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Meditation for the Feast of St. Mark

“For they were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark. Why? Because some of the earliest texts of St. Mark’s Gospel end at verse eight of the sixteenth chapter rather than with the accounts of the Resurrection that take us to verse twenty. To be sure, the canonical Gospel, the gospel that is authoritative for orthodox Christians, includes those additional twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the Doctrine of the Resurrection or that the additional verses are somehow unrelated and disconnected to the rest of his Gospel and unfaithful to it. Quite the contrary.

And yet, what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is a powerful and poignant ending, and serves to make the doctrinal point about the Resurrection even more strongly. After all, it is only in the light of the Resurrection that the story of Jesus makes any sense. The Resurrection has captured the imaginations of the Gospel writers, such as St. Mark, and compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels could never have been written.

The additional verses serve as an epilogue and as a further point of confirmation, whether as added by Mark or by someone else later on is entirely uncertain and unknowable, and, I must add, quite irrelevant to our understanding of the Christian Faith.

But some speculation is called for. I like to think that the shorter ending expresses something of the character and experience of Mark himself. I like to think of him as the young man who ran away naked leaving his loin-cloth behind at the scene of the capture of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane by the temple authorities. We all betray Christ in one way or another; we all run away naked from the truth of our betrayals. But what happens when we are forced to confront those betrayals of our hearts in light of the empty tomb? Suddenly there is “trembling and astonishment,” actually a kind of ecstasy (εκστασις) in the sense of being aware of something which is greater than ourselves, namely, the power of God. It renders us silent, “they said nothing to anyone”; what could they say? For“they were afraid”. I like to think that St. Mark is one who has had to confront his fears and his failings and in so doing has written his Gospel.

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” as the psalmist and others would teach us; “know thyself” as the Delphic Oracle of the Greeks would teach us. There is “fear and trembling” in our being awakened to the mighty power and truth of God. And if there is not, then we are dead in ourselves. The fear here actually opens us out to the presence of the Risen Christ.

We are recalled to the comfort, that is to say, strength, of the Doctrine of the Resurrection for us in the face of the controversies and confusions of our Church and day. Here is the doctrine that counters “every blast of vain doctrine” that arises when there is no longer any “fear and trembling,” no longer any fear of the Lord, no longer any awareness of the great dangers of human presumption and folly.

It may be that we shall have to discover this the hard way, by way of our nakedness and our emptiness, by way of the discovery of our betrayals of Christ. Then and only then, shall our experiences be turned into “the fear of the Lord” which issues in the praise and worship of God; then and only then, shall we be like Mark who ran away only to find the one from whom there is no running away. Our fear and trembling shall be turned into joy and delight.

“For they were afraid”

Fr. David Curry
Meditation for the Feast of St. Mark
(transf.) April 29th, 2014