Mark1618

Mark 16:1-8
Easter Sunday

I’ve got a confession to make, one that I’m not too proud of, but, you
know we’ve all got some things we’d prefer not to have to admit to, and
this is one of them. So, here it goes—and I say this with deep, deep
shame: I love reality television shows—not all of them, mind you, but
more than I would have ever expected when this whole reality boom
began in television a few years ago. Yes, yes, yes, you are a better
person than I am for not liking them, and smarter, more sophisticated
than me—congratulations, you should be receiving your award sometime
soon. And I get all the reasons to dislike these kinds of shows, or to
have misgivings about them—and I do have some misgivings, actually a
lot of them, and yet, like some addict going back to his drug, I find myself
at the trough of reality television, wanting more and more!

And speaking of addiction, one of my favorite shows is a series called
Intervention on the A&E cable network. The premise of the show is to
ask addicts of all sorts—people addicted to food, shopping, drugs, sex,
whatever—to allow a documentary crew to follow them around and
record their struggle with their particular addiction. But unknown to the
addict, the producers of the show have been working behind the scenes
with the family and friends on putting together an intervention to get the
addict into some sort of rehab program. The intervention takes places
near the end of the show: the therapist and family confronts the addict
with the reality of their addiction and they tell the addict the
consequences of what will happen if they do not seek help, which usually
means the family withdrawing some sort of contact or financial support
from their friend or family member, and then comes an offer of help,
which means almost immediately going to an out-of-state treatment
center. The drama comes out of that moment, that intervention, when
the addict must decide to either to accept or reject the offer of
treatment—and though I do get the kind of sick game-show quality of the
show, especially near the end, it is still truly compelling television—and I’
m usually a puddle of tears at the end of the show. Most of the time,
though not always, the person struggling with the addiction accepts the
offer of help, and they are subsequently whisked away to the airport
within hours of their verbal willingness to seek help, in order to fly to their
new home, a treatment center of some sort, for the next 30-90 days.

To me, the highlight of the show comes at the very, very end, beyond
even the actual intervention itself, when the screen blackens and the
producers tell the viewers about the short-term fate of the subject of that
evening’s show.   Sometimes the news is good and they report they were
discharged from their treatment program after their completion of it and
they have been sober since the end of the filming of that episode. Other
times, you find out that they dropped out of their treatment center before
the prescribed end of the treatment plan, and they are either still using
their drug of choice or they’re trying to beat the addiction on their own,
without help of professionals. As I mentioned earlier, its fascinating
television, and for me, the fascination really comes with the ending—did
it end well? Did they get through their treatment program? How are they
doing now? It’s probably the reason I like mystery who-dun-its, like the
ones Agatha Christie used to write: the whole point of the story is to get
to the conclusion, to find out who did the crime, and how they committed
the murder in that old English countryside manor. The television show
Intervention has that same pull for me—tell me how it ends, how does the
story conclude? And like most people, I like a good neat ending—I want
the addict in treatment, I want the nice couple in the reality show The
Amazing Race to get the million dollars, and I want the nasty character in
Agatha Christie’s book The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to be the murder. I
want the endings to be neat and the end to be tied up well—I want
success, no messy endings, no ambiguity. I hate it when Intervention
ends on an ambiguous note—the addict has left the program, they’re still
struggling with the addiction…and yet, of course, the truth of the matter
is that even the success stories are not finished with…the story goes on
for the addict, they still must struggle, beyond the neat-hour long box the
program has used to tell their story of struggle, and hopefully, triumph.

But neat, tight endings are not we often get in realty, is it? Reality
television doesn’t often reflect reality, ironically enough, though they
sometimes try to do that, or claim to do that, and maybe its why millions
like me are watching these shows, because it feels more real, more
human, and we are a culture that is desperately trying to find the really
real in our lives. I think the attempt to reflect realty is something that
pulls us towards watching the human wreckage that is often depicted in
them—even the people in these shows get categorized in nice, neat
categories—there are the good guys, there are the bad guys—neat and
simple, and we get told who to root for, and maybe who to root against.
Maybe the reason millions of people love these shows is because real
life is a lot messier—and the neat endings don’t come often, and telling
the difference between the good and bad guys isn’t easy.   We hunger
for the definitive endings, even though we’ve become more and more
cynical that endings are ever really all that neat. Reality shows say that
they reflect reality, and yet they often offer the endings we don’t get in
our real lives—clean, clear, with a definite winner at the end of the hour.
We all know real life isn’t like that—things don’t end neatly, there are no
moments where life fades into a black screen and we get our typed
conclusion spelled out for us in white lettering. Things end but they end
with more complexity and sometimes they don’t ever quite end—the story
goes on and on, despite our desire for a nice neat THE END to those
part of our lives where we want things cleanly wrapped up.

The temptation to end the story neatly even infects our own sacred
texts. Fore example, someone thousands of years ago thought that the
Lord’s Prayer ended badly, and subsequently someone added a
brassier, more bold ending to Jesus’ own prayer—For thine is the
kingdom, the power, and glory forever, Amen. You find this desire to
“end well” with some of the psalms: scholars have sometimes noted that
the more positive upbeat endings to some of our most pain-ridden
psalms reflect a different hand the rest of these psalms. Some ancient
figure thought the psalms didn’t end on a quite upbeat enough of a
note. Even the book of Ecclesiastes, in our Old Testament has a taint of
this desire for a different, neater ending: the book ends on curiously
upbeat, religiously orthodox note, an upbeat ending that seems so in
conflict with the tone and tenor of the rest of the text, an ending that
most scholars think was inserted in at a later date.

And even in the Gospels, in our earliest telling of the story of Jesus’ life,
we have the probable insertion of 11 verses at the end of Mark’s
Gospel—note that I only read up to verse 8 today, though the printed
text goes to verse 20. Someone, probably in the early second century,
thought the ending of Mark, with the women being in a state of terror and
amazement was not quite “big” enough of an ending—someone thought
we might need some appearance stories of Jesus that we find in the later
Gospels, Matthew, Luke and John. Someone wanted to finish the story
differently and more neatly—not on such a negative note, with the
women going out with mixed feelings, unsure of the future, silent and
afraid because of the empty tomb.

I mean, I get that. I want the neat endings as well. I want the
reconciliation with Peter, I want the moment with Thomas, when he
declares Jesus as his Lord and God, as Thomas touches the wounds of
this newly resurrected Christ. I like those stories. And we do get those
powerful stories elsewhere, in the other Gospels, but just not here, not in
this Gospel of Mark, this earliest and most visceral telling of Jesus’ life,
death, and resurrection. The earliest ending in Mark is not neat, it is not
definitive, and we don’t get the reconciliation’s we want to witness. It’s
like the moment at the end of the reality show Intervention: the show
fades into black and the white lettering spells out the uncertain future—
we don’t know if the addict makes it or not. Like the show, we’re stuck
with only a word of hope—the tomb is empty, or the addict has sought
treatment and they are trying, and we can only hope for the best.
Sometimes the prayers Jesus gives us don’t end with a bang, and
sometimes the words of Scripture end on a disturbing note, an
ambiguous note, with no neat ending, no neat conclusion with which we
can easily put down the text. Truth is best unvarnished, I think, and
sometimes the wood needs to be unfinished for its real beauty, its real
possibility, to really shine. I also think that doctoring the endings,
inserting a “better” ending, a more positive end, doesn’t allow us to write
our own endings, and these interlopers, with their “better endings” than
what is in the text itself, they forget what God can do with all of our
endings, however messy they may end up being.

More on that later, but I want us to look at our text from Mark a little bit
more closely. The text itself says that the women came to the tomb with
a question: “who will roll away the tomb? How do we get to the body in
order to embalm it with spices?” They arrive and they receive their
answer—someone has already moved the stone and there is yet another
sitting in that tomb, someone who is not the Christ. This young man, so
the text goes, gives them a message, with this most unscripted of
endings: “He has been raised; he is not here.” This wasn’t part of
anyone’s script—or at least it wasn’t an ending anyone was willing to
believe when Christ foretold his death in the Gospels stories, when he
was telling his disciples the ending that he thought God was going to
write with his life. And then the text has this angel telling the women to
go and tell the disciples that this now missing one is going ahead of them
to Galilee. And on these words, the women flee, and we are told simply
that they were filled with fear and amazement—and if we end with verse
8, we don’t even know if they did what was asked of them, which is to tell
Peter and the disciples this puzzling piece of news. All we know is that
the experience silenced them and that is how the story ends. We as
readers are left hanging in the oldest manuscripts of the Gospel of Mark,
wondering what happens next, and maybe that is why the ending
seemed so insufferable for someone in the early 2nd century—surely the
story shouldn’t end like this!

But I like how the original story ends in this Gospel, at end of verse 8,
because I think it allows God and us some freedom in writing the next
part of the story, in the telling of our story of resurrection. In the end, the
most ancient ending of Mark ends with us being what happens next in
the story.   It’s almost as if we are invited to write the last part of the
story, as if we are invited to write our own stories of Jesus’ appearance in
our own lives. The other Gospels furnish those stories for us—but not
here, not in Mark—all we know is that Christ goes before us to Galilee,
and that he will meet the disciples, us, there. Something about the way it
ends just opens up the text in ways that none of the other Gospels really
allow—we become characters in the story, we become participants in
writing this divine narrative, and we are allowed to take and write the
story at the very moment the women flee from the tomb, full of fear and
wonder, full of dread and hope. That is the point we get to begin writing
our own stories of resurrection, ones that come out of those same
moments of fear and hope. Resurrection is a terrible and wondrous
thing, an ending that is not nice or simple and certainly not neat. This is
an unexpected turn of events—people don’t rise from the dead, even
first century folks are a little surprise at the way things have ended up!
And even if the ending is good news, even good news can be scary at
times—being sober after years of addiction has its own terrors,
especially when you’ve only known addiction, or the tomb, or despair, or
even fear. It is the devil you know, so to speak, and most people go with
what they know rather than what is best for them.

The possibility, the opportunity here, is to write our own stories of
resurrection, to write the story of how God has done surprising and
wondrous things in our lives. And its about letting God write those
stories with us, about allowing ourselves to be resurrected out of our
graves, of not resisting that for which we were created, which is life, and
not death. The Christian tradition has always understood the church to
be the presence of Christ in this world—it has always believed that to
know Christ now, in this moment, is to know the one next to you in the
pew, no matter how imperfect that manifestation of the Christ may be, as
we all are. Not only are we the women and men who meet this newly
resurrected Christ, but we become the resurrected Christ himself in this
world—we are both witnesses to the resurrection of the Christ and the
very One who is resurrected. We become the readers and writers of the
divine story the moment the women flee from the tomb, with only their
fear and amazement in hand. We are the resurrected one, we are the
Christ, and thus we witness to our own resurrections, which are as real
as the one that happened thousands of years ago in a graveyard
outside Jerusalem. The messenger in the tomb speaks not only of the
Christ in that moment, but to all of us, in our own graves, whatever grave
we rotting in, when he says: “He has been raised; he is not here.”
Those words are about us as well. Mark’s ending, or his lack of an
ending, or at least his lack of a neat ending, it invites us, you and me, to
take up our pens, and tell the story of our lives, of how God can take that
moment of terror and wonder, that moment that silences us, even as it
amazes us, and of how God can take that moment and transform it into
new life. You and I, we have been raised, you and I, we are not in the
tomb. The Christ is risen and so shall we be. Amen.