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10 Epilogue: Mark 16 With this final section, Mark’s Gospel of the gospel comes to its apocalyptic conclusion. Consistent with the rest of Mark’s text, it is not a full-blown apocalypse, but a Gospel in an apocalyptic mode. What Mark does differently, however, is to make sure there is at least some element of mystery here. Something important is indeed disclosed after Jesus’ death, even as the narrative continues to point forward promisingly in ambiguity. While most of the Gospels we know end with resurrection appearances, Mark ends with quite a bit less: an empty tomb, a commission to tell and call the disciples and Peter to meet Jesus in Galilee, and a surprising reticence on the part of the women at the tomb to carry it out. In fact, 16:8 narrates their astounding response in my oddly-worded, wooden translation: “they said nothing to no one, for they were afraid.” That, however, is just one of the problems. To come to terms with Mark’s curious ending we need first, however, to get past its endings. It seems Mark 16 has some extra mysteries of its own! Epilogue: The Ends of the Gospel (16:1-20) INTRODUCTION The mysteries become clear to preachers who venture to the end of Mark’s Gospel in their Bibles. One would think that the first Gospel would end as unambiguously as it began. We called Mark 1:1-15 a “prologue” as a way of describing its function relative to the rest of the narrative. The first verse reads like a title: The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ [Son of God]. How wonderfully clear! Indeed, we saw that the prologue set the agenda for reading both by describing the gospel good news in terms of Jesus’ identity (Mark 1:1, which was carried forward and elaborated in 1:11, 8:29, 9:2, and 221 ultimately 14:62 with Jesus’ confession before the High Priest) and in terms of the announcement of the kingdom that Jesus himself equates with the gospel of God (1:14-15) and becomes concrete in his subsequent ministry of teaching, healing, and exorcism. For all that clarity, however Mark’s gospel ends in surprising ambiguity. The preacher who looks at the final chapter of the Gospel discovers not one ending, but three. There is the ending that most scholars agree on: the one that concludes with 16:8. There is the ending that appears, largely in brackets, in most Bible versions: 16:9-20, usually called the longer ending. Finally, there is the intermediate ending, which doesn’t even merit a verse number. By the time you have sorted through them, you might think you had ended up in one of those mystery dinners where you participate in solving a detective story by choosing conclusions from the menu. It is better, however, to consider the endings together. That way we can understand what is at stake theologically in the decisions that have been made. Along the way we will discover some greater theological clarity about what Mark is up to and what we are up to when we engage in our own act of theological interpretation in preaching the end of Mark for some Easter celebration. I write “some Easter celebration” with great intentionality. The most likely ending of Mark, 16:1-8, appears as an alternate for Easter B and a common text for the Easter Vigil in years A, B, and C. While the alternative endings do not appear in the RCL, Mark 16:15-20 does appear in the Roman Catholic lectionary as an alternate for Ascension Day. The upshot for most of us is that we will not need to choose on Sunday morning which ending to observe, even while we can find a unique and powerful Easter witness even with Mark’s most likely and yet troubling ending: 16:1-8. PASSAGES OMITTED FROM THE LECTIONARY Our goal here is not so much to exegete these texts in full. Not only do they not appear in the RCL, they are not even judged to be reliably part of the Markan text itself. At the same time, some appreciation for their theologies can help us sort through the choice that Mark’s theologically-driven narrative did make and help us understand it in the context of the early church. This, in turn, will make us better homiletical theologians as we proclaim the Easter gospel with Mark and his...

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