Ending without end - Living by the Word - Mark 16:1-8 - Column

Christian Century, March 16, 1994 by Patrick J. Willson

AS AN END to a story, this one is wholly unacceptable: a white-robed young man whispers enigmatic promises while women scurry away in fear and astonishment.

Mark's story has led us to expect much n tore. But now it is over. There is no Great Commission, no road to Emmaus, no breakfast of fish on the beach with the risen Jesus. There is only a promise that we will see him, followed by fear, then silence. We look around. half expecting some final bombshell to release the tension that has welled through Mark's telling of the tale. There is none. The credits roll. Clearly something must be done about this ending.

Matthew addressed the problem by providing a triumphant, happy ending, the risen Jesus meeting the disciples on a mountain with eleventhth-hour instructions. Knowing that Mark's clumsy ending would leave us hanging, Luke rewrote the entire episode, adding a second man in "dazzling clothes." and pulling a pair of stories from his stock of resurrection appearances. Jesus meets the disciples on the road to Emmaus, he interprets the scriptures and breaks bread. Now that's the way to tell about the resurrection.

Many writers have tinkered with Mark's ending. The church knew the story couldn't stop so abruptly; faithful Christians insisted there was more. Someone added ."the longer ending" to Mark's Gospel, a solution accepted by tradition, though it has tended to inspire dangerous behavior, encouraging the faithful to handle poisonous snakes and swig strychnine cocktails. In an elegant but shorter ending "Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west,' the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation."

Surely Mark must have felt tempted to end the story with such a soaring vision. Most scholars agree that he Wrote for a congregation that was liminal, marginal, expendable and suffering some form of persecution. Wouldn't these people come to Christian worship hoping for the blessed relief and consolation of a happy ending? A conventional happy ending comforts us by its very conclusiveness. ,What was begun is finished. We are left feeling filled, satisfied and reassured about the order of things. The world is a reliable place after all: dramas begin and conflicts arise, but all is resolved in the final scene. Our hearts are lifted and the curtain falls. Mark advertised his story as "good news." But what kind of good news ends with devastating ambiguity: promises uttered from the shadows of a tomb, women rushing off afraid? Moreover, what pastor, preacher or teacher would dare flout the expectations and longings of vulnerable people?

The jagged edges of these final verses do, in fact, trace Mark's pastoral wisdom. He refuses to tie the loose ends of the gospel into a tidy bow of fleeting consolations. The final verses are ambiguous: a promise greeted by fear; a pledge that that we will "see him" swamped by our own uncertainty and dread. What Mark's ending lacks in romance it makes up for in sheer realism. Isn't this the world we live in? No enchanted world of thinly fabricated happily-every-afters, but a world in which we hold tightly to the promise and fearfully tread our way through a tangle of doubts and amazements.

This is the way Easter dawns upon us: with promise and apprehension. We can either heave the book across the desk in exasperation or mine for deeper significances. Mark's ending, or rather its lack of an ending, leaves us hungry and haunted. We forage back into the Gospel, ravenous for clues. What was it Jesus said in the 14th chapter? "After I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee." We ponder possible meanings. We do "not cease from exploration," as Eliot has put it.

Matthew, Luke and the anony- mous authors of the longer and shorter endings understood: this story cannot end here. Mark hinted at the truth in his first verse: "The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God." The story goes on. His story goes on, and so does ours. We proceed with the promise that accompanies our uncertainty.

We live by faith, then, precariously balancing between the young man's promise and the women's fear and astonishment. We seek ending after ending, only to discover that every ending that we fashion inevitably disappoints us. Every finale forecloses the drama prematurely. An ending says too much too surely, and therefore it never says enough. Although it may satisfy us for the moment, we sense its failure and falsity. The young man in the tomb understands that there is more to come. "He is not here," not in the tomb, not at the end of the story; "he is going ahead of you," always ahead of us; and "you will see him," in Galilee and in places we would never have expected. He is going ahead of us, and of his story; there is no end.

Patrick J. Willson is pastor of St. Stephen Presbyterian Church in Fort Worth, Texas.