Monday in the Octave of Easter
I've always preferred the original conclusion of Mark's Gospel, the ending as the author intended. “Very early when the sun had arise, on the first day of the week, the women came to the tomb,” Mark 16:1.
Underneath Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the outcrop of rock in the quarry that was Golgotha, there are several first century tombs. They are little more than holes in the quarry walls. The tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, given over to Jesus, would have been like that.
In Mark, the women find the stone already rolled away and inside the tomb a “young man” (not an angel) seated at the right hand side. He announces the first ever Easter proclamation adding, “Go and tell Peter and the disciples that he goes ahead of them into Galilee. There they will see him.”
Now here's the kicker: “The women fled from the tomb and said nothing to anyone because they were terrified.” Happy Easter!
The original ending, as Mark intended, was too unsettling for succeeding generations. So a Christian scribe added a longer ending sometime in the second century.
Easter is like Ohio. It's “the heart of it all.” The Gospels, starting with Mark, were composed backwards, beginning with Easter. Every chapter, every verse, every word of the New Testament permeates with Easter. Without Easter what we know about Jesus of Nazareth would be limited to a brief mention by ancient historians Josephus and Tacitus.
Mark's totem symbol is a lion. I suspect this Evangelist who invented the narrative Gospel (his was first) has been roaring with indignation about the tampering with his masterpiece and the lack of appreciation of his intent.
There are echos of Mark's ending in today's reading from Matthew, written some 15-20 years later. Both Matthew & Luke add and subtract from Mark. Their Gospels were attempts to correct and clean up his Gospel. Perhaps Mark's greatest indignation was that for a 1000 years his Gospel was considered to be sort of a “Reader's Digest” version of Matthew. We think that no longer.
Today Matthew adjusts Mark by adding an earthquake, guards at the tomb, a descending angel rolling away the stone, and the women themselves experiencing the Risen One. Then they ran to tell Peter and the disciples.
The earliest tradition is that Easter happened for Peter and the others not in Jerusalem but in Galilee. That's where they fled upon Jesus' arrest and execution. That's where the women are told that the Risen One has gone ahead of them.
But in my view Mark's version of the women fleeing, saying “nothing to anyone,” is more aligned with our own faith journeys. There's more of mystery to it. Like life, it's not neat and clean and well ordered.
Mark's final word was “terrified.” Has your life known the terror of confusion, helplessness, loss, and grief? Is this not what the women knew, encapsulated in that one moment before sun rise at that hole-in-the wall quarry tomb, a stone's throw away from the giblet of torture on which their beloved rabbi died his excruciating death?
It's back to Galilee that we will see him. Where it all began it begins again---in the Galilee of the first century and in all of our Galilees since. Where the messiah is least expected, there he is to be found.
Timothy J. Cronin