The Resurrection

Mark 16:1-8

I grew up with stories that ended with ‘happily ever after…’ My children’s favourite stories ended with Harry climbing aboard the Hogwarts Express at the end of the school year. All of these stories ended, and they ended neatly and tidily. Even if the author left a tantalising clue to a sequel, hidden in the final pages, you could rely on there being a resolution.

None of those things are true in the passage we have read today. Commentators tell us verse 8 was undoubtedly the original ending of Mark’s gospel, and the subsequent addition a later attempt to tidy up the ragged ending of the women fleeing and making a pact to tell no one what they had seen.

The story of the Good News of Jesus Christ, Son of God, introduced in chapter 1 ends with fear and uncertainty and a whole load of questions for the readers. We have the story, so they must have told someone, who and when did they do that? What has happened to Jesus?

What the women saw and heard early that morning was so far away from anything they expected, and truly beyond their comprehension. Our familiar telling of the Easter story, with Jesus’s resurrection the fitting end point can lessen the huge shock the resurrection was. People don’t rise from the dead, and you don’t casually chat with another worldly figure dressed in white, with a message from the one who died. These are not everyday occurrences! They are instead earth shattering and perhaps Mark’s ultimate cliffhanger is meant to make the reader look for the answers to all the questions we have.

Often in my faith journey I want everything to be resolved. I want to know all the answers and think that certainty and simplicity gives my faith authenticity. But in reality my faith is messier. I can sing my heart out on Sunday declaring my love of God, and on Monday I can find myself flat on my face as I sit with a friend whose life has been turned upside down by an unexpected event. God’s power is in the messiness of this telling of resurrection, in the reality of fear and uncertainty. God wants to break us free from our neat and tidy organising of this story.

This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ! Radical, unsettling, bewildering and dangerous!