Bloomsbury Central Baptist
Church
11.00am,
3 April 2016
Mark 16.9-20 The
Longer Ending of Mark
Mark 16.8b The
Shorter Ending of Mark
Psalm 119.18-20
Listen to this sermon here:
https://soundcloud.com/bloomsbury-1/2016-04-03-am-simon-woodmanmp3#t=19:12
Do
you like a happy ending?
If so, then the original ending of
Mark’s gospel is probably not for you.
As
we saw last week, on Easter Sunday,
Mark finishes his gospel with
something of a cliffhanger.
The
women are seen running away from the empty tomb,
and are too afraid even to speak.
Not,
you might think, the most natural place to end the story.
And if you think that, you aren’t
alone.
You
may be interested to know that there have been two serious attempts
to fix this within the manuscript
tradition.
And
there are four possible variations available to us
for the ending of Mark’s gospel.
The
most ancient and reliable sources,
including the wonderful Codex
Sinaiticus
which you can go and see not
far from here in the British library,
agree
that the gospel in its earliest form finished at verse 8.
The
longer ending, particularly verses 11 to 20,
appears to be a cobbled together
sequence of stories
based on events either from
the other gospels, or from the book of Acts,
and the best estimate of scholars
is that it was added to
Mark’s original text
some decades after the gospel
was first written.
It
may be helpful just to recap for a moment
what we know of the sequence of the
authorship of the gospels,
such as who wrote what, and
when,
as a way of getting our heads around
this.
We
really ought to start with Paul’s letters:
Romans, Corinthians, Galatians,
Ephesians,
Philippians, Colossians,
Thessalonians, and so on…
These were written in the early to mid-50s,
some 20 years after the
events of Jesus’ crucifixion.
Then
comes Mark’s gospel, with its original hanging ending,
written in about 60,
setting
down in writing for the first time
the stories of Jesus’ life
that had until that point had been
circulating orally.
Mark’s
gospel was obviously something of an early hit,
and it was widely copied and
circulated
amongst the early communities of
Christians.
But
it also became clear fairly early on
that there were some problems with
it.
After
all, it describes Jesus as a teacher,
but doesn’t actually recorded much of
what he taught.
It's
also lacking any of the birth stories we know so well.
And it's worth a thought that if we
only had Marks Gospel,
we wouldn't have any Christmas!
And
it also, as we have seen,
doesn't have any resurrection
narratives.
There
were a variety of responses to these deficiencies.
Probably
the most dramatic was Matthew’s,
who about 10 years after Mark was written,
decided to have a go at rewriting the
gospel to include extra material.
So
he copied some significant chunks of Mark directly,
but added in the Christmas story,
five large teaching blocks of
Jesus’ sayings,
plus some Resurrection
accounts.
Then,
about 10 years after Matthew’s re-writing of Mark,
Luke decided to have a go himself,
and
using material from both Matthew and Mark,
plus some other stuff he researched,
he
came up with what he hoped would be
the definitive version of the Jesus
story,
what we call Luke's Gospel.
Where
he differed from the other two
was that he went on and wrote a part
II,
which we call Acts,
describing the goings on in the early
church
and the adventures of Paul.
We
are actually planning a series on Acts for after Pentecost,
so will come back to Luke’s part II in
a few weeks.
And
we can only speculate,
but it seems likely that if Matthew,
Mark, or even John,
had also written their
versions of the story of the early church,
they might of been as different to the
book of Acts
as their gospels are to one
another.
But
I digress, although only slightly,
because sometime after Luke wrote his
gospel and Acts,
two further things happened.
The
first was the emergence of the gospel of John,
sometime around 90, as yet another,
and this time radically different,
version of the Jesus story.
The
second was that someone decided
to add a new ending onto Mark’s
Gospel,
largely,
as I said earlier, cobbled together from Matthew, Luke, and Acts.
And
where this brings me to, really,
is what strikes me as an important
question:
Why
do people keep feeling the need
to update and rewrite the Jesus story?
Now,
don't get me wrong,
I'm not about to call into question
the scriptural status
or the usefulness of either
Matthew, Luke, or John's Gospels.
Neither am I going to make a case that
‘original is best’
and argue for the primacy of
Mark’s Gospel.
Sometimes
things need improving, or expanding,
and the tradition and witness of the
church
has been that Matthew, Luke,
and John
got far more right than they
got wrong.
But,
insofar as our passage for this morning is concerned,
this cobbled together miscellany of
resurrection appearances
that got tacked on to the end
of Mark’s Gospel
some decades after he wrote
it,
please forgive me if I reserve my
judgement
as to its usefulness, or
indeed inspired nature.
In
fact, I might even go along with Ched Myers,
who suggests that what we have in the
additional ending of Mark,
is the first known example of
what has become
'A long theological tradition
which continues to this day,
[That of betraying] the
gospel by 're-writing it'.[1]
As
we saw last week
(and if you weren't here, you can
catch up with the sermon
by reading it or listening to
it online)
Mark’s Gospel originally, and very
deliberately, ended on a cliff-hanger:
The tomb is empty, the women
are afraid… what happens next…?
The
invitation inherent in ending this way
is for those of us reading the gospel
to continue the narrative of Resurrection
in our own lives.
Where
is the risen Jesus?
He's in your life, in my life, in our
life together!
That
is the message of the original ending of Mark’s Gospel.
Will the women overcome their fear
and encounter the new
beginning
that the empty tomb opens before
them?
Will we?
This
is the challenge to us of Mark’s Gospel as originally conceived.
It
has no need of stories about Jesus passing magically through walls
to suddenly appear in the midst of his
friends,
like some first century version of a
locked room mystery.
It
has no need of a shape shifting zombie Jesus,
rising from the grave
to surprise doubters and tell off
unbelievers.
It
has no need for stories about miraculous healings,
unearthly languages,
or the magical ability to handle
dangerous snakes
or drink poison with no ill
effect.
And
yet all these, and more, are here in our additional longer ending.
What's
going on?
Why do people keep feeling the need
to update and re-write the Jesus
story?
Partly,
at least in the case of Mark’s longer ending,
although also I suspect in the case of
some of the other gospels,
it's to do with the fact that most of
us don't like to live with ambiguity.
We
like closure, and an open-ended ending
can feel like it's no ending at all.
There
may be something in here about personality type,
and it certainly seems to be the case
that some people are much less able to
cope with ambiguity than others.
Some
of us crave the neat ending, the closure of certainty,
whilst others of us find this
restricting and stifling,
and we long for the new possibilities
inherent in uncertainty.
But
I think it's more than this.
A
neat closure to Mark’s Gospel allows those of us reading it 'off the hook'.
We don't need to ask ourselves whether
risen Jesus is in our own lives
because the question of where
he is has been answered:
he is there in the text, in
the locked room,
back among his
friends, telling them off for their unbelief,
and commissioning them to go
out and witness to the gospel,
doing all kinds of
magical signs as they do so,
to prove to the world that
Jesus is more powerful
than any of the
pagan gods,
or the priests who
vied for attention in the ancient world.
But,
maybe it's actually even more sinister than this.
Maybe
this isn't just an ending added by someone
who didn't like the ambiguous cliff-hanger
of the original.
Maybe
it isn't even just an attempt to release the reader
from the uncertainty of having to
encounter the risen Christ
in their own context.
Maybe
it isn't even just about galvanising disciples
to courageous witness in the face of
seemingly insufferable odds.
Ched
Myers, again, suggests that what we have here
is an 'Imperial re-writing'[2] of
Mark’s Gospel,
an
attempt to domesticate the wild lion of Mark’s narrative,
to tame it and bring it into our own
world
in ways that comfort us,
rather than which challenge and
disturb us.
Think
for a moment about the way our society tells stories
which construct and reinforce the
dominant narratives of our world.
At
the most basic level, we like our films to have a happy ending.
It's rare for a box office smash to
end on ambiguity,
and those that do are able to
get away with it
only if they are reinforcing
some other aspect
of our society's dominant
mythology along the way.
Have
you come across the Bechdel Test?
It's named after Alison Bechdel,
and asks whether a work of
fiction, such as a book or a movie,
features at least two women who are
named
and who talk to each other
about something other than a man.
In
many ways it is a test of the extent
to which the male dominated aspects of
our culture
determine the stories we tell.
Recent
films that fail the test include:
The Social Network, Harry Potter and
the Deathly Hallows,
Avatar, the entire original
Star Wars trilogy,
and the entire Lord of the Rings
trilogy.
It
is, It seems, still very much a man's world.
And
in the longer additional ending of Mark’s Gospel,
we see the narrative hijacked
away from the named women of Mark’s
original.
Mary
Magdalene bears witness, but the men don't believe her,
and so the narrative moves away from women
and back into the world of
the dominant males,
who then get to their own series of
resurrection accounts.
And
it is the men, not the women, who are commissioned
to 'go into all the world
and proclaim the good news to
the whole creation' (v.15).
The
gender-inclusive echo of Jesus' ministry,
still present in Mark's original,
is
appropriated to the cause of patriarchy
by the end of the first century.
And
the trajectory towards two millennia of male-led
and male-dominated Christianity is
well and truly set in train.
The
alternative "shorter ending" even goes so far as to name a Peter,
who is presented as the restored head
of the community
after his denial of Jesus
just a few days earlier.
Peter
of course, being the one who comes to be revered
as the head of the church in Rome,
at the heart of the Empire and at the
heart of power.
Patriarchy
wins, and wins again.
But
it's not just the suppression of gender inclusion
that betrays the darker intentions of
the additional endings of Mark's gospel.
The
tendency for subversive radical discipleship
to be re-written as orthodox-compliance
and power-dominance
is visible in other ways also.
Firstly,
let's think about the balance between doubt and faith.
I
don't know about you, but my experience of faith
is one of faith held through profound
doubting.
I
don't believe that it is wrong to doubt.
I don't believe that it is sinful to
wrestle with unbelief.
If
anything, I'm always rather suspicious, and even a little bit afraid,
of the kind of Christianity that
leaves no room
for honest doubt and
integrity-filled-unbelief.
And
it is this honest wrestling that we meet in Mark’s gospel,
as we encounter ourselves in his
failure-ridden portrait of the disciples.
We
find ourselves identifying with the unnamed father of the sick child
who cries out to Jesus, "I
believe; help my unbelief!" (9.24).
All
this is undone in the additional ending,
where, three times in eleven verses,
the disciples are criticised for their
unbelief (11, 14, 16).
We
are told that salvation is for the one who "believes" and is
baptised,
while the one who unbelieves is
condemned.
This
is fundamentalism taking over a religion of grace.
"Comply or be damned" is the
subtext,
and the gospel’s wrestling with the
grey areas of faith is undone.
The
cross, taken down this path, becomes a sword or an emblem on a battle shield,
as Christianity begins its journey
towards Imperial domination.
And
still this process continues,
as people of faith in our own world
constantly re-write the grace of the
Jesus story
to suit their own aspirations for
power and certainty.
"Believe
or be damned!",
or worse yet, "Believe what I
tell you to believe, or be damned!",
remains
the inauthentic hallmark
of so much of what seeks to pass for
faithful Christianity.
Give
me a church of honest doubters
wrestling their demons with integrity
any day!
But
secondly,
building on the betrayal of doubt and
the assertion of certainty,
we
also meet in the longer ending
the tendency to reduce a lived
relationship with the risen Christ
to the status of magical wonders as
the guarantee of belief.
The
ending tells its readers in V.17,
that "these signs will accompany
those who believe",
before listing the casting
out of Demons, speaking in new tongues,
picking up snakes, drinking
poison,
and laying hands on and
healing the sick.
The
underlying assumption behind this list
is that being a Christian means
demonstrating visible power.
The
powerlessness of the cross,
and the mystery of the empty tomb,
are
exchanged for a grasping after power
and a desire to access magic
at the level of the pagan
temple-priests and wonder-workers.
Every
show of strength in the name of the pagan gods
is matched by those who would follow
Jesus
demonstrating similar magical
abilities.
It's
like Moses before Pharaoh,
with Pharaoh's magicians matching Moses
trick-for-trick
until all the children are dead.
And
whilst we may laugh at those in the Bible-belt of the United States
who take this literally, and practice
snake-handling
as part of their religious
devotion,
we
need to guard ourselves carefully
against the desire to exchange
servanthood and rejection
for power and influence.
When
Christianity in any culture seeks visible forms of power,
it rewrites the story of the one who
came to suffer and die
to subvert all narratives of power.
Any
claim that we are all should be a "Christian country"
is a betrayal of the cross,
and
any attempt to that claim cultural values have a gospel mandate
is a distortion of the gospel itself.
But
the additional ending not only exchanges honest doubt for blind faith,
it not only exchanges service for
dominance,
it
also banishes Christ from the earth
and confines him to heaven.
Mark’s
original ending deliberately left the women
seeking their risen Lord in the
ordinariness of their lives,
with him having gone on ahead of them
to Galilee to meet them there.
The
new ending elevates Jesus to the heavens,
and sets him at the right hand of God
on high.
The
servant Jesus, known in community,
becomes the king of the cosmos,
ruling even over the emperor in Rome,
and
in due course becoming the head of the Imperial church itself.
This
is the ultimate will to power,
as simple faith and servant living
give way to Imperial aspiration and
dominance.
And
so, to return to my question
of why people feel the need to
re-write the Jesus story,
I
think I'm beginning to sense an answer.
We
do it because we are afraid of weakness and we desire strength;
we do it because we want to be assured
of our right-ness,
even if that is at the cost of another
person's wrong-ness.
And
in our own ways we continue to re-write the story;
as we draw our battle lines to rule
others out and ourselves in,
as we grasp after power and
influence,
as we worship the King above all kings
rather than the servant of all.
And
yet…
Through
all of these rewrites,
the challenge of Mark’s empty tomb
still echoes through:
Where
is Jesus?
The
resurrection is not the answer to everything, it turns out.
Rather, it is the first question of
the rest of our lives.
We
meet the risen Christ as we follow him
in faithful, costly, servant hearted
discipleship.
This
is the truth of the resurrection.
He
is risen. He is risen indeed!
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