Mark 16:1-8
“End of Story?”
April 4, 2021 – Easter
Quite a few years ago, Beth and I got the kids to bed and sat down to watch a science fiction movie. The Abyss was televised the night before. I recorded it on the VCR (yes, it was that long ago). We made popcorn and quickly got caught up in the story of an underwater drilling crew. They were tasked to recover a wrecked nuclear submarine, fallen into one of deepest places in the ocean. There were special effects, tense undersea dangers, extra-terrestrial visitors, and a rocky love relationship: a female engineer and her ex-husband, the boss of the oil-drilling crew. We were hooked.
Tension grew as the crew’s rig was damaged and trapped beneath the sea, caught on the edge of an abyss, a huge crack in the ocean floor plunging thousands of feet further down, where no human vessel could survive. Aliens were down there, though. The crazy man—there always is one in these stories—armed a nuclear missile from the sub and sent it into the deep to blow up the aliens. To save them, the crew boss suited up to dive deeper than anyone had gone before and disarm the warhead.
Beth and I leaned forward as he sank into the abyss. His light reached only an arm’s length into darkness. Pressure brought on dementia. His words on the radio began to lose touch with reality. So his cold ex-wife took the microphone and told him to stay alert, to keep his head, to do his task, and then, with sudden passion and tears, to “Come back to me!” She got through. He told her he loved her. Love would bring him back. Then, suddenly, his line broke. He was falling, falling loose into the darkest depths of the deep.
And then… well then our tape went blank. There wasn’t any more. I had set the VCR wrong. The rest of the movie was not recorded. We screamed in frustration. Beth kept saying, “How could you do this to me? I will never get to sleep tonight!”
You might not think of turning to the Bible for a cliffhanger like the one I just told, but our Gospel for Easter comes close. As verse 1 begins we meet three women. They buy spices on Saturday evening after the Sabbath ends. The end of the previous chapter told us that two of them, the two Marys, had seen where Jesus was buried. So in verse 2 on Sunday morning we see them headed there, to Jesus’ tomb.
Mark tells us the sun had risen. These women weren’t stumbling around in the dark. Two of them had seen the place before. They didn’t go to the wrong tomb. But on the way in verse 3, they do consider a problem. “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” Two days before a heavy stone had been rolled in front of the door, by men. How were women to manage it?
Verse 4 brings us the first surprise in this story. When they arrive, the stone is already moved. Mark doesn’t tell us how. It’s just open. And when they duck their heads and enter that dark space with the light coming in behind them, they meet the next surprise in verse 5. They don’t find the body of Jesus, but instead the living form of a young man dressed in white, sitting off to the side.
Nothing was turning out as expected, so Mark tells us they were “alarmed.” Matthew tells us the “young man” was an angel and he moved the stone, but Mark leaves us in the same situation as the women, having to guess what’s going on.
Verse 6 feels like a nice resolution. The angel tells 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.” It’s all explained. Happy ending. Everything is wrapped up. But it’s a little like that point in a movie thriller when it seems like it’s all over, the child is rescued, the bad guy caught, the mystery is resolved. Then, all of a sudden, you realize someone our hero trusted all along is on the other side, or maybe the bad guy suddenly comes back to life and pulls a hidden gun, or perhaps there’s just some piece of the puzzle that doesn’t quite fit. That’s where Mark takes us next.
Verse 7 gives us what looks like a straightforward commission to the women, “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.” But it’s another point where things aren’t quite what they seem. Any ancient reader would hear something odd. Women then weren’t deemed reliable witnesses. They couldn’t testify in court. Who was going to believe anything as wild and strange as this story coming from three females?
The final surprise arrives in verse 8. They don’t, at least in Mark, do what the angel asked. “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.” The surprise is, that’s it. That’s where the Gospel breaks off, end of story. Abrupt, incomplete, frustrating, like our movie videotape. No meeting with Jesus. No bringing the story to the male disciples. No resolution. It makes us want to scream, “But what happened next?”
You probably have an ending or two printed in your Bible, one with verses 9 to 20, and another very short one. They are probably set off from the rest of the text. There’s a footnote. In the NRSV from which I read, it says, “Some of the most ancient authorities bring the book to a close at the end of verse 8.” Huh? But that can’t be how it ends. It can’t be how Mark ended it.
Just read those alternative endings and you will see the problem. The short one makes no sense. Mark has just said they ran away and didn’t tell anyone, and now he’s supposed to say that they went and told “all that had been commanded them?” It doesn’t fit. Nor does the beginning of the long ending in verse 9. It’s like it’s starting all over again. We meet Mary Magdalene as if we didn’t know she was there from verse 1. It’s pretty clear that both these alternate conclusions have been taken from somewhere else and patched onto the end of Mark to “fix” the fact that it ends so abruptly.
The fact is, we don’t know exactly why Mark breaks off like this. Maybe Mark was interrupted after writing verse 8. One of my favorite literary stories is about Samuel Taylor Coleridge awaking from a dream in which he was inspired with a complete poem, from start to finish. He sat down to write it all out, beginning with “In Xanadu, did Kubla Kahn…” He completed a number of verses, but before he was done, some visitor came knocking at the door. By the time he had sent the interrupter away, he lost the thread and never finished the poem.
Mark’s interruption could have come in the form of an arrest or a flight from persecution. Some tradition has it that he wrote his Gospel in Rome, based on the memories of Peter. The emperor Nero was persecuting Christians. Peter may have died then. Mark may have as well, or had to run for his life, leaving an unfinished manuscript.
Another theory has it that Mark actually did finish his Gospel. But his manuscript got damaged as it was passed around for other Christians to read before anyone thought to make a copy. As I once heard someone suggest about nearly incomprehensible manuscripts by Aristotle, may mice got into it and ate part of it.
Most scholars today accept something like one of those accounts I just gave you, believing Mark’s real ending is lost. A handful of them, usually folks who think the King James was the most accurate translation, will try to defend that added-on long ending in verses 9 to 20. But it’s just too wonky. There’s that bit in verse 18 about handling snakes and drinking poison. No, that ending is just fakeroo, despite the fact some Christians were quoting it as early as the second century.
No, whether intended or not, Mark really does end at verse 8. What I read a few minutes ago is what we’ve got. What can we learn from that? First, remember that God’s Holy Spirit allowed Mark’s Gospel to turn out this way and for Christian scholars to realize neither of those added endings can be real. What then do you and I learn from an Easter story with no appearance of Jesus risen, with no satisfying conclusion and words from Jesus Himself?
I have in my office another book that has no real ending. I’ve read a lot of Charles Dickens, but the last book he wrote is as frustrating as Beth’s and my viewing of The Abyss. Dickens, like Mark perhaps, died before he ever finished the story he called The Mystery of Edwin Drood. It’s the only story Dickens never finished, but it’s the only one he really needed to finish, because it was his only mystery story.
On the surface, there’s no mystery. We know from a friend of Dickens that the story was to be about, “the murder of a nephew by his uncle.” So it’s not a who-done-it. We know it was the uncle. But the question that has plagued Dickens fans and scholars for nearly 150 years is whether there actually was a murder. Did Edwin Drood really die or did he escape to show up later in the story, disguised as a character named Datchery, who would have finally implicated his uncle for his crime?
We’ll never know. On a bright sunny June the eighth, Dickens sat writing at his desk. He got up, leaving his unfinished manuscript of chapter twenty-three of Edwin Drood. He went in his library, wrote a few letters, then sat down for dinner. Everyone noticed he was ill. He said he had been, “very ill for the last hour.” A few minutes after 6 o’clock he rose, then collapsed to the floor. He lingered for a bit, but never recovered. He died almost exactly 24 hours later on June 9.
As you might guess, thousands of pages and, I suppose, hundreds of doctoral dissertations have been written to solve The Mystery of Edwin Drood. There are all sorts of proposed endings, humorous, serious, short, long. But G. K. Chesterton says it best: “Dickens is dead, and a number of splendid scenes have died with him. Even if we get the right solution we shall not know that it is right. The tale might have been, and yet it has not been.”
But that isn’t where Chesterton left it either. He goes on to say,
And I think there is no thought so much calculated to make one doubt death itself… Edwin Drood may or may not have really died; but surely Dickens did not really die. Surely our real detective liveth and shall appear in the latter days of the earth. For a finished tale may give a man immortality in the light and literary sense; but an unfinished tale suggests another immortality, more essential and more strange.[1]
Though you may not see it immediately in his work, Dickens was a Christian. He wrote a life of Jesus for his children. On the next to last page he wrote of Edwin Drood is a paragraph describing a beautiful “brilliant” morning in which appears a dark cathedral we first saw in chapter one. He wrote about a “glorious light” which did “penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthly odour, and preach the Resurrection and the Life.”
That’s just what the angel preached to the women there as the morning sunlight penetrated that dark tomb. The One who is the Resurrection and the Life was not there in the dark, but risen into glorious life. If Mark’s manuscript breaks off interrupted like Coleridge or Dickens or any of all the many endeavors you and I find interrupted in our lives, that is not the end of the story. Death doesn’t need to be end of us or of anyone.
Chesterton is right about Dickens and right about Mark. However the Gospel writer was interrupted, however he died, he is not dead. He trusted in the Man who said, “I am the Resurrection and the Life. The one who believes in me will never die.” All our unfinished stories, all our unfinished work, will be finished. There will come a bright morning when the glorious light will penetrate our graves and raise us out of them to finish the stories God has only just begun in each of us.
All my sermons for the last thirty years are saved in files on my computer. I know there is at least one that I opened up a while back, hoping to reuse some material on that passage of Scripture. I saw that it was only a couple pages long and I had added at the bottom, “Got sick, never finished.” At this point it likely never will be. I must have stayed home in bed that Sunday.
I imagine you have dreams and projects and hobbies and maybe even relationships like that. Even now, well before the end of your life, you know you will never do them, never have those experiences. Maybe this past year of pandemic has made that true for some hope you had. Whether it’s the literal writing of a book, or the forming of a friendship, or a satisfying career, or travel to a place you always wanted to see, it hasn’t happened and you can’t see how it could happen before the end comes for you.
To you and I this unfinished Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, preaches the Resurrection and the Life, saying there is another life when all that you dreamed and hoped for will be finished. God is not going to leave your life incomplete, anymore than He left Jesus lying dead in the tomb. God will raise you up to see the light and finish your story.
Please don’t mishear me, though. I’m not saying that Mark’s story goes on just because we are reading it, what Chesterton called immortality in the literary sense. No, the Easter Gospel is not living forever in other people’s memory. It’s resurrection and living forever in fact. It’s the immortality Chesterton calls “more essential and more strange.” That’s the Christian hope, the essential hope that the story really will go on, really is going on because Jesus Christ is not in the tomb. That’s not the end. He is risen.
This abrupt ending of Mark also invites us to provide our own ending, to make ourselves something like authors of the story. The women ran away, silent and afraid. How will you and I react to the news that Christ is risen? Will you just go away, quiet and maybe a little afraid to take it too seriously? Or will it change you? Will the hope of a story that never ends transform you right now? Will you begin to see the way you live, the way you treat others, the way you deal with hard times, all in that glorious light of eternity?
Jesus died and rose so that we could finish our stories, and give others the hope of finishing their stories. We did that before the pandemic by giving someone a warm place to sleep so they could know their story doesn’t have to end in a bottle or in a needle or even in a homeless shelter. We do that when we stand alongside Black or Asian people to work for a system in which their story does not need to end in a hate crime or a violent act of injustice. We also offer hope by announcing the Good News the angel told, that there is One whose story is not over but still going on. And our stories can become part of His.
Jesus offers the hope of a finished story to those who feel their life ended with a divorce or with a bankruptcy or with some horrible wrong they did to those around them. That same hope is for those who feel their story ending with words like “cancer” or “stroke” or “dementia” or, this year, “coronavirus.” Those are not the end of the story just because of a vaccine or some miracle cure. Those things cannot end the story of Jesus any more than Mark’s description of fear and terror actually ended the story for those women on Easter. We know that they did, in fact, go and tell the other disciples. Their story went on. It’s good to remember that they got there first that day. The women are the beginning of the story of Easter Sunday.
God does not want death or darkness to be the end of your story. He does not want it for you any more than He wanted it for Jesus. When Jesus died and rose again, God created a new ending for everyone’s story, for your story. The ending of Jesus’ story is just what the angel said it was, “He has risen!” That same story can be yours too.
In second book of The Lord of the Rings, Sam and Frodo enter one of the darkest chapters of their journey. As they pause to rest, Sam remembers ancient stories. He recalls a great man of the past who battled against evil and won light for the world. Then he realizes that the two of them are carrying a bit of that same light in a gift they received on the way. Then he cries, “Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”
“‘No, they never end as tales,’ said Frodo. ‘But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended.”[2]
Mark has no ending because the great tales never end. The greatest tale of all, the true story of Christ who died, Christ who is risen, Christ who will come again, never ends. It goes on and on. New characters are always coming into it. You and I are only the latest. Frodo wasn’t quite right. One’s part on earth may end for awhile, but in the story of Jesus no one’s part is ever finally done. His story, which is our story too, goes on and on.
Christ is risen! May that be your story.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2021 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Criticisms and Appreciations of the Works of Charles Dickens (Cornwall, UK: House of Stratus), p. 130.
[2] The Two Towers, J. R. R. Tolkien (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), p. 321.