I learned an interesting fact this week about the movie Dodgeball. Dodgeball, if you aren’t familiar with it, is a Ben Stiller movie about a scrappy dodgeball team that wins the championship. Now, before you rush out and watch it I will add this disclaimer that 1) I’m not really a Ben Stiller fan, 2) Dodgeball is not the type of movie that really justifies mention in a sermon, and 3) I’m about to tell you how it ends. So, you know, go with that. But, here’s what I learned about Dodgeball. The original ended had the team loosing. As sort of a poke in the face of all traditional underdog movies, the original script ended with Ben Stiller, leader of the bad guy team hitting Vince Vaughn, captain of the good guy team, in the face with the ball, the film cuts to a scene of Stiller and his teammates celebrating joyfully, and roll credits. Now this, probably expectedly, did not really go over well with movie-goers, so the producers changed the ending so the movie would tie up in the sort of feel-good way that we want movies to end. Because we don’t like movies to end with a lot of questions. Especially not scrappy underdog tales about hard-fighting sports teams.
So, why am I talking about a Ben Stiller film I’m not actually recommending you see at the beginning of an Easter Sermon. Because someone did to Mark what the producers did to Dodgeball. So we stopped reading this morning at verse 8. If you look in your Bible you’ll see that the Gospel goes on a bit from there, but the verses might sound a little funny, like they don’t really match the writing style of the rest of the Gospel. They’re probably also set apart from the writing by brackets and your Bible may even have a notice that these were not the original ending.
So here’s your fun Bible history lesson for the morning. In the days before the printing press, copies of the Bible were made by hand. These hand-written copies are a testimony to the faithfulness of the writers. Think how quickly a game of telephone can go awry, but we have thousands of copies of Bibles, some thousands of years old, all written by a scribe or a monk painstakingly working away for hours that tell these same stories over and over again in incredible precision and detail. But there are quirks here and there, words dropped or added, letters left out, details switched slightly. The kind of mistakes you’d expect given the incredible labor of love creating copies by hand would entail. The Bible we read today is a compilation of these copies. Scholars look through all the versions trying to pick out the oldest and most common occurrences to try to find the heart of the scripture, the ones most true to the original writing.
It is this rich history that makes the Bible real for me, that gives the Bible authority. That there are quirks and twists show the care for which our ancestors in the faith have treasured this sacred text. It is a book that has been wrestled with for centuries, for millennia, and still it offers us more to ponder.
So here’s where Mark is interesting. Those shorter and longer endings of Mark that are in our Bible. They’re set apart by brackets because they’re not in the oldest copies of Mark’s Gospel. So, in fact most Bibles will tell you, scholars are pretty universally in agreement that some monk at some point added those endings, because he wasn’t really satisfied with the ending Mark came up with. Some monk at some point didn’t like the fact that the women came to the tomb, saw nothing, and then ran away in fear and told no one, so he just sort of added a little ending on, added the women telling Peter, added Jesus appearing a couple more times, added something to make this ending make sense.
And I have to tell you, I’m in agreement with the monk that the story didn’t end this way. Maybe not enough in agreement to write my own ending to the Bible, but I agree that the resurrection appearance at the tomb did not end with the women running away and telling no one because they were afraid. I know the story didn’t end this way, because we are here this morning. Think about it. It the story had ended like this, if the women had ran and told no one, no one would know that Jesus had risen from the dead. We would not know that Jesus had risen from the dead. We are here this morning singing hymns and shouting alleluia and breaking bread together because someone told someone and that someone told someone else and on and on until someone told us. We know Mark’s ending is not the right ending because we are here giving witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The women didn’t say nothing, someone told.
In fact I think, no, I know Mark knew the story didn’t end the way he wrote it. After all, Mark is not listed as one of the people at the tomb. The story doesn’t read, “Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, and Mark.” Somebody told Mark so he could write it down, so clearly the story didn’t end here.
But I think Mark ended it here to make a couple larger truths known. We’ve been talking in Bible study throughout Lent about how the stories in the Bible are Capital T true because they tell us larger Truths about God and the world and humanity than any great theology textbook could ever hope to. And using a short story to tell us a huge truth is pretty much the thing that Mark is ace at. So here are three truths that I think Mark is getting at in this weird ending to our Gospel for this morning.
Truth number one: Experiencing resurrection requires the courage to bear witness to death. Experiencing resurrection requires the courage to bear witness to death. There is a temptation to judge these women, who came to the tomb, saw the stone rolled away, and then ran away and hid in fear. The monk does. They should have told someone, right, they shouldn’t have been afraid. But that’s projecting our own knowledge into this story. Because these women are the heroes of Mark’s Gospel. They are the ones who stayed, they are the ones who showed up. Think about it. Where’s Peter, the rock on whom Christ will build the church? Where are James and John, witnesses to the transfiguration? Where’s the centurion who recognized Christ on the cross? Where’s Joseph of Arametheia who tended to the body of Christ? They’re gone, they’re not here. Peter, James, and John slunk away at the cross, the centurion proclaimed and left, Joseph of Aramethia did his job and departed. No one stayed to bear witness to the body of Jesus, no one stayed to proclaim his death, no one, but these three women. They came with oil not to experience resurrection but to bear witness to death. These three women had the faith and the strength and the courage to show up and bear witness to his death, to bear witness to his pain, to bear witness to their loss. Showing up and bearing witness to death is the hardest thing we can ever face. Letting someone or something die and trusting that beloved thing to God, that is an impossibly painful and hard thing. And these women did that. Experiencing resurrection requires first the courage to bear witness to death.
Truth number two: Resurrection is hard to recognize in the moment. So these women showed up at the tomb, with oil in their hands to anoint the body of their Lord, and instead a young man in a white robe said “Do not be alarmed, Jesus of Nazareth is not here because he has been raised; he is not here. Go, tell his disciples that he has gone ahead of you to Galilee.” And they ran out and did just that! No, right, they said nothing because they were afraid. But not just because they were afraid, I think, but also because they could not comprehend the words the young many was saying, they could not understand the experience they were having. It was too much it, it was too far from their expectation, it was too unbelievable. They had believed that Jesus in life was their savior, but they had not expected salvation to look like this, had not expected salvation to take this form. So when they came across salvation, in an empty tomb and a surprising young man, they did not recognize it for what it was. They could not see it, even though it was right in front of them, because they didn’t know what they were looking for.
This is because resurrection is hard to see when you are in the midst of it. We know the women were experiencing resurrection because we see it from the future, and resurrection looks clearer when we look back on it. But when we are standing in the midst of the tomb of death, then even the brightest light can just be blinding. We think of resurrection like transfiguration moments, like suddenly resurrection swoops in and everything’s different, and we get it somehow. But sometimes resurrection is a gradual awakening, so subtle that only with the precious wisdom of the future can we look back and say, yes, there it was, there was the moment that life began again.
Which leads to the third, and possibly most important truth Mark has for us in this Gospel. In order to see resurrection, we need someone to show it to us. In order to see resurrection, we need someone to point it out. The women couldn’t see resurrection in the tomb, but later, afterwards, somehow, they figured it out and they told someone, and someone told someone else, and the story was passed on that Jesus had gone on ahead to Galilee, and we are here today because someone told. So this Gospel reading leaves us with the promise that when we cannot see resurrection. When new life does not look like we expect, when promises are shrouded in darkness, this Gospel promises us that even when we cannot see a way through, there is a way through, and someone will show us the light. What Mark does in this Gospel then is promise us each other. Mark promises us that resurrection is lived out in community. It is lived out in the people of God coming together again and again and telling these stories of faith. Telling of the empty tomb and the strange young man and the brave women who ran away, telling these stories until we can believe them, until we can bear witness to them, until we can see them lived out in our own lives.
And then, Mark’s Gospel challenges us to be those story tellers for each other. It challenges us to speak truth for each other when we cannot believe it. It challenges us to bear witness to resurrection in each other’s lives, to hold up for each other these words of promise, to assure one another that Christ is not here, for he has been raised, and he has gone on ahead of us, to Galilee, to freedom, to life. And so we bear witness to this miracle of the resurrection, we tell this story, again and again, year after year, because resurrection happens in the midst of us. Amen.
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