The Unfinished Story
©
by the Reverend Dr. Byron E. Shafer
(Rutgers, April 23, 2000;
Easter Sunday, Year B;
Holy
Communion)Acts 10:34–43 (NT, pp. 134–135);
Mark 16:1–8 (NT, pp. 55–56)
(the
material on Roberta Bondi is drawn from The
Living Pulpit, January-March, 1998, p. 36.)
What
a strange last verse Mark provides for his story of Jesus!
I mean, really odd!
It says: “”So [the women] … fled from the tomb … ; and they said nothing
to anyone, for they were afraid.”
About the events of that first Easter day, Mark describes for us only a tomb
opened and minus the corpse, a “young man” dressed in dazzling white
apparel— was he an angel?— and three sorrowful women panicked into flight
and silence. Mark offers us at the
end of his gospel no appearances by the Risen Christ, no instances of vanquished
sorrow, no episodes of quickened hope.
And the women respond to this command to go and tell by fleeing in fright and
saying nothing to anyone!
This image that concludes Mark’s gospel falls like a bombshell on the
expectation nurtured earlier in the gospel that though the men might fail
the women would not. They
would prove ever faithful in doing whatever needed to be done.
But now, on Easter morning, those who had proven faithful on Friday,
through the hours of crucifixion and burial, do fail.
They flee, and remain silent. It
would seem, in the end, that there are no heroes among Jesus’s followers.
At first glance, Mark’s ending seems inappropriate for a book that purports to
offer good news. But, perhaps Mark
never intended this last verse to be for
his readers the end of the story. Perhaps
Mark intended for his readers to experience his story as one that was, in fact,
left deliberately unfinished. For,
in the original Greek, Mark’s last verse ends in mid-sentence.
Yes, it does! It concludes
with what amounts to a “. . .”—or a “to be continued.” In English, we might duplicate the effect Mark creates by
reading not “For they were afraid.” (period), but “For they were afraid,
and … ”
Now, every reader in Mark’s audience of course understood that the women must
not have remained silent forever, that they must have found their tongues sooner
or later, that they must have gone on to tell the other disciples the good news
that Jesus had been raised on the third day, that despite fear and failure the
story must have gone on.
Otherwise, there would have been no continuing Christian community, there would
have been no occasion to write or to read a gospel.
Without the resurrection and unequivocal testimony to it, the Jesus
movement would have been stopped dead in the tracks of the disciples’
unmitigated despair and disillusionment.
But for Mark the curtain of the third day was still up; the drama of Easter was
not over; the story of resurrection was still unfinished.
Mark wanted every one of his readers to complete the story of
resurrection in very personal terms.
Mark wanted every one of us readers to shape our own account of a personal
experience of the resurrection of Christ, a personal experience of the triumph
of good over evil, a personal experience of the conquest of fear by hope, a
personal experience of the victory of the forces of life over the forces of
death.
Mark wanted every one of us readers to write our own narrative of how life has
come to be reaffirmed by us in the face of death, our own account of how our
personal experiences of tears shed, of pain sustained, and of death remembered
have come to be transformed into experiences of composure gained again, of joy
felt afresh, and of life affirmed anew.
Let me share with you one such story, a story
of a modern-day Mary Magdalene, a modern-day Salome, a story of a
contemporary woman’s transformation from despair to joy, a story that offers
us a contemporary conclusion to Mark’s consciously unfinished gospel.
It’s an autobiographical story told to us by Roberta Bondi, a church historian
on the faculty of the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.
It’s a story found in her quite moving chapter on the resurrection in
her book Memories of God, a book in
which she seeks to find a way to claim for our own time and our own generation
what it means to be Christian.
In this chapter, Bondi explores the development of her understanding of the
resurrection in terms of her own life-experience.
She begins by presenting various childhood memories, describing the
pressures of family and church that had led to her childhood depression.
Her evolving understanding of what God wanted of her is chronicled
through descriptions of some of the very ordinary experiences of her youth and
adulthood. She weaves a web of
stories that evokes her movement toward a richer, more mature faith.
Then Bondi describes one particular moment in her adulthood, while she was
pursuing her career as a church historian, a moment in which her understanding,
indeed her very person, went through a dramatic transformation.
She was alone in her study, experiencing great depression and despair, telling
herself, “I absolutely give up.” She
had surrendered to her morbid state of mind, and then it
happened! Listen, as she
herself tells her story:
"There in my familiar chair, on that green April
afternoon, the light of my life went out.… How long I sat there in that state, I have no idea.
Perhaps it was a long time that passed; perhaps it was simply a moment.
I only know that, all of a sudden and without any warning, I woke up.
I heard my own voice repeating in my mind the words from the Roman
Catholic eucharistic prayers for Easter, ‘The joy of the Resurrection renews
the whole world.’ Every cell of
my body heard them, and for the first time I knew that these words were
absolutely true.”
“‘…The joy of the Resurrection,’ I said to myself, and my heart filled
up with a joy so fierce that it spilled out and ran through the whole of my body
and flickered around me like a flame. In
my red chair I laughed out loud for pleasure.…
Of course! There was,
indeed, something I had missed about Christianity, and now all of a sudden I
could see what it was. It was the
Resurrection!
“How could I have been a church historian and a person of prayer who loved God
and still not known that the most fundamental Christian reality is not
the suffering of the cross but the life it brings?
Of course, Jesus did not die to bring death to the world, but to
establish the life God intended for us from the beginning.…
The foundation of the universe for which God made us, to which God draws
us, and in which God keeps us is not death, but joy."
“The joy of the Resurrection…”
In that moment, Bondi’s depression had lifted, the
forces of death within her had surrendered to the forces of life,and she had
been given the resource of hope that was neededfor her to cope with her fears
and anxieties.
Bondi’s story is an example of the stories that Mark hopes each one of us will
be able to tell in order to finish Mark’s unfinished gospel—stories of
transformation from fear to confidence, from despair to hope, from death to
life, stories of transformation rooted in the reality that “The joy of the
Resurrection renews the whole world.”
May Mark’s unfinished gospel find a conclusion of joy in each of our lives.
Through the power of the Risen Christ, may we all be led to the joy of
certainty in the resurrection. And
may that certainty enable us to vanquish from our lives the power of doubt, of
fear, of depression, of addiction.
You see, despite the sorry performance of all of Jesus’s disciples, God’s
goodness will happen and will keep on happening.
And the story of God’s grace and of God’s power to transform wants to
be written in each of our lives today!
We cannot know where and when we shall experience the Risen Christ; we only know
we cannot escape him, so anxious is he for the story of his resurrection to be
finished in us.
Let us pray:
O God, whenever we find ourselves filled with doubt, or fear, or depression, or
addiction, come to us in the Risen Christ, and finish in us Mark’s story of
the empty tomb. Amen.
Now, I invite you all to stand and to join with me in offering a rousing Easter
affirmation. Are you ready?
Christ is risen! [Christ is risen
indeed!]
Christ is risen! [Christ is risen
indeed!]
Alleluia! [Alleluia!]
Amen! [Amen!]
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