Hilton Head Island, SC – April 17, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 16:1-8;9-20 (Matthew 28:1-10, 16-20 in place of Responsive Reading)
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And they went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment has come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. – Mark 16:8
For many years it has been a conundrum to me. The oldest copy of the Gospel of Mark ever found ends at the eighth verse of its last chapter, Chapter 16. It says that three women, including Mary Magdalene, arguably the most devoted of Jesus’ disciples but not one of the twelve named male disciples, went to Jesus’s tomb very early on Easter morning. They found that the stone which had covered the entrance to the tomb was rolled back. They saw a young man, who told them that Jesus had been raised from death. They were to go tell the other disciples that Jesus had returned to the region of the Galilee, and they were to go there, presumably to meet the resurrected Jesus. That is all, and that is the essence, of what it says.
Then comes the last verse in the oldest ending of the Gospel of Mark, and it is the text for today’s sermon: “And they [the women] went out and fled from the tomb; for trembling and astonishment had come upon them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid) 16:8). Here is what the footnote in the New Oxford Annotated Bible says about that phase, “for they were afraid.” “The Greek expression is unusual in style and abrupt in effect, especially if, as is possible, it ended the Gospel. In contrast with Mt. 28:8-10, where fear is part of an emotional state that includes joy (v.8) and is controlled by worship (v.9) and acceptance of mission (v. 10), fear here, probably in the sense of overwhelming awe is the pervasive consequence of amazement (v.5) and of trembling and astonishment (v.8) that resulted in flight and silence” [p.1238].
Have you ever noticed how, in academic writing, sometimes when scholars say something they are not sure of but feel obligated to address anyway, that they use words that seem hard to understand, and that maybe that was exactly what they intended? These two lengthy, complex, convoluted sentences seem like an excellent example to me of that phenomenon. Whoever wrote that observation was skirting around a glaring reality: the end of the Gospel of Mark quite clearly says the tomb of Jesus was empty on Easter morning, and a young man in a white robe told the three women that Jesus had “risen,” but no one, presumably including the “young man,” actually saw Jesus.
In this series of teaching sermons I have given many of my own thoughts on the themes of the sermons. I’ll give another one now. I do not believe Jesus rose from death on Easter; I believe he was raised. He was resurrected by God; he did not resurrect himself by his own power. That is a teaching I hope you will ponder long and hard, whether or not you agree with it. But what I just said (which I have said before) is an opinion; it is not what I or anyone else would claim to be an undeniable Gospel truth.
But secondly, to go back to the long and involved sentences in the footnote in the Oxford Annotated Bible, the writer of those sentiments was trying to skirt around the obvious anomaly that the tomb was empty, but that the women did not see Jesus. Furthermore, the last verse of the last chapter in the earliest ending of Mark does not suggest or even hint that anyone actually saw Jesus.
Did Easter happen? Did it? Was Jesus actually and factually raised from the dead? Or, if you prefer, did he rise from the dead? The first ending of Mark doesn’t answer that question. It is altogether silent on that issue. It says the young man claimed Jesus was alive again, but it doesn’t say that he or anyone else saw him.
There is another footnote in the Revised Standard Version of the Bible which was given to me when I “graduated” from Confirmation Class in 1954 that says this: “Other ancient authorities add after verse 8 the following sentence: But they (the three women) reported briefly to Peter and those with him all that they had been told. And after this, Jesus himself sent out by means of them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation” v.9). But note: this verse does not state, or even hint, that anyone actually saw the resurrected Christ; they only proclaimed what they thought Jesus wanted them to proclaim after his death.
But sometime well after the first copy of the first Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, was written, somebody else thought that second ending wasn’t enough. Therefore a third ending, all of which you heard earlier, was written somewhere by someone, but not by the man who was the author of the Gospel of Mark. The third ending is partly echoed in parts of Matthew, Luke, and John. But the point I want you to acknowledge is that no two Gospels tell exactly the same story, or even very similar stories. With or without either of the other two endings, Mark tells by far the least about Easter morning.
Now we return to the second long and enigmatic footnote from the Oxford Annotated Bible. “Nothing is certainly known either about how this Gospel originally ended or about the origin of vv.9-20, which cannot have been part of the original text of Mark. Certain important witnesses to the text, including some ancient ones, end the Gospel with v.8. Though it is possible that the compiler of the Gospel intended this abrupt ending, one can find hints that he intended to describe events after the resurrection” (p. 1238).
I agree with the essence of everything that footnote says, except the last sentence, which I find intellectually weak. Nonetheless I think it surprising that the printed text in the Oxford Annotated makes verses 9 through 20 of Mark 16 appear as though that ending was in the original Gospel of Mark, because it is not in italics, as it is in my nearly-fallen-apart confirmation class Bible. It is misleading to the reader to use the same type for the whole chapter.
If it has never struck you that there are important differences among all four of the Gospels with respect to Easter, I hope it is beginning to register with you now. In some appearances, the resurrected Jesus is definitely physical, and in others he definitely is a disembodied spirit. No two Gospels have the same reports of all the same appearances, and when two or more of the Gospels include the same events, they don’t do so in the same way.
So allow me to ask the question again: Did Easter happen? In stating it that way, I am asking you if you think Jesus either rose from the dead or was raised from the dead. And if Jesus did rise, precisely in what form did it happen: in flesh, or in spirit? In a physical body, or, as the apostle Paul says, in a “spiritual body,” whatever that oxymoronic phrase might mean? Mark does not unmistakably declare that Jesus was resurrected, but by the time the Gospel of John was written, fifty or more years after Mark, the resurrected Christ says and does things that none of the other three Gospels mention at all.
Now I invite you to go back to Chicago, Illinois in 1961, and to McCormick Theological Seminary. We are in the New Testament class of Prof. Floyd Filson. Dr. Filson was a white-haired, grand old man of McCormick, and the dean of the faculty. (He was probably at least fifteen years younger than I am, but his hair was whiter than mine.) He had written a book which was something of a minor classic in Mainline Protestant New Testament studies at that time. It was entitled Jesus Christ, the Risen Lord. His thesis, which he explained in a clear and compelling manner, is that the Church’s conviction that Jesus was raised from the dead on Easter is the foundation upon which Christianity was built. As magnificent and memorable as the life and teachings of Jesus were, it was the claim that he was raised from the dead which was the essential basis upon which Christianity was constructed, said Dr. Filson. Certainly that was true for the apostle Paul, he wrote. Paul says almost nothing about the life of Jesus, but he says a great deal about the death and resurrection of Jesus. It was Paul’s unshakeable belief that we too shall be raised from death into life eternal with God.
I have preached Prof. Filson’s thesis hundreds of times in funerals and memorial services. Jesus Christ was lifted out of death, and so shall we all be. But is it true? Did Easter happen?
In Europe in the nineteenth century, a widely recognized group of scholars wrote their own interpretations of what they believed constituted a proper understanding of the life of Jesus. Perhaps the most influential and often-discussed Life of Jesus was the 1863 book written by the French historian Ernest Renan. It was based on the Gospel of John. He said, among other things, that Jesus purified himself of Jewish traits and thus became a true Aryan. Just as there were anti-Jewish ideas in the Fourth Gospel, there were proto-Nazi and Hitlerian ideas in that book that came into vogue 60+ years after Renan wrote it.
Every author of every Life of Jesus book felt that he had written the definitive history of Jesus of Nazareth. No doubt there were many in Germany, France, and elsewhere who agreed with that assessment regarding Renan’s Life of Jesus.
However, there was a German-Alsatian man who effectively put an end to the Jesus-of-History movement. His name was Albert Schweitzer. He was born in 1875 and he died in 1965. Schweitzer was surely one of the most intellectually talented men of the twentieth or any other century. He was a highly gifted organist, musicologist, Lutheran pastor, philosopher, theologian, and medical missionary doctor. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in large measure because of his devotion to the sanctity of all forms of life, both human and animal. As a very young man he toured the world, giving lectures on the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, and playing his compositions on the organ. He spent the last decades of his life in French Equatorial Africa in a hospital he established in the city of Lambarene’.
Among his many other pursuits, Schweitzer wrote a book which brought an end to that branch of the study of Christology which sought to place Jesus into an undeniably historical context. The book was called The Quest for the Historical Jesus. As much as we might like to agree on a carefully documented life of Jesus to which nearly everyone would give both historical and spiritual affirmation, such a quest is an intellectual impossibility, he said. He implied that there are as many lives of Jesus as there are Christians who seek to follow Jesus. It is impossible to tie Jesus down into any particular historical context, because we have so little reliable knowledge of his life and times.
When I was young, I strongly disagreed with the thesis of Schweitzer’s book. Now I tend to think he may have hit a 475-foot home run.
The last paragraph of The Quest for the Historical Jesus echoes hauntingly across the decades since he wrote it over a hundred years ago. “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old by the lakeside. He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same words: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which he has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience who He is.”
Some people believe that because there are parts of the Bible which surely are historically untrue, that nothing in the Bible is true. That is a profoundly cockamamie conclusion. Perhaps it is even cowardly, to take such a radical position. It is also intellectually narrow and foolish to reject the entire Bible, or Judaism, or Christianity, because of historical inaccuracies in their holy scriptures. History is an attempt to explain what happens, but there is so little genuine history in the biblical Gospels that no Jesus of history can ever be recovered there.
Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing was a movie from the 1950s which probably became best known because of its theme song. Orchestrations of it were heard throughout the movie at regular intervals. If you don’t remember the movie, you might guess that it was a romance, and about that you would be right. The female character, a Chinese doctor living in Hong Kong, says to her lover, who is skeptical of many things, “If we don’t believe the unbelievable, what would happen to faith?” It’s true; if we don’t believe the unbelievable, what would happen to faith? As an example, my guess is that people who truly believe that a small white wafer given to them by a priest is actually the body of Christ find that their lives are better and richer than if they refused to believe it. However, even if I had been born Roman Catholic, I doubt that I could ever believe that. It would a bridge too far for me.
Through the years I have finally come to the position that I am prepared to be convinced that Jesus never emerged from his tomb, if indeed his body was ever taken to a tomb. It was the normal practice of the Romans to leave bodies hanging on their crosses for many days as a ghoulish warning to passersby. That brutal policy visibly declared, “This is what you’ll get if you defy us.” Jesus definitely did not defy the Romans, but he ended up crucified anyway.
No one can prove there is no resurrection, any more than anyone else can prove there is. The abiding trust of billions has brought Jesus forth from death for two thousand years. However, the resurrection of Jesus Christ or of his followers will only be ascertained if there is a resurrection, of either Jesus or us. If there isn’t, we will never know it when we die, because we will cease to know anything.
However, if Jesus was raised, if God raised that man who healed so many and moved so many to higher aspirations and inspirations, if faith and trust make the resurrection real, who is to say that it isn’t real? If we don’t believe the unbelievable, what would happen to faith? Did Easter happen? It happens every day everywhere in multitudes of people, until, when they die, everyone shall know it.