In the movie, Pirates of the
Caribbean, there’s a funny exchange about the famed pirate ship the Black
Pearl. Upon hearing the ship arrive and attack, Captain Jack Sparrow says, “I know those guns! It’s the Pearl…”
The man with him replies: “The
Black Pearl? I’ve heard stories.
She’s been preyin’ on ships and settlements for near ten years. Never leaves
any survivors.”
“No
survivors?” Jack replies. “Then where do the stories come from, I wonder?”
In
the earliest manuscripts of Mark, the book ends with our passage for today. Two
women, fleeing from the tomb, and the phrase, “they said nothing to anyone, for
they were afraid.” This is a particularly unsatisfying ending. It’s a paradox,
of course, for if the women really didn’t say anything to anyone about it, then
how did Mark come to know what happened to tell us? But Mark leaves the story
right there. Like when you are watching a television show, and just as they
seem to be about to resolve the drama, it freezes, and “to be continued…” show
up at the bottom of the screen. This drives me crazy, the realization that I’ll
have to wait until next week for them to resolve this plot line.
But in this case, it’s even worse,
because in spite of the incomplete nature of Mark’s gospel, this giant “to be
continued…” at the bottom of the screen, nothing else is coming. It’s unsatisfying, to us, because the
story seems unfinished.
So
unfinished, in fact, that later scribes added their own endings, which you will
find in your Bible in brackets, the shorter ending of Mark, and the longer
ending, which began appearing on copies of Mark about a hundred years after it
was first written. Each of them wraps the story up a little bit, adding on
resurrection appearances which occur in the other Gospels, and closing up the
loose ends given in Mark’s “to be continued…”
I
can see how this would happen. A scribe, laboriously copying the Gospel by
candlelight, gets through verse 8 and looks for the next part and realizes this
is the end. And he says, that can’t be right, and adds a few verses, based on
what he remembers from the other gospels. These later endings relieve us of the
tension, relieving us of the logical paradox and giving the story an ending so
that it wouldn’t seem so incomplete, missing any appearance of the resurrected
Christ. But I think Mark wants to leave us with an unfinished story. I think
Mark wants us to be a little bit uncomfortable. Mark wants us to feel the
tension of the unfinished “to be continued…”
See,
this kind of uncomfortable situation happens often in Mark. The people who ought to see and believe
somehow do not. In spite of being told over and over again, Jesus’ disciples
didn’t get it. [Peter, the first disciple mentioned in the book of Mark, denies
Jesus three times. James and John, who were brought up to the mountaintop to
see Jesus transfigured with Moses and Elijah, request extra glory in the
kingdom of God. ]
It’s
not as if Jesus is unclear about the plan. In chapter 8, verses 31, it says,
“Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering,
and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be
killed, and after three days rise again.” Immediately
after that, Peter pulls him aside and rebukes him, telling him not to spout
that kind of nonsense around.
Jesus
tells the disciples again, in Chapter 9, verse 31, which says, “for he was
teaching his disciples, saying to them, ‘The Son of Man is to be betrayed into
human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will
rise again.’” But
the disciples spend the next few minutes arguing over who is the greatest, as
if their teacher hadn’t just declared that he would be rising from the dead sometime
in the near future.
It
happens a third time, and I’m not even sure I need to tell you about it,
because by this point it is so clear to you, but it is not to the disciples, so
here goes. Jesus, in Chapter 10, verse 33, says, “See, we are going up to
Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the
scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to
the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill
him; and after three days he will rise again.” Immediately
after this story, the disciples still don’t understand. James and John come to
request extra glory in the kingdom of heaven.
It’s
like when I was a freshman in high school I had to read the Charles Dicken’s
novel, Great Expectations. And I hated
it. It wasn’t Dicken’s writing, wordy and hard to understand, though it was. It
was that every single time the main character, Pip, would come to a point in
his life where he needed to make an important decision, he would make the exact
wrong call. And it was incredibly frustrating. As I worked my way through the
book, I got angrier and angrier at Pip, watching him make mistake after
mistake, almost yelling at the book, “Pip! Are you kidding me! There’s no
possible way that could work out for you! What are you thinking!”
Or
when watching a horror movie, and someone is alone in the house, and the power
goes out and spooky things start to happen, and then they hear a noise and
decide to go down into the basement to check it out. Don’t go down into the
basement! How can they not see what we see? How can they not understand what is
so obvious to us?
This
is what the disciples do over and over again in the book of Mark. It’s almost
frustrating to watch, as Jesus becomes more and more clear about what is going
to happen, and the disciples still manage to misunderstand or ignore it. It
makes you want to grab them by the shoulders and say, “Peter, come on, dude!
He’s telling you the answers! It
shouldn’t be that hard!”
But
this is how Mark writes his gospel, all of the ones who should see, do not. And
the ones that do see, are exactly the ones you wouldn’t expect. There are the
demons legion, who proclaim, “I know who you are,” as Jesus casts them out. But
they can’t exactly be counted on to proclaim the story of Christ. There was the
Roman centurion, who said, as Jesus was being crucified, that truly this is the
son of God. But he was crucifying Jesus when he said that. And as a Roman
soldier, he’s not exactly the one to go proclaiming to the world that Christ is
the Messiah.
The
reason Mark does this is to call us to a greater response to the resurrected
Christ. Mark intentionally leaves us in these unsatisfying situations so that
our dissatisfaction might turn into action. He uses the failure of those who
ought to see, and the unlikeliness of those who do see to call us to the
realization that someone must see, and understand, and follow. And who is left?
If the ones who ought to see and understand do not, and the ones who do understand
are Romans or demons (which, at the time of Christ, were roughly equivalent in
social stature for people living in Palestine), who is it that can tell of what
happened there? If the women who saw the empty tomb do not tell of what they
saw, who can proclaim it? If Mark leaves his gospel unfinished, with a “to be
continued..” who will finish the story?
Us.
This is the point of Mark’s gospel.
This is why it ends abruptly, unfinished, with a sort of “to be continued…”
that does not get resolved. Because Mark is calling on us to see and
understand, to recognize the significance of what has happened and to act on
it, to continue the story.
It
is our calling to finish the story that begins with the empty tomb. It is our
calling, to proclaim what we have seen and heard, to be the resurrection in the
world, to go out into the world with Christ in our hearts and on our lips,
forever praising God that Jesus Christ is risen, and so shall we be also.
Listening
to the declaration from the man in white, sitting inside the tomb helps direct
us as to how we should do it. . He tells us to go to Galilee, and expect to
find the risen Lord. The end of Mark’s Gospel points us back to the beginning.
Galilee is where Jesus did ministry. Galilee is where people who were blind
received their sight, where demons were cast out, and people were healed by the
touch of Christ’s hand. Galilee is where Jesus preached a Kingdom of Justice,
Righteousness and Reconciliation.
This
is what we are called to. We are called to go to our Galilee, and continue the
story. To give sight to those who are blinded to the ways of salvation. To cast
out the demons of sin and selfishness and despair. To heal people with loving
hands and warm embraces. To preach Christ’s message of justice and
righteousness and reconciliation. To proclaim that the kingdom of God is at
hand. We are called to go out to
our Galilee, the place in our lives where we are called to minister, and be
Christ’s body to everyone we meet, continuing the story that begins in the
empty tomb.
We’re
called to go to Galilee and prepare ourselves for the arrival of the risen
Christ, and fill you up with the glory of the resurrected Christ, with joy, and
power, and passion, and eternal life, for just as the stone was rolled aside
from Jesus’ tomb, so have the stones been rolled aside from all that entombs us
in our lives, from sin, and death, selfishness and weakness, hopelessness and
despair.
No comments:
Post a Comment