Newspaper Columns by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
When an Ending is a Beginning
By Bishop Paul V. Marshall
April, 2005I love and hate films that do not actually end. Casablanca is a good example. Problems are resolved and a few of the characters come to know themselves in a new way. As the story ends, however, the main characters go off to face an uncertain future.
Mark seems to have written his Easter gospel in a similar way.
Before dawn on Sunday, women come to anoint the body of Jesus. The body is not there. A messenger from God tells them that Jesus has risen and will meet the disciples in Galilee.
Then, Mark concludes: "So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid."
Mark stops his gospel virtually in mid sentence: "They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid of..." Our translations usually smooth that off for us, but it is as I've described. The reader is left hanging, wondering what will come next.
The early hearers and readers of Mark’s proclamation knew that he was not so much writing an ending as he was signaling a beginning. What would happen next in the Easter story was up to them. What will happen next for contemporary readers and hearers of this Easter gospel is up to us.
Some ten years ago Ronald Scates wrote an article, Why they Come, Why They Stay (Reformed Worship, March 1996), in which he reports that a survey of 26 mainline congregations in the USA revealed that the number one reason visitors return and eventually become members is that “the congregation acts like it really believes Jesus is alive through a collective effervescence that pervades everything that is done.”
Gimmicks require so much less of us. Scates reminds me that technique to get people in the door may be well and good; after people walk through our doors, however, it is not our technique but our faith that matters most if our mission is to be successful. For mission to succeed we need, as individuals and as congregations, to live that effervescence that comes from following a living Lord, an exalted servant.
That, in fact, is why I have a nearly total lack of interest in arguments about whether the tomb was empty or not.
I believe it was; even if I did not, however, the "proof" of the resurrection from Easter Monday on lies not in reconstructing a past that cannot be reconstructed. The “proof” is in the present-day encounter Christians have with the person and power of the risen Christ.
That is what Mark's gospel is trying to get me to see in its unfinished Easter story.
One of the most beautifully staged operas I've ever seen was the premiere, some years ago at the Met, of Puccini's Turandot. Puccini never finished the opera. When he died in 1924, his work was reverently finished by friends from his notes.
At its Italian La Scala premiere in 1926, Turandot was conducted by Arturo Toscanini. One of the stories told about this premiere is that when Toscanini came to the last passage Puccini had written, the conductor lowered his baton. Turning to the audience, he said through tears: "This is where the master ends."
Then he raised the baton and said: "This is where the friends continue." He went on to what has to have been one of the greatest premieres in musical history.
Easter is a springboard into God's future. It I as though today we paradoxically remember tomorrow. Jesus is going on ahead of us. We have the master's notes. In fact, we have the risen master with us. May we, his friends, continue the story.
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