Polished Finish/Jagged Prologue (Mini-Sermon on Mark 16:1-8+)
On Sunday, April 20, 2025, I gave a mini-sermon at Shalom Community Church. This is an adaptation of the mini-sermon. (My friend Michelle read the parts inspired by Eve Babtitz.) The audio is available here:
Scripture
Mark 16:1-8+ (The Inclusive Bible)
[1] When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought perfumed oils so that they could anoint Jesus. [2] Very early, just after sunrise on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb.
[3] They were saying to once another, “Who will roll back the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” [4] When they looked, they found that the huge stone had been rolled back.
[5] On entering the tomb, they saw a young person sitting at the right, dressed in a white robe. They were very frightened, [6] but the youth reassured them: “Do not be amazed! You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, the One who was crucified. He has risn; he is not here. See the place where they laid him. [7] Now go and tell the disciples and Peter, ‘Jesus is going ahead of you to Galilee, where you will see him just as he told you.’“
[8] They made their way out and fled from the tomb bewildered and trembling; but they said nothing to anyone, because they were so afraid.
The gospel ends here.
Two different endings--the "Shorter Ending" and the "Longer Ending"--were added by later writers.
Mini-Sermon1
He knew exactly, sort of, what he was going to do.
They’d put Jesus on trial, AGAIN, this time before the Roman governor Pilate. Pilate had come up with this “wonderful, awful idea,” this charge of “indigenous kingship” in potential insurrection against the Roman order. And so he asks Jesus, “Are YOU the King of the Jews?” (13:2b).
Jesus refuses to participate in his own interrogation. He knew this might happen. Not to be outdone, Pilate “consults” the crowds. The chief priests, who were his allies, had them all riled up. And he manipulates them into a false choice–he understands both that Jesus is politically more dangerous to the Roman order than the anti-imperial assassin Barabbas AND how to pacify the crowd. When they shouted “Crucify him!” Pilate handed him over.
What he wanted to do most of all was END it.
But he wanted the finish to be so definitive, so absolute, so... beautiful even... that the whole episode would stand away from ordinary life as an enameled example of something handled as though someone cared, for once, for the shape of the thing. The form.
The "experienced imperial official"-ness of it all; the "procuratorial pragmatism." The shrewdness; the ruthlessness.
And so, crowd pacified, Jesus is crucified, dead, and buried. It happened every day. In Mark’s gospel, the rolling of the stone over the entrance to the tomb (15:46) symbolically ends the story.2 Jesus is dead. The Jewish and Roman authorities have taken over the narrative; the disciples have fled; and there are only a few women left.
But this is Easter! The story doesn’t end there. When those women–Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome–attempt to salvage some dignity for Jesus’ BODY, they force the story to REOPEN, and take back the narrative from the authorities.
And, you know, I don’t always know what I believe about resurrection; least of all this particular one. But that’s OK! There’s not much of a proclamation of the Easter resurrection message in Mark; no visions of glory or triumph. But we do get an empty tomb, the stone rolled away, this great announcement: “He has been raised” (16:6), and a PROMISE that he is still on the road and you’ll see him again in Galilee. The story will begin… again… in the very place where it all began.
And over the centuries the story continued, and adapted and changed. By the time we get to Matthew and Luke’s later accounts of Jesus’ death and resurrection, Pilate is CONFLICTED about what he’s doing and Jesus sees PURPOSE in his suffering. There’s not just an empty tomb, but RESURRECTION APPEARANCES to Mary Magdalene and his disciples and others, and then… by the time we get to John…
...Jesus seemed even during his crucifixion as if he would sail off the cross and float upward.
But already in Mark, the authorities wondered if they were [really] wreaking havoc... OR.... if they were in over their heads and God what were they going to do. This wasn't the ending they'd so clearly polished earlier, for Christ's almighty sake.
The story is SO alive that MARK couldn’t even figure out how to end it (16:1-8+). In the original, it ends with the women terrified. They too run away in fear and don’t say anything to anyone. It’s very abrupt and troubling and YET… it’s such an OPEN ending that early on it led to several attempts by the Bible’s editors to append “happier” and more satisfactory conclusions, with a more definitively triumphal resurrection.
But we don’t NEED to RUSH towards resolution (or maybe… today of all days we CAN :) ). The genius of this “‘incomplete’ ending lies precisely in the fact that it demands a response from the reader.”3 From us. And we do respond… in fascinating, brave, complex, and fragile ways.
Here they'd wanted this polished finish and what it looked like they'd done was a jagged prologue.
And, of course, the story continues, to this day, and we’re not just readers, or spectators: we are CO-CREATORS. We inherit this wild, beautiful theological tradition, but it’s an open ending, a LIVING tradition.
Resurrection offers us a particular way of seeing reality, if we have eyes to see:
- a scandalous, even STUBBORN insistence that God is good, all the time DESPITE all the counter-testimony of history with its violence, suffering, and injustice (those hells we create for each other…4 and for ourselves);
- that God is NOT a king or a judge but “Abba”–someone (something) with whom we can have an INTIMATE relationship;
- that we live in an “already and not yet” reality where:
- the past meets us, with all its beauty, yes, but also brokenness, and
- where every single moment offers possibilities for God’s future to “break in upon us.”
- And where God-forsakenness is ONLY a human category5 and nobody gets left out because God refuses to be God without us.6
Resurrection is a uniquely Christian HOPE, an invitation to yes, life after death, even life after hell, but it is also an invitation to life BEFORE death. “Believing in the resurrection… means PARTICIPATING in God’s creative act…
…It is the energy for a rebirth of this life.”7
Resurrection is not just something that happened to Jesus a long time ago, but it’s what’s happening NOW to all of creation, including us.
Amen.
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