Sermon for the Feast of St. Mark/Third Sunday After Easter

admin | 25 April 2010

“They were afraid”

It is known as the short ending to The Gospel according to St. Mark 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.

But what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think, it is 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 at all. The resurrection captures the imaginations of the gospel writers and compels them to see things in a new light without which they would never have written what they have written about Jesus at all.

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 might 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. 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 in one way or another. 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 indeed 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.

Fear and its overcoming is a feature of the teaching about the Resurrection. The Resurrection accounts show the disciples either huddled behind closed doors in fear or running away from Jerusalem in fear. The Risen Christ appears in our midst behind closed doors. The Risen Christ runs out after us to teach us the resurrection on the Road to Emmaus.

“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.

Today is The Feast of St. Mark as well as The Third Sunday after Easter. Both speak to the mystery of the Church as belonging to the mystery of the Risen Christ. Both recall us 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.

Is that not our problem? We no longer know what the Church is and what it is for because we demand that everything be accountable to us. The idolatry of pragmatism is an especially modern trait. We insist that everything be measured in practical terms, whatever that means, and, in so doing, can only discover that we are naked and without hope because we are without God.

And we are without God because we have banished him from ourselves. The Church ceases to be, first and foremost, the place of the awesome worship of God. Instead, we demand that the Church reflect our world and day, our projects and plans. We insist that God be accommodated to our agendas and our perceptions. We demand that our experiences be the measure of reality and that every mess-up in our lives be paraded about and celebrated as truth. There is no fear of God because, in part, we have taken his mercy for granted. In short, we want God to be subject to us.

In this view of things, the Church becomes just another comfort station dispensing the spiritual equivalents of Ritalin, Prozac, and Viagra for a depressed and depressing world. In short, we want God to service us. To which Jesus says, “Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.”

It is only when we confront our emptiness that God can begin to make something out of our nothingness. Only in confronting the contradictions of our souls and in discovering the limitations of our worldly ambitions can we begin to learn about “the building up of the body of Christ in love” that Paul is talking about in his Letter to the Ephesians. There is, of course, nothing new in the demand to make the church answerable to the age and to our immediate and practical concerns. The problem is that it is, always, at the price of the Gospel.

We forget that, as Anglicans, we are part of Christ’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic church; that we are subject to a body of teaching, the consensus fidelium that we have received and to which all are subject; that the consensus fidelium which, first and foremost, is about the revelation of God also teaches us about our humanity; that our bishops and our synods and our parishes are also subject to the fundamental teaching about God as Trinity, about the essential divinity of Jesus Christ, about the work of human redemption and our sacramental participation in it; in short, to the consensus fidelium which connects us to the church universal. In other words, it is not something which we can alter and change. It is not something that we make up. We can only embrace it or deny it.

We are subject to a pattern of teaching that is rich and great in its wisdom. We only belittle it by our ignorance and our arrogance. It may be that we shall all have to learn the hard way, by way of our nakedness and our emptiness, by way of the discovery of our betrayals of Christ. Perhaps, then, our experiences shall be turned into “the fear of the Lord,” which issues in the praise and worship of God; perhaps, then, we shall be like Mark who ran away only to find the one from whom there is no running away.

And then, out of our sorrows, there will arise the joy that has no end, the joy that is the counter to all our crippling fears.