And the Murderer Is.... (Mark 16)

I remember an episode of the old television show M*A*S*H where BJ got his hands on a mystery novel. Being in the middle of Korea, just miles from the front, novels were a rarity at the surgical hospital. Everyone couldn't wait to get their hands on the book and enjoy a good, old-fashioned whodunit. There was only one problem: turned out that the last page of the novel was missing. The last page was where the detective announced the killer. After reading the book, everyone was left hanging. They didn't get the satisfaction of a good ending.

In some ways, that is how I feel at the end of the book of Mark. Most scholars agree that only the first 8 verses of chapter 16 actually came from the book of Mark. They speculate that Mark must have written more. After all, the 8 verses seem a strange place to stop (especially in light of the other Gospels). The ending was so jarring that most likely some scribe later added verses 9-20 to try to give the book a proper ending. But all that snake handling, drinking poison stuff tells us that this was most likely a human creation. None of those things are paralleled anywhere else in Scripture.

So Mark 16 leaves us hanging. But I wonder of in this case that isn't a good place to be. I sort of like the ending that verse 8 gives us. If we didn't have Matthew, Luke, and John it might not be a good ending. But since we do have those Gospels to fill in the story, I like it. Verse 8 tells us that trembling and astonishment had seized the women who came to Jesus' tomb and that they were afraid.

We are not like the women. We have become so used to the story of the resurrection that we no longer have trembling and astonishment when we hear the story. But maybe we should. What kind of man is this that He rises from the dead? How can it be that someone can come back to life after three days? The women were afraid because they wanted to know what had been done to their friend. But they were also afraid because this was a new event in history. God is doing things that He has never done before. I think that some how the women had a sense that everything would be different because Jesus was alive.

In the New Testament, the resurrection changes everything. In Acts, the Apostles preach the resurrection as much as they preach the cross. They knew that the resurrection of Jesus from the dead ushered in a new era of history. It meant that God had a new way of dealing with people. It was astonishing to them. And it should still be astonishing to us today.