and others think Mark just never finished writing it.
But almost all of them think anything in your Bible attributed to Mark after verse 8 probably got added by somebody other than Mark.
And who could blame them for adding something? What kind of way is this to end a story? What’s the point of it?
It’s like singing the “Happy Birthday to You” song and leaving off the last note. Have you ever tried it? Something in us just longs to have that last note to resolve the tune.
And something in us just wants what Paul Harvey would call “the rest of the story” to resolve Mark’s account of the gospel.
We want what Peter told the crowd in our reading from the Book of Acts this morning, how Jesus appeared to them and ate and drank with them, and then commanded them to go preach and testify about him.
That’s how you should end a story, for heaven’s sake.
But that’s not how Mark ends it. Mark doesn’t even end it like an episode in a soap opera. There’s no cliff hanger, with people staring vaguely off camera. He just concludes with these good, faithful women “saying nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
In fact, the original Greek ends even more abruptly than the English indicates. It ends with the word “gar” which means “for” or “because.”
The syntax of the original Greek could be read this way: “They said nothing to anyone and they were afraid because . . . .”
It is not usual for a Greek sentence to end with the word “for.” The word is generally used as a conjunction, to add something else on to the end of the sentence. It’s a clear indication something’s not finished.
And we’re left with the questions, “Why did Mark do this? What kind of story is this with no ending?”
There could be a couple of reasons.
In Mark’s gospel, part of the suffering Jesus endured for our sakes included isolation.
Once Jesus enters Jerusalem, He becomes more and more alone. First the disciples keep falling asleep while Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane. Then Judas betrays Him. Then all of the others run away – one of them even leaving his clothes behind.
Peter then denies Jesus three times, and Jesus is taken alone to be crucified. These women stand at a distance watching. Maybe this last episode is meant to be the final act of isolation, when even these women finally run away in terror.
But I think it’s more than that. I think Mark is doing something profound and important.
Mark did not set out just to tell a good story.
Mark’s not even trying to relate a bit of history that happened two thousand years ago.
Mark starts this gospel account by calling it “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.”
That’s what “gospel” means: good news – and that’s what Mark brings us.
It’s good news not only for those who lived in the time and place when all these events took place, it’s good news for us here and now.
But for the resurrection, we’d have this: God became man and we killed Him. That would be the most terrible thing anybody could conceive.
But God did not stay dead! He’s not in the tomb; He didn’t stay in the place they laid Him. God conquered death.
And so this terrible thing becomes the best thing anybody could conceive.
After this event, how the women reacted, and how the disciples reacted, do not matter nearly so much as how we react right here and right now.
The victory of Jesus Christ over death and the grave can be our victory.
Mark does not give us a nice neat ending to the story, because we are invited to become part of the story. The story’s not over even yet.
Like the women in the tomb, we are confronted by this incredible truth:
Jesus is alive NOW! Jesus goes ahead of us NOW! And Jesus bids us to come to Him NOW!
That’s the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
Jesus triumphed over sin and death for a reason; He did it to invite us to live in His resurrection with Him, and we don’t have to be afraid of anything any more.
Isaiah prophesied about this long ago when he said,
“God will destroy the shroud that is cast over all the peoples . . . He will swallow up death forever. Then the Lord God will wipe away the tears from all the faces, the disgrace of his people He will take away . . . .”
Does this mean our lives are suddenly a bed of roses? Does this mean we will never face problems and conflicts in our own stories?
No. Of course not. But as our lesson from Colossians admonishes us, it’s time we looked beyond the limitations of this world and set our minds on things that are above. It’s there we find we have been raised with Christ. Our story becomes part of His story – His continuing story.
So no matter what confronts us, no matter what gets in our way, we are destined for glory. We’ve already got a happy ending waiting for us we can claim right here and right now.
“This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. On this day the Lord has acted; we will rejoice and be glad in it.”