Mark 16:1-8

As you work your way through Mark 11-15 and arrive at this week’s passage, Mark 16:1-8, the sermon text for Easter Sunday, here are some things to notice.

First, notice Mark’s very strange ending.  The final word in Mark’s Gospel is afraid!  You’ll probably have some footnotes in your Bible that explain that we’re not sure if this is how Mark intended to conclude, or if the original ending somehow got lost.  You’ll note your Bible has some additional verses, 9-20, but these are from later manuscripts and are not generally considered to be authentic to Mark.

So let’s work with what we have: a Gospel, a “good news,” that ends with the word afraid.  That just seems wrong, right?  But maybe not …

Notice, too, how Mark draws on Genesis themes: it’s the first day of the week, the day after the Sabbath.  In Genesis terms, this would be “Day 8.” God created “the heavens and the earth” in six days, including Adam and Eve on the sixth day. God, and all creation, rested on the Sabbath, the seventh day.  Then comes the eighth day, the first day of the first week of human life and activity.  

Notice that Mark tells us it’s just after sunrise; perhaps we hear an echo of “Let there be light!”

The women are going to do the last thing we can ever do for anyone since Genesis 3: prepare a body for burial.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  

In Genesis, following our rebellion, God had set an angel to guard the entrance to Eden, to prevent human trespass.  Now an angel (the young man in a white robe) has been sent to welcome the women in.

But not to stay.  To see (the tomb is empty).  To hear (“He is risen! He is not here!”).  And then to go—with a message, with a commission, with Good News!  “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth …”

Genesis: creation.  Gospel: new creation.

These three women are the first to step into new creation.  Well, the second ones: Jesus is first. The God who has promised to make all things new has done just that, and now, suddenly and unexpectedly, they’re in on it.

But the path from the all-too-familiar first creation, a creation that is both “very good” (Genesis 1:31) and in thrall to the Powers of Sin and Death, to God’s new creation ran first through Golgotha and then through this now-empty tomb.  That is a difficult path to take—of course the women were alarmed (6), trembling and bewildered and afraid (8). Of course they fled, saying nothing to anyone.

God was making all things new.

If we are not the least alarmed, bewildered and afraid by what we read, perhaps we have not been paying close enough attention.  But the Good News is that afraid does not need to be the last word.

Maybe that was Mark’s intention: that afraid is the last word of the old creation.  New creation is breaking in: be not afraid!

What are you noticing as you spend time following Jesus, using Mark 11-15 as your guide?

To what are you giving your attention in these coronavirus days?  Can you identify some ways in which attending to Jesus can reshape how we attend—and respond—to “the news of the day”?