Because They Were Afraid (Easter; Mark 16:1-8; March 27, 2016)

Because They Were Afraid

Easter

Mark 16:1-8
March 27, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

“They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” That’s an odd way to end a book, especially one that began with the words, “The beginning of the good news...” When do we get to the good news? “They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”

It’s actually stronger than that in Greek. In English we don’t like double negatives, but Greek never had that problem. In the original it’s “And to no one nothing they said,” putting the emphasis on the nothing and the no one. We would offend our English teachers and gain no style points with Strunk and White, but we would have to put it something like, “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared."

An unsatisfactory ending for a gospel. So unsatisfactory, in fact, that some old manuscripts— not the best and not the oldest, but some old manuscripts— supplied an ending. Two different endings, actually. A shorter ending has some hifalutin language that sounds very strange coming from Mark’s pen. And it doesn’t show up until the 300’s. The other ending shows up in the middle of the 100’s and says that the disciples won’t be harmed by venomous snakes or poisons. That’s pretty cool, but it seems to be drawn from other gospels and from Acts and we know that Mark was the first gospel written, so that’s backwards.

Some have objected that the ending that we have, “They said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared,” means that in Greek the book ends with the conjunction “because". No other book in Greek ends that way, they argued, until an ancient writing that ended with “because” was found.

No, we’re stuck with it. This is the way Mark ends his “beginning of the good news": “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ‘cause they were scared."

Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome had bought embalming spices, worried about how they would get access to Jesus’ body, discovered the stone already rolled away, and had a brief conversation with “a young man in a white robe.” This young man— was he a human messenger or a heavenly one?— told them that Jesus of Nazareth who had been crucified had been raised. They were to tell the rest of the disciples to meet him in Galilee. They reacted to this news with “terror and dread.” “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared."

What were they afraid of? Were they afraid to tell the other disciples for fear the disciples would make fun of them, accuse them of being fanciful women? Were they afraid that the authorities who had gone to such lengths not only to kill Jesus but to make sure that he stayed dead would find out that they were defiantly spreading the story that the authorities had failed and Jesus was alive? Or was a dead Jesus that needed to be prepared for burial a sad reality they could handle, but a Jesus alive in spite of having been dead was just too much for them to wrap their minds around? Were they scared because the world they had known was gone— a world of living things and dead things, but not with someone who had been dead and was now alive? Were they scared because that world had been replaced with one in which anything was possible?

Any of those reasons or all of them would have provided ample grounds for any reasonable person to be afraid, overcome with terror and dread, and so scared that they said nothin’ to nobody. From the safety of our cushioned pews we might criticize their fear, but we should be careful of that.

After all, we’re scared too. Of different things, but still. When I was ten years old there was a wolf under my bed at night. I lay in dread and terror because I was certain that, if I accidentally let my hand hang over the side of the bed, my fingers would be savaged up to my knuckles, or I would lose my feet if I tried to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. You may smile because you know that there was nothing at all lurking under my bed, but unless you are ten years old, alone in your bed in the dark, you don’t know anything about it.

Later, when I was twelve or thirteen, I found a copy of Dracula by Bram Stoker. For months after that I was convinced that there were vampires in the hallway outside my room, especially on those nights when moonlight shone in through the window at the top of the stairs. The journey between my bedroom door and the bathroom became the most dreaded four feet in the known universe. And, if by some miracle I managed to make it to the bathroom, there was still the problem of how to get back.

We have a lot of fears, some more realistic than wolves under the bed or vampires in the hallway. And some less realistic. We’re afraid of immigrants. We’re afraid of Muslims. We’re afraid of mental illness and the mentally ill. We’re afraid of gays and lesbians. We’re afraid of African-Americans. We’re afraid of Tea Party Republicans. We’re afraid of global warming. We’re afraid of black helicopters. We’re afraid of the government. We’re afraid of large corporations. We’re afraid of intellectuals. We’re afraid of bats. We’re afraid of our food. We’re afraid of our water. We’re afraid of the future. We’re afraid of our past. We’re afraid that our money will run out before we do. We’re afraid that our lives won’t have mattered. We’re afraid of cancer and dementia. We’re afraid there is no God. We’re afraid there is.

Not all fears are unreasonable. But, reasonable or not, our fears persist. And it is clear that, whatever else it can accomplish, Easter does not usher us into a fear-free life. Otherwise the women would not have greeted the news of the resurrection with terror and dread.

Speaking of the women, there is something else strange here, something not quite right. The women are afraid and though we’re aren’t told why precisely, their fears seem reasonable enough. The women say nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they are scared. That, too, seems reasonable. It seems reasonable, but it cannot possibly be true!

Mark’s gospel was written about forty years after the events that it describes. Someone—we call him Mark for convenience, but we have no idea, really— someone wrote this for the sake of a community of readers whom he hoped to benefit. There was a community of Jesus people; there were traditions about what Jesus had said and done circulating in that and other communities; and, there was a writer pulling it all together and arranging and re-arranging it to tell a story that made sense. After it was done, the community thought it was worth keeping. They made copies of it and shared it with other communities. It was copied and bound with other gospels and other writings from the various groups of Jesus-people.

The existence of this ending, “They said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were scared,” contradicts what it says. If they said nothin’ to nobody, how did the story end up in this book? Somebody said something to somebody, or there would have been no Mark, no community, no New Testament, no Church, no Easter, no us gathered this morning talking about these things. Somebody said something to somebody. Somebody summoned the courage so that— scared or not— they— and I suspect it was the women— told what had happened to them at the tomb. Being afraid didn’t keep them from telling the story.

We know that Mark’s community was afraid. They lived in fearful times when the world that they knew was coming apart. Perhaps they had allowed their fears to silence them. I don’t know. I do know that Mark’s good news for them is that being afraid doesn’t have to keep them from telling the story. We live in fearful times, too. We are beset with fears, both founded and unfounded. But we do not have to allow those fears to keep us from telling the story. We do not have to allow those fears to keep us from living the good news that we have received from Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Frightened, nervous, unsure of themselves, but sure of what they had seen and heard, they did tell the disciples in their hiding place that the tomb could not hold Jesus. Emboldened by the women, the men were perhaps a little better prepared when Jesus met them. They might have been trembling with fear, their knees may have been shaking, but these women and men turned the world upside down. The Empire that had killed Jesus proved unable to keep him dead and unable to stop his message. And they were the proof.

And now it is our turn. The powers that be seek to crucify Jesus once again. They kill him daily, but they can no more keep him dead now than they could in ancient Roman Palestine. We now are the bearers of this story. We now are the ones called to live into it. We are the ones who bear witness to Jesus’ dream of a better world. It has become our dream, too, that cannot be killed and cannot be silenced. So we will proclaim a world in which no one goes hungry and no one goes unloved, a world in which terror is met with love and justice, and violence with love and peace. We will tell this story and we will stand up for this dream, whether we are afraid or not. We ourselves, the followers of the risen Christ, will supply the missing ending of Mark. And it will not be, “And they said nothin’ to nobody, ’cause they were afraid.”

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.