For they were afraid

If you have checked in your Bible, you may have noticed that Christians in the early centuries were uneasy about that abrupt ending and they borrowed some verses from the other Gospels and tacked them onto Mark to sort of tidy up the ending a bit.

But more recent translations have separated out those verses so that we can see that most likely Mark intended his Gospel to end just as we heard it a moment ago: ...they said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.

If anything, the Greek word order is even more awkward than English; the word “for” comes at the end of the phrase, more literally “afraid they were for”.

But this jagged, ragged end of the Gospel is not a mistake, there is nothing missing; I'm convinced that Mark fully intended that his telling of the Gospel conclude this way.

He had no intention of trying to make it a “happily ever after” kind of story.

Because it isn't.

Throughout it has been the story of Jesus' continuous confrontation with the powers of evil and death.

And now in resurrection, Mark is beginning to show that Jesus is and finally will be completely victorious in this long battle.

So why are the women afraid?

1 --When we think about it, being met by a man whom they had seen brutally killed and buried is a fearful thing to contemplate. That is reason enough right there!

2--Furthermore, these women were among the disciples of Jesus who, just a couples of days before, had deserted Jesus in his greatest hour of need.

If Jesus is back from the dead, what will be his attitude toward those who deserted him and fled into the night when the going got rough?

3 --The fear in this day is even deeper than this.

If Jesus, the one who was crucified by colluding government and religious leaders, the one who had been crushed by the forces of evil,

if this Jesus were now raised, now vindicated by a mighty act of God and raised to life,

if God had stepped in and mightily reversed the whole march of time and history and raised Jesus,

then the women knew enough to recognize that everything in the world had been turned upside down and nothing would ever be the same again.

That is fear on another level of complexity.

We are used to dealing with death and finitude, three-score and 10 and all that.

Eat, drink, be merry, make the most of the moment, ...you know the drill.

Thoughtful folks like us know how to get along even though we know that death is in our future.

We might become a cynic, a stoic, a romantic, or just try not to dwell on it too much, but we have ways of dealing with death and cemetery.

But if Jesus is raised from the dead, if the stone is rolled away and life overcomes death, and God has the last word, then there is reason for the women...and us...to fear.

The “facts” of death and life are turned on their heads.

Nothing is fixed and secure anymore.

If Jesus is raised, that means that God is loose, on the move. Watch out!

We could have possibly have adjusted to the tomb, the stone, and to death.

Perhaps God's absence is easier for us to handle that is his presence!

Jesus, the one who so amazes, confuses, challenges, and judges us, is now come back to the women and to us.

So perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise to us that fear is what we feel before joy.

God is loose; watch out!

The future will now go his way, not ours.

And it is not not going to be tidily under our control.

All we have is a promise that we will see him, a promise swamped by our own uncertainties and not a little dread.

It is a harshly realistic ending for the Gospel.

This is the sort of world we live in; not a fabricated happily-ever-after, but a world in which we need to hold tightly to his promise and fearfully tread our way through a tangle of doubts and amazements and day-to-day problems.

This is the way that Easter dawns on us, with promise and fear.

We could either turn away in dismay, or listen again ever more closely as Jesus writes us into his story, and intends to teach his story to the world through us.

The promise of Jesus is as much as we have, and indeed as much as we need.

All of the rest of the things are to be written in the lives of those who hear that promise with joy and fear and hold onto it,

in the lives of those who are here today,

in the lives of those whom we will be inviting to join us here in the days to come,

in the lives of those whom we haven't even thought of yet,

until the time that Jesus brings the promise to its completion and fulfillment.

Any ending we would write for Mark's gospel would say too much, and too little,...

It would foreclose the drama prematurely since there is more to our lives yet to be written, and we do not know the details of what God has in mind for us to be doing.

He has gone ahead of us.

We will see him as he promised.

Mark stops his telling here.

The next part of the Gospel story and promise is what it does

in your life and mine,

how it changes fear and death

into joy and life.

From England just before WWII comes my favorite prayer:

Lord God, you have called your servants to ventures of which we cannot see the ending, by paths as yet untrodden, through perils unknown.

Give us faith to go out with good courage, not knowing where we go, but only that your hand in leading us and your love supporting us; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.