DO NOT BE AFRAID
With those few verses of chapter 16, the Gospel according to St Mark comes to a sudden and abrupt end.
There are no resurrection appearances in Mark; just the bare statement by the young man in white that Jesus has been raised, and that they will see him later on in Galilee. And the last verse of the Gospel is really surprising: the women
fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.
From the earliest times, people felt that this was unsatisfactory ending. In many bibles you'll find various alterative additional endings which give a potted summary of the resurrection appearances, but anyone can see that these have been added by someone else in a quite different style.
It's also been suggested that perhaps Mark did write more, but that the last section of his original manuscript got torn off and was lost.
That’s just speculation of course; the fact is that we don’t know whether this was the original ending of Mark’s gospel. But I could imagine that it might be.
Remember that Mark’s gospel was the first to be written. You can imagine people gathering round in one of the early Christian communities in Palestine and saying to Mark: “Tell us the stories about Jesus”. And he would recount the baptism, the healings, the parables, and above all the passion story, and then he would get to the first Easter morning, and he would stop there and say something like “And the rest is history” – in other words, the rest you know, bcause you yourselves are part of it. The rest of it is so familiar that I don’t need to go on.
A bit later on, of course, when memories were fading and eye-witnesses were dying off, Matthew and Luke came along and decided that it was necessary to take the story a little further (and of course Luke decided to take it a lot further because he went on to write the Acts of the Apostles too). So Matthew and Luke added a beginning and an end: the birth narratives and the resurrection appearances. And so you ended up with what we regard as a “proper” gospel, a complete gospel, which makes Mark’s pioneer gospel look to us as if it is incomplete.
But be that as it may, let’s get back to that first reaction of the women: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Mark tells us that they were “alarmed”, “afraid”, “terrified” even.
And this reminds us that fear is almost always the first reaction of people in the Bible to the presence of God. And then, always, comes the message of reassurance: fear not, do not be afraid. Followed, typically, by the commissioning for a special task. In this case: “Go and tell the disciples and Peter”.
But despite this reassurance, the women in Mark’s account are still afraid. They run away, full of terror and amazement, and –most surprising - in fact, they don’t tell anyone.
I think this stress on fear as the first reaction brings home to us just how strange, how incomprehensible, the message of the resurrection must have seemed to them. They simply couldn’t cope with the news, they were boulversées. After all, think how psychologically fragile they must have been after the terrible experiences they had gone through during the last few days. Their world had come to an end, their hopes had been destroyed on a cross: and now even their Lord's body had disappeared. It was more than they could take.
We forget how difficult it must have been for them to grasp the announcement of the resurrection. For us it is almost too familiar, and we have in a sense “domesticated” it. For us the resurrection brings to mind a series of almost rather “cosy” stories: the evening walk to Emmaus, a supper shared, a picnic by the lakeside.
And so, after going through the stress and anguish of the passion narratives during Holy Week, we sit back reassured, now we can relax. “So that’s all right then”, we think to ourselves; “all’s well that ends well”, the story has a happy ending after all. Ouf!
It’s like a film when, however much you enter into the tension of the hero’s adventures and sufferings, you can nonetheless remain fundamentally relaxed because you know that it’s all going to turn out all right in the end, because it always does.
And so we tend to lose the sheer shock of the resurrection, the sheer strangeness of the experience of the first disciples. The dsiciples emphatically did not know that everything was going to turn out all right; and as far as they were concerned, it had all gone horribly wrong.
The fact of the resurrection turned their world upside down. At first they just didn't know what to make of it; though before long, of course, fear and disbelief turn into joy and delight. The mystery of the missing Jesus turns into the knowledge that he is alive again, and present with them. Alive and present in a different way, of course, but in a way that is just as real as before.
As this news sank in, they began to realise some its stunning implications. If the might of Rome, the mightiest power on earth, was not capable of frustrating God's purposes, if even death itself cannot frustrate God's purposes, then absolutely nothing can. Death looks to us like the end, but God calls death's bluff. And so we see that death is not the end, but what the Prayer Book calls a “gateway” into a new life, a life freed from the frustrations and limitations of our present existence.
As Paul puts it:
I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
So the message of Easter is indeed “fear not”. We do not have to be afraid any more.
We do not have to be afraid of earthly powers. So our faith should release us from fear of economic collapse, of military threats, of violence and destruction. We do not have to be afraid of spiritual powers either, and so Christianity has come to many as a release from ancient fears of witchcraft, and the power of ghosts and spirits.
There will of course still be struggles, and there will still be sufferings of all kinds, but the resurrection faith assures us that, in the end, everything will be all right because everything is in God's hands. Despite everything, God's great adventure of creation, an adventure that we are part of, does have a happy ending – not in a sentimental Hollywood way, but in a way that is much more real and much more lasting.
As the great medieval English mystic, Julian of Norwich, who was no stranger to suffering, put it:
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
And that, as the poet Keats might have put it is « all you know and all you need to know ».
Reverend John Murray, Strasbourg Anglican Chaplaincy
Easter Day, 12 April 2009
Year B Gospel: Mark 16.1-8
