“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.
“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. The fear here turns into awe and wonder; in short, into worship.
The Feast of St. Mark recalls us to the 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, no longer any sense of the grandeur of God.
And 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. If we insist that everything be measured in practical terms, whatever that means, we can only discover and, perhaps frighteningly so, that we are naked, empty and without hope because we are without God.
It is only when we confront our emptiness that God can make something out of us. 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”.
We are part of Christ’s one, holy, catholic and apostolic church. We are subject to a body of teaching, the consensus fidelium that we have received and to which all are subject; the consensus fidelium which, first and foremost, is about the revelation of God who teaches us about our humanity;
We are subject to a pattern of teaching that is rich and great in its wisdom. We may 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. But, 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. Such is the mercy, but only through the “fear and trembling”.
“They were afraid”
Fr. David Curry
St. Mark, 2016