Sermon for April 7, 2024: “I Know How this Sounds” based upon Mark 16:9-15, 19-20 by Sarah Mills, Member in Discernment

​Mark 16:9-15, 19-20
The Shorter Ending of Mark
[[And all that had been commanded them they told briefly to those around Peter. And afterwards Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation. ]]

The Longer Ending of Mark
Jesus Appears to Mary Magdalene
[[Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.
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Jesus Appears to Two Disciples
After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.

Jesus Commissions the Disciples
Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table; and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, ‘Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation.

The Ascension of Jesus
So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it. ]]

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​The Long Ending of Mark
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“Now after he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, from whom he had cast out seven demons. She went out and told those who had been with him, while they were mourning and weeping. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.
After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.
Later he appeared to the eleven themselves as they were sitting at the table, and he upbraided them for their lack of faith and stubbornness, because they had not believed those who saw him after he had risen. And he said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation… So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God. And they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it.”

My friends, it is wonderful to be amongst you all again. Pastor Chrissy and I have joked that the Sunday after Easter will soon be known as “Sarah Sunday” at Winthrop Congregational Church. In the year since I last visited with you, I have taken more courses through the Maine School of Ministry, continued my work on the MESOM Advisory Team, and begun a chaplaincy internship at Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick. My journey of pursuing my call has continued in new ways. That is also where we find ourselves in this, the first post-Easter service, looking to how we can pursue our call as disciples of Christ in a post-Resurrection world.

Now, your reading last week, Mark 16:1-8 closes with the women being told by the white-robed man they do not recognize to leave the empty tomb, for Jesus is not there. He had told them to let the disciples and especially Peter know that Jesus would go ahead of them to Galilee, but what did they do? They leave the tomb and don't tell anyone because they're afraid. Fear and doubt are a common theme in the gospel of Mark and so it makes sense that this would be where Mark asked us to leave the story of Christ. We are left with people who are afraid, people who probably doubt what they've just seen and what they've heard from this mysterious figure.

Now the reading that we heard today seems to fly in the face of this mysterious and doubt-filled ending. What we instead get is the rest of the story or so it would seem. What we might not know from hearing these verses is that this is very likely an addition to Mark’s Gospel from perhaps 200 years after the original text was completed, a text which ends with the verse you heard last week, the women who leave an empty tomb and tell no one, so we have to ask ourselves, why make this addition to the text? What is it about people that means that we can't sit with a story of Christ that features an ending centered on doubt and fear? In the original ending, the robed individual says that Jesus will go ahead of them to Galilee and that the disciples will meet him there. Now, Mark usually portrays a Christ who is true to his word and so when we read that Jesus will appear to them all in Galilee, and then we don’t get to hear about it happening, well, I don't know about you, but I would be upset. That can’t be how it ends!

To make a comparison to a different epic story, it would be like having the Lord of the Rings end with Sam and Frodo having completed their goal of getting the one ring into the fires of Mount Doom, escaping the rising tide of lava as the mountain begins erupting, but then Tolkien deciding that he will just leave the story with them clinging to the rocks, happy to be free of the ring and completed their quest. We want, no, we need to see Gandalf fly down on the back of an eagle and rescue them both before the fires can claim them. We wouldn’t be happy to just know that the ring had been destroyed and Sauron had been defeated. We long for happy endings that tie up ALL the loose ends. There is a reason many people say “The Return of the King” has too many endings. The truth is, we want to know that it’s all been worth it and everyone’s stories have tidy endings. In that same way, we long for more stories about Jesus after Mark 16:8. If I were an early Christian, I would be shouting “That can’t be how it ends! Come on! Tell me everything you know!” Give me those 25 more minutes of climatic ending sequences!

What we have in the added verses we read today is what Ched Meyers in his book “Binding the Strongman: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus” calls an “imperial rewriting of Mark”. This imperial rewriting symbolizes our unending efforts to domesticate the gospel. Meyer states that this longer ending represents the work of those who cannot see the meaning of chapter 16 verse eight as an invitation to which to respond, but only as a scandal that must properly be resolved. These rewriters are looking for a happy ending, not content with the ending Mark originally offers; one where we are left to wrestle with whether or not the women at the tomb (that is to say ourselves) overcame their fear in order to proclaim the new beginning in Galilee. Instead, they preferred to insert an ending that has neat closure and allows the reader to remain passive.

In these added verses, we hear that the women did indeed speak to the disciples, but they were not believed, and after that, Jesus appeared to two more disciples who were walking into the country and they went back and told the rest, and they did not believe them either. Now, it would seem our imperial rewriters are not doing the best job here. I thought this was supposed to be the happy ending that set up the foundation of Christ’s kingdom on earth, but all these people don't seem to be believing what they're hearing. Well, then we get to Jesus himself showing up to the 11 as they are sitting at a table and berating them for their lack of faith and they're stubbornness because they had not believed those who had seen him after he had risen. To me, this is those imperial rewriters coming in and saying “Listen! We know you don't all understand and believe as much as we do so we're here to tell you that Jesus is really mad. If you don't believe in him and those who try to tell you about him, he might just shout at you for your stubbornness.” In fact, I left out a pretty sizable chunk of verses that, to me and most theologians, seem to subvert so much of what Mark’s original gospel is trying to say in place of providing the early Christian church with more imperialistic, measurable proofs of Christ’s power.

Maybe this will sound familiar to you, but in verse 16 it says, “the one who believes and is baptized will be saved, but the one who does not believe will be condemned.” And one verse that we may be all know, verse 18, says that true-believing Christians “will pick up snakes with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them. They will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover.” For a gospel that is otherwise almost entirely concerned with sacrifice and a suffering Christ and mystery and silence and misunderstandings, these verses seem to give very clear directions on what people need to do in order to both be a good Christian and then to go out and properly represent Christ and his power. I don't know about you all, but I'm about to go into the desert and pick up the first rattlesnake I see and see how my luck is!…  Obviously, I'm not going to do that! So much of Mark’s Gospel refutes the idea of miracle working as being theological proof that Jesus is who we believe Jesus to be. It is easy to criticize the many efforts at Christian magic that are inspired by this text. Think of those folks in churches, particularly in Appalachia, who handle dangerous snakes during their service as a sign of their faith. This emphasis on miraculous Christian magic betrays Mark’s message by instead endorsing the idea that to be a Christian means to demonstrate visible power. You are taking one of the most dangerous creatures and lifting it up in your bare hands, you're drinking poison without fear of dying. You're showing off how powerful you are because you have been baptized and are now a Christian. There is suddenly an emphasis on the idea that, because you are a chosen, baptized person, you can do all of these amazing things.  What this notion ignores is Mark’s rejection of those visible signs of power in favor of servanthood and sacrifice.

So, given all of this, why did I decide to pick this as the reading for today, you might wonder. Well, as I said earlier, I like the fact that, even though this is an addition to Mark’s Gospel, it still embraces the idea of people reporting things and not being believed, not being fully understood. I like that the resurrected Christ is almost as much of a mystery as the Christ in the earlier portions of Mark's gospel, appearing to a select few people until he just can’t take the fact that his closest friends aren’t believing their fellow disciples when they hear of his encounters with their comrades. The disciples are just as useless in this additional writing as they are in the rest of the book, not understanding what Jesus is doing. I like the idea that we end with the disciples being told to proclaim the good news everywhere (even though they may struggle with doubt and not understand everything) and that, during their witnessing to the world, the Lord worked with them. Christ remains collaborative, even after his ascension to heaven.

But I also picked this reading for all of the things that I don't like about it. I picked it in part for the verses that I did not have our liturgist share: the idea that someone looked at an ending of a gospel text and felt so lost, still felt like they did not have a good grip on Christ yet, and just wanted that happier ending. I understand wanting to have a list of things that you need to do and that you should do in order to best serve Christ after his resurrection and prove to those you meet that the power of Christian belief can be visibly demonstrated. I understand the desire for a risen Jesus who shows up and tells people who still don't believe the stories of others to stop being so stubborn! He really is not in that tomb anymore! I understand, wanting to have this earliest story of Christ’s ministry end with people actually seeing him being taken up into heaven and sitting at the right hand of God. Warren Carter and Amy-Jill Levine share that Mark’s original ending “maximizes reader engagement with the story. Readers are called to continue the story. [But it also] is not surprising that some early interpreters found this unresolved conflict to be unsatisfactory.” After nearly 200 years of questioning Mark’s ending, a choice was made by people like you and I to unify its closing narrative with the other gospels. Maybe this was a sign of a young faith seeking firm foundations and prescriptive sacraments around which to root their discipleship. A faith longing to model the empire all around it with signs of strength and visible power.

But I also love the idea that Mark originally ends with a question mark. It invites us to consider what we would do in place of these frightened women running from a now empty tomb. We can put ourselves in their place and imagine telling others, "Now I know how this sounds, but…". In this post-Resurrection world, we are called to return to the beginning of the gospel, to Galilee, and share it with everyone; called to begin our own journey of discipleship in the model of Christ. We may not see a physical risen Christ in our midst, as the rewriters decided to include, but we must strive to follow his example as detailed right the way up to Mark 16:8, and pursue our call to be like him nonetheless.

Indeed, as C. M. Tucket says in his commentary on the end of Mark: The rest of the gospel is to be completed by the reader, but the reader can only complete the story by following as a disciple of Mark's Jesus, and that means going to Galilee being prepared to follow in the way of discipleship as spelt out by him, i.e. the way of the cross. There, and only there will Jesus be seen and experienced. There is then no happy ending to the gospel… It is up to the reader to supply the ending – and that is the perennial challenge of this gospel to all its readers today.

We do not always have experiences with neat and tidy happy endings. As humanity, we are sometimes forced to learn from the saddest of stories and find the hope and the love in them wherever we can. We must continue to wrestle with tales that leave us wanting clearer answers. And while we may never catch a glimpse of Jesus literally sitting at God’s right hand, we can certainly hold fast to the belief that he is working right along with us as we strive to live a life of discipleship like his own, one rooted not just in signs of visible power, but in the strength of sacrificial love and servanthood to all of creation. Amen.

Sources consulted for this sermon:
Carter, Warren, and Amy-Jill Levine. The New Testament: Methods and Meanings. Abingdon Press, 2013.
Coogan, Michael David, et al. The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version; with the Apocrypha; an Ecumenical Study Bible. Oxford University Press, 2018.
Myers, Ched. Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus. 2nd ed., Orbis Books, 2008.
Tuckett, C.M. “Commentary on Mark.” The New Oxford Bible Commentary, Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2001, pp. 886–922.