Mark’s Easter empowers us to complete it, to create a vision for Easter that fulfills God’s hope for humankind and all creation. Mark’s gospel makes room for an Easter that does not depend on a sighting of the risen Jesus. We can’t force it to do what it never did or become what it never was. We want Easter to play by our rules.īut life doesn’t work like that, and neither does faith. The church was uncomfortable with an open-ended Easter. They wanted a compliant Jesus rising visibly from the dead, lending credence to the resurrection claim. Other options for a “better” ending followed, each trying to make Mark’s Easter conform to the other gospels. Around the third or fourth century an alternate ending was added in order to unify and control the narrative of Christian faith. Maybe we’d want to try to “fix” it as the early church did. If Mark were the only gospel we had, with its abrupt ending that offers no sighting of a risen Jesus, what would be the hope in that?
The women were terrified and ran away – and didn’t want to say anything to anyone.
They say he was taken out of the tomb, or even that he rose from the dead. The stories that form Mark had been told and re-told for years around campfires and family meals, in prayers and liturgies, in markets and on street corners, in hushed tones in places of power.ĭid you hear about Jesus of Nazareth? The Galilean arrested and killed by the Romans? I heard several women went to anoint the body, but it was gone. The gospels aren’t Eyewitness News they’re composites of various narratives and memories that eventually coalesce into coherent accounts. For a time, it was! Mark precedes the other gospels by 10, 20, 30 years or more.Īnd even Mark wasn’t put into written form until perhaps three decades after Jesus. Imagine if Mark were the only gospel, and that’s all we had. So the women 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 way Mark tells it, though, Easter is hardly cause for celebration:
Yes, the pandemic is still with us, racism has not been dismantled, gun violence continues, but signs of Easter abound: vaccines are working, we’re finally listening to truth-telling about race in America, and public support to end gun violence may be at a tipping point. Crocuses are up and daffodils not far behind. A 12-month winter that would not let go, with death always hovering close, nearby.īut now birds sing and buds are on the trees. We’ve been cooped up in a yearlong Covid-imposed Lenten-like season.
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