Is there anything more frustrating than to be reading an interesting article in the newspaper, only to find that the article is “continued on page 7, section C”.... and then turn to page 7, Section C., only to find that someone has either torn off that page or cut an article from the other side and thereby wiped out the conclusion of the story? That’s sort of the way it is with the Gospel of St. Mark.
I. SCHOLARS HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME THAT MARK’S GOSPEL IS CUT SHORT AT THE END OF VERSE 8. They know this for a number of reasons: the primary one being that the oldest and most reliable ancient manuscripts end there. In fact, the Gospel ends in mid-sentence with the Greek word “gar”...which means “for...” Obviously, that’s no way to end a book!! “Gar” is a particle which normally comes second in a clause of several or many words. No words follow gar, and no appearances of Jesus follow the report of His resurrection in the most reliable manuscripts of Mark.
But the Gospel could not have ended there. Throughout the Gospel there are hints that the writer intended to describe events after the resurrection. For example: Mark 14:28 looks forward to the account of at least one resurrection experience with Jesus. “But after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee,” He said. Mark knew about the resurrection even as he wrote his Gospel. One can imagine that he was eagerly looking forward to telling us more about it when he got to the end of the story. But his Gospel was never finished. The apparent incompleteness of this ending prompted early Christians to add either a short two-sentence ending which appears as a footnote in English versions, or (in most manuscripts) a long ending designated as Mark 16:9-20.
What happened to the original ending of Mark? it is fascinating to speculate. Did the author die as a martyr before he had time to finish it? (Luke never finished what he intended to be a trilogy, after writing his Gospel and the Book of Acts.) Was the author called away to more important things—called to do something for Jesus instead of merely writing about Him? Why was the Gospel unfinished? Did the ending get torn off of the most ancient manuscripts? We do not know. All we know is that originally, Mark’s Gospel ended with the disciples struck dumb with amazement. “And they went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8)
Prof.Lamar Williamson says: “The last verse of Mark’s Gospel falls like a bomb on the carefully nurtured expectation that the women will always faithfully do what needs to be done and that predictions of Jesus will always find fulfillment in the story. Instead of giving the message to the disciples, as they were commanded, the women flee from the tomb in astonishment, fear, and trembling and tell no one anything. And instead of reporting a glorious epiphany in Galilee, the Gospel ends abruptly with no resurrection appearance at all. The one group of faithful followers finally fails; the resurrection predictions are fulfilled, but the second shoe (appearance to the disciples in Galilee) never drops.” (INTERPRETATION: Mark, Atlanta, John Knox Press, 1983, P. 28)
BUT- THANK GOD THE STORY DIDN’T END THERE! There were other Gospels written which completed the story, other Gospels which “dropped the other shoe.” And then, there is the interesting fact that the Gospel records are not the earliest written record of the resurrection, anyway! Do you know where the earliest record is to be found? In the letters of St. Paul. His famous 15th chapter of I Corinthians, (the “Resurrection Chapter”) was written perhaps as much as two decades before Mark’s Gospel! And what does Paul say? “...I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins...that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day...!” (I Cor 15:3-4a) But Mark ends with the doleful words: “And they went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8)
II. I WONDER WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF THEY HAD KEPT SILENT? For one thing, There would have been no New Testament. Not another word would have been written. If those first Christians had kept silent we would have no New Testament, no record of the early Church going forth into the world with the glad good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ, no promise in the last book of the Bible that there will come a day when God “will wipe away every tear from every eye, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.” (Revelation 21:4) Without the Easter message, there would have been no New Testament.
There would have been no Church. I remember that while in college I read Thomas Jefferson’s New Testament. Jefferson was an outstanding statesman, but a lousy theologian. Infected by the popular philosophy of “Deism” of the day, Jefferson went through the New Testament and snipped out the passages that seemed incredible to him. Nothing supernatural, nothing miraculous remained. He had the disciples huddled together behind closed doors with fear that what happened to their Lord might happen to them. And then, suddenly, you have them standing in the marketplace, boldly proclaiming that Christ is Lord. What happened in the interval? I find Jefferson’s version far more incredible than the New Testament version. Newton’s third law of motion says: “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. The Church is the reaction.” The Church was the reaction. What was the action? They said it was the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Think of those first Christians: disillusioned disciples of a discredited Messiah! And suddenly, something happened. They became the nucleus of the greatest spiritual movement the world has ever known. Something happened; and it could not have simply happened in their minds, for they were not going to be convinced except for solid, substantial reasons that Jesus was alive. There is nothing else that can account for the fact of the Church. You see, we do not explain Easter. Just the reverse. Easter explains US. In one of his books (PORTRAIT OF THE CHURCH: WARTS AND ALL, p. 147) Ben Garrison says: “You can no more attribute the Church to an illusion than you can account for Lake Michigan by saying that the mayor of Chicago left the spigot running.”
Listen to these words: “I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event....” The words of a good, orthodox, Christian theologian, right? Wrong. They come from Pinchas Lapide, who is a Jewish scholar of the New Testament. In his book THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS he says these startling words: “...as a faithful Jew, I cannot explain a historical development which, despite many errors and much confusion, has carried the central message of Israel from Jerusalem into the world of the nations, as the result of blind happenstance, or human error, or a materialistic determinism..... The experience of the resurrection as the foundation act of the church which has carried the whole Western world must belong to God’s plan of salvation.” (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1983, p. 142) Lapide says that we have to “explain the fact that the solid hillbillies from Galilee who, for the very real reason of the crucifixion of their master, were saddened to death, were changed within a short period of time into a jubilant community of believers.” (Ibid., P.129) For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The reaction is the Church. The action (the early Christians said) was God’s raising Christ from the dead. Without Easter, there would be no Church.
Without Easter, there would be no Lord’s Day, either. What we tend to forget is that the first Christians were all Jews. And they were zealous to obey the commandment: “Remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy.” And what is the Sabbath day? Saturday. For the first century and a half or so, Christians tried to observe two special days—The Jewish Sabbath on Saturday and the Christian Lord’s Day on Sunday. Then there came the parting of the ways between Christians and Jews (which I deem regrettable), and the Christians settled on the first day of the week and called it “the Lord’s Day” in remembrance of the momentous act of God in breaking down the tomb and opening the grave and raising Jesus from the dead. But Mark ends: “...they went out and fled from the tomb for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” (Mark 16:8) Which raises for us the important question:
III. HAVE WE TOLD ANYBODY ABOUT EASTER LATELY? A story came out of the Soviet Union in the days before as much freedom of religion was permitted as at present. Forbidden to assemble for worship, a youth on Easter Sunday morning in the midst of a Communist gathering raised his voice and cried out, “Christ is risen!” Immediately hundreds of voices gave the response from the Orthodox liturgy: “He is risen indeed!” Though subdued by oppression the faith was not utterly stifled. One wonders whether we would have raised our voices for Christ in such a dangerous situation...or quietly acquiesced in evil and kept our mouths shut. Most of us are pretty good at keeping quiet about Easter. Look at those words of indictment: “They told nothing to any one.” Do they not suggest to us the multitudes of Christians in every age who have managed to keep Easter a secret? For centuries Christians have heard the good news that Christ is risen from the dead and become King of kings and Lord of lords, but they seem to have heard it only in a conventional way. It hasn’t shaken their lives down to their shoes. It should. Can you imagine anything more earth—shattering than this: “Christ is risen. Christ is risen, indeed!”
David H.C. Read, a Presbyterian minister in New York City, writes of hosting a television discussion program, and being somewhat surprised that one participant - a novelist - spoke up strongly for His Christian beliefs. Afterwards he asked him about it, and received this astonishing answer: “If you had just heard that a man like Jesus had risen from the dead a few days ago and believed it to be true, wouldn’t you want to talk about it on every possible occasion?” That makes us all stop to think, doesn’t it? Is our belief in Easter so compelling that we want to talk about it on every possible occasion? I remember an atheist friend telling me once: “I don’t believe that what you preach is true; but if I did, I would crawl on hands and knees over broken glass to get the message out!” And yet, here we sit on our hands, tongue-tied and silent, while the world out there is dying for some message of hope. You see, Easter is nothing if we keep quiet about it.
J.B. Priestley’s novel, DAYLIGHT ON SATURDAY portrays life in an armament factory in England during the Second World War. There is bitter conflict between the workers, and a superintendent and a workman are talking it over. “My feeling is,” said the workman, “...that people ‘aven’t much to get ‘old of. They feel a bit empty inside. They don’t know where they’re going’ or what it’s all about. And it frightens me.” The superintendent says, “I think it frightens me too. But surely, Sam, there are plenty of chaps ready to tell them where they’re going and what it’s all about - parsons, professors, writers and so on.” To which Sam replies, “But I fancy most o’ them don’t know neither. If they did an’ were certain, they’d come runnin’ w’ the good news.” (J.B. Priestley, DAYLIGHT ON SATURDAY, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943) And so the questions are these, to ask ourselves on this glorious Easter Sunday: Do we have any good news for the world? Are we sure of it? Will we come runnin’ with it?
One ancient authority ends Mark this way: “But they reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” And that is exactly what happened. Whoever wrote those words was reporting actual historical fact. So I say: Thank God not all of those first Christians kept quiet about Easter. If they had, we wouldn’t be here this morning. And we would have no help or hope in this world. Or in the next.
W.E. Sangster was a great Methodist preacher in England during the first half of this century. One day Dr. Sangster began to notice some uneasiness in his throat and a dragging in his leg. When he went to the doctor, he found that he had an incurable disease that caused progressive muscular atrophy. His muscles would gradually waste away, his voice which had thrilled thousands with its message of the Gospel would fail, his throat would soon become unable to swallow. Sangster threw himself into his ministry with renewed vigor. Figuring that he could still write, and he would have even more time for prayer, he worked harder than ever. “Let me stay in the struggle, Lord,” he pleaded. “I don’t mind if I can no longer be a general, but just give me a regiment to lead.” He wrote articles and books, and helped organize prayer cells throughout England. He would say to people who pitied him, “I’m only in the kindergarten of suffering.” Gradually Sangster’s legs became useless. His voice disappeared completely. But he could still hold a pen, shakily. On Easter morning, just a few weeks before he died, he wrote a letter to his daughter. In it he said, “It is terrible to wake up on Easter morning and gave no voice with which to shout, ‘He is risen!’, but it would be still more terrible to have a voice and not want to shout it!”
Some years ago a meditation for Easter Sunday was printed in the now-defunct journal PRESBYTERIAN LIFE. It was written by Ann Weems, and it goes like this:
Do We or Do We Not Believe The News Is Good? O, Lord, you love us! Why aren’t we shouting? The stone’s rolled away! Why aren’t we dancing? O Lord, you love us! Why aren’t the bells pealing? The victory’s won! Why aren’t the drums drumming?
Why aren’t the feet stomping
and the doves flying
and the bands marching
and the fingers snapping,
and the tongues praising
and the hands clapping
and the trumpets blaring
and the choirs singing
and the cymbals clashing
and the children laughing?
Why aren’t the eyes smiling
and the knees kneeling
and the banners blowing
and the horns sounding
and the voices calling
and the crowds clamoring
and the arms waving
and the tamborines playing
and the hearts humming
and the old men running? And why aren’t we crowning him Lord of Lords? If the news is good.... SING!
(THE CLERGY JOURNAL, April, 1983, p. 25)