Month: April 2016

“They were afraid”

It marks, if you will pardon the pun, the ending of Mark’s Gospel at least in terms of what is known as the shorter ending since the earliest texts of his Gospel end at verse eight rather than verse twenty of Chapter 16. 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. The Gospels, after all, could only have come to be written in the light of the resurrection.

Still, what are we to make of that shorter ending? From a literary point of view, I think it is powerful and poignant ending, and theologically only serves to make the doctrinal point about the resurrection even more strongly. The resurrection has captured the imaginations of the gospel writers and compelled them to see things in a new light without which they would never have written what they have 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.

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. 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” in which we become aware of something greater than ourselves, namely the power of God. It renders us silent, “they said nothing to anyone”. What could they say? “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.

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“The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.”

It is a powerful and familiar image and yet one which I think we often fail to comprehend. Perhaps the most familiar of all of the biblical images and certainly the one which is most commonly represented in the church culture of the Maritimes, it has, I fear, been co-opted by the therapeutic culture and emptied of its deeper meaning. It speaks to us about care, of course, but it does so in the deeper context of sacrifice. It is about something more, though not less, than hugs and squeezes, far more, though not less, perhaps, than the comforts of pharmacare as wonderful as those can be.

We forget that this image so popular and familiar belongs to the pattern of death and resurrection and the way that pattern informs our lives of sacrifice and service. For centuries the Gospel of Christ the Good Shepherd has been read in the Easter season. Christ, the only Son of God, has been given to us as “both a sacrifice for sin, and also an example of godly life,” as one of the prayers of the Church puts it. These are powerful and profound theological concepts that relate to the quality of our lives in faith. There is something quite suggestive, important and necessary about connecting the image of Christ the Good Shepherd to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

For that is exactly what the image of Christ the Good Shepherd is primarily about. It illustrates the theological idea that God can make something good even out of our evil. The power of the good is always greater than all and any evil.

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“The spirit of truth will guide you into all truth”

Along with the repeated mantra “because I go to the Father”, the Gospel readings on these three last Sundays of the Easter season open us out to the power and truth of the Holy Spirit, “the spirit of truth”. Christ’s going to the Father is the condition of the coming of the Spirit. These spiritual movements speak to the fears and uncertainties of our own age and culture, fears and uncertainties which raise important questions about our humanity and about our lives together.

What are our fears and uncertainties? In one way, they are legion but in another way they come down to felt sense of an emptiness within the soul of a culture when we can no longer say what it is that is worth living for, when we can no longer identify the principles and the ideals that dignify our humanity.

If there is nothing to live for, then we are the proverbial ‘walking dead’. Zombie Apocalypse is us! There is nothing to give your life to. Yet our lives are primarily about relationships and connections with and for one another. This is precisely where the Eastertide Gospels come so prominently into play. They provide a kind of counter to our current fears and worries about the empty darkness of our world and day, the emptiness within out of which comes such frightening and senseless acts of violence witnessed so frequently in our schools, our cities, our streets, and our world; acts which destroy all relationships. The essence of such acts is their meaninglessness born out of a sense of the nothingness within our souls and our culture, resulting in the active nihilism of terrorism. Added to that are the paralyzing fears of our uncertainties about what we can and should do, throwing up our hands in despair, as it were, retreating into the ghettoes of a kind of passive nihilism. The fearfulness that we have to confront and overcome in every way is our fearfulness. How will we confront it? How will it be overcome? Only in Christ.

Jesus confronts our fearfulness. The Gospel of the Resurrection is especially about his overcoming of our fearfulness. The message of the angel to the women, coming early to the tomb and finding it empty, was “be not afraid.” Jesus comes into the midst of the disciples whether they are huddled behind closed doors in fear in Jerusalem or on the road to Emmaus in flight from Jerusalem in fear.

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“What is this that he saith, A little while? We cannot tell what he saith”

Perplexity and wonder are among the dominant features of the Easter season. It is all about the perplexity and the wonder of the Resurrection, the new reality which challenges all of our preconceptions and attitudes. The various accounts of the Resurrection are all about the changes and transformations in our understanding of what it means to be human and about how we think the things of the past as well as the things of our present experiences. It happens through the encounters with the Risen Christ, on the one hand, and through what Jesus teaches prior to the events of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, on the other hand.

The Gospels for the last three Sundays of the Easter Season are all taken from the so-called ‘farewell discourse’ of Jesus in John’s Gospel. They are the very profound ideas which Jesus sets before the disciples about which they are puzzled and uncertain. Jesus is preparing them for two mysteries which they do not and cannot understand before they happen. The two mysteries are Christ’s Crucifixion and his Resurrection and Ascension. The latter go together; the Ascension is the culmination of the Resurrection, its fuller meaning, we might say, insofar as it marks his “go[ing] to the Father”. The great Eastertide refrain is precisely “because I go to the Father”. This is the meaning of his Crucifixion and his Resurrection which culminates in the Ascension.

What this means is shown in these remarkable Gospel passages. We read them in the light of the Resurrection and as illuminating the meaning of the Resurrection for us. The aspect of not-knowing is very much part of the human drama of our life with God. Our unknowing is part of the fallen condition of our humanity. The Resurrection is something which we have to be taught, something which we have to grow up into an understanding of its meaning. It means seeing everything in a new light.

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