“For they were afraid”
The Easter stories all show the overcoming of fear and uncertainty through the encounter with Christ’s Resurrection. Sorrow is transformed into joy. “Be not afraid” is the message of Easter in the second Gospel provided on Easter Day read from St. Mark (Mk. 16.1-8, BCP, p. 185). We have seen in various ways the process of dawning awareness in the disciples about the essential life of God that is greater than sin and evil, greater than darkness and death, whether it is Mary Magdalene coming in her early morning sorrow to the empty tomb or the disciples huddled in fear behind closed doors as in a tomb or in the arresting and dynamic image of Christ the Good Shepherd. His laying down his life for the sheep is precisely about his going “through the valley of the shadow of death” for us, with us, and in us such that we need not fear “for thou art with me.” On the Third Sunday after Easter, we see the new birth of the Resurrection in us by way of the image of child-birth, the idea of sorrow and pain transformed into joy and delight.
Thus there is something rather fitting about the conjunction of the Feast of St. Mark with the Third Sunday after Easter today. Mark is the Easter saint par excellence. His feast day always falls within Eastertide. The Easter Gospel from Mark helps to explain today’s Gospel and Feast. “For they were afraid” complements “be ye not troubled.”
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 that we possess 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 twelve verses. The shorter ending does not mean that Mark does not believe in the Doctrine of the Resurrection or that those twelve 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 highlight 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 has compelled them to see things in a new light without which the Gospels themselves could never have been written.
The additional verses, if they are in fact additional for they could be original, 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 probably unknowable, and, I must add, quite irrelevant to our understanding of the Christian Faith or to the questions about the canon of Scripture. In a way the questions about the ending of Mark’s Gospel are a bit like the questions surrounding the mystery of the Johannine Comma. Originally there in the text and then removed or interpolated into the text later? Who knows?
But some speculation and reflection 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 does Austin Farrer, 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. Only Mark gives us that rather peculiar, poignant, personal, yet puzzling detail (Mk. 14. 51,52).
We all betray Christ in one way or another; that is, of course, the lesson of the Passion. And we all run away naked from the truth of our betrayals. Part of the Easter message is about Jesus running out after us or appearing before us precisely where we are in fear and uncertainty, in sorrow and confusion. 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 in the sense of being aware of something which is greater than ourselves, namely, the power of God who is essential life. It renders us silent, for what could we say? “They said nothing to anyone for they were afraid.” I like to think that St. Mark is someone who has had to confront his fears and his failings and in so doing has written his Gospel. In other words, his Gospel is his response to the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. His Gospel is the moving spirit of the Resurrection in him.
“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” as the psalmist and others teach us; “know thyself” as the ancient Greeks teach us. There is “fear and trembling” in our being awakened to the mighty power and truth of God, to the wisdom that is the knowledge of what knowledge does not and cannot know. And if there is no fear, no sense of awe and wonder, then we are dead in ourselves. This fear opens us out to the presence of the Risen Christ. Sorrow is transformed into joy.
We are recalled to the comfort, that is to say, strength, of the Doctrine of the Resurrection in the face of all of the confusions and uncertainties of our culture and church. 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 essential life of God which grounds all reality in the knowing love of God. Here is joy even in the midst of our current fears and endless uncertainties about the ups and downs of the pandemic.
It may be that we discover this the hard way, by way of our nakedness and our emptiness, by way of the discovery of our betrayals of Christ whether personally or institutionally. For 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 which leads to the building up of the body in love even in a world of distress and dismay, of division and animosity, of fear and anxiety. “Be ye not troubled” because ye need not fear. “Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.”
“For they were afraid”
Fr. David Curry
St. Mark & Easter 3, 2021