Endings and Beginnings
Easter Sunday
Anyone who loves a good book or a good movie has undoubtedly been forced to reckon at some point with a masterfully constructed cliffhanger. Whether it’s a plot point that emerges in the second installment of a trilogy, or a season-ending bombshell that dropped on a popular TV show’s audience, storytellers have long understood the effectiveness of such techniques to leave viewers and readers wanting more.
While I don’t think that the author of Mark’s gospel was motivated by a desire for ratings, it’s hard to deny that what we encounter in the first eight verses of Mark chapter 16 constitute perhaps the most astonishing cliffhanger ever introduced. It doesn’t hurt that the story involved, far from being just another novel or movie, is the most incredible, and most monumental, story ever told, the story of the death and resurrection of the Son of God. And yet, when we turn to Mark’s account of this story, one of the first things we might notice is that it doesn’t have all of the trappings we’ve come to expect. We don’t see the risen Jesus meeting Mary Magdalene in the garden. We don’t hear about him passing through the locked doors of an upper room, encouraging the fearful disciples to see and even to feel the wounds in his hands and side. In fact, we don’t see Jesus at all.
Instead, we see an empty tomb and an angelic messenger. We hear the proclamation that he has risen and the charge given to the women to go and tell the disciples that Jesus was on the way to meet them in Galilee. But after that, we are left with the abrupt, and perhaps unsatisfying conclusion that the short ending of Mark provides: the women hurry away from the tomb in terror and amazement, and in their fear they don’t say anything about what they had seen and heard. It’s not hard to see why those within the early church might have been compelled to add the verses that pop up in those later verses, the long ending of the gospel. We can imagine them scratching their head over the original conclusion and saying, “There’s got to be more.”
But there is more. Even without the added verses that emerge in the later manuscripts, we know that the women fleeing from the tomb was not an ending to the story, but rather a beginning. We know that they did go and share what they had seen. We know that Peter and the other disciples were transformed, first by the women’s witness and then by their own encounters with the risen Lord, so that they would be able to preach, to teach, and to share the Kingdom of God in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
Peter’s testimony to Cornelius in Acts chapter 10 is itself not an ending, but a continuation of this new beginning. In fact, from the moment when the women fled from the tomb, the events of that first Easter morning, and the stories that the earliest followers of Jesus would tell about those events, couldn’t be stopped. Rather than teetering on the edge of the cliff, the narrative of God’s powerful victory over death and sin and darkness hurtled right past the cliff and into a new and glorious reality that was just beginning, a reality that will have no end, but will continue into a glorious eternity as the same God who raised Jesus from the dead will make all things new.
