Day 1156 - Where is your Galilee?

An amplification of a Bible study at Second Presbyterian Church, Feb. 4, 2016, Chattanooga, TN

Mark 15:46-16:8a

Last week I took Mercy Junction and the two groups Mercy Junction attacked to task for overlooking the opportunity to minister the compassion Christ taught in regard to a man of their congregation who was arrested for aggressive panhandling. 
I invite you to read this passage beginning with the last two verses of the preceding chapter. These two verses provide testimony to the death of Jesus. 
This post, an expansion on these two verses and the 8 verses that end the gospel of Mark, gives a more nuanced and real, though subtle explanation for the line separating political advocacy and the life of Christian ministry. 
I admit there is a gulf separating our views that is hard to span. They believe in a Machiavellian ideal that somehow they can use the power of the world to reshape it into their ideal "Christian life" - something their most loathed opponents believe also. It is hard to reconcile that motivation with the idea that God holds all the power, and the existence of the world in toto is an influence against the values and ethics of Christian compassion for the individual, not a tool for the collective whole that embraces that Machiavellian ideal. Every journey begins with a single step. To live those values and ethics day-by-day is the ultimate testimony to faith.

Let's begin. After this testimnoy that Jesus is dead, Mark begins to close his account of the good news:

Mark16:1-3 leads us to think perhaps the burial rites were not complete, the two women go back to the tomb to anoint the body (because now that the Sabbath was over it was proper to “work”?).  Yet they worry how will they be able to get to the body? Now Mark effects a stunning end:

Mark16:4-8  The oldest Greek manuscripts end the gospel of Mark here. More recent manuscripts contain various combinations of the verses 9-20, often called the shorter and longer ending of Mark. A very large number of scholars (as early as the second and third century of the Christian Era) recognize that these verses likely were added to harmonize the ending with the other synoptic gospels. See, for example, Luke 24 mirrors almost all the content of this longer ending. Before discussing this further let’s consider the “accepted” ending verses 1-8.

This ending has some very significant theological points. The women, as one might expect, are stunned and frightened to find the tomb empty except for this young man. The young man announces the key message of the gospel, “Jesus who was killed on the cross has been raised, he is not in his tomb.”

Mark could have ended his gospel right here but he continues with the imperative of the young man, “…go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”  The English translation fails to capture the full reaction of the women is verse 8, “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.”

The Greek words are tromos and ecstasis. Tromos really more appropriately means paralyzing, or heart-stopping deadly fear of not being able to fulfill a religious duty. Ecstasis is more appropriately translated as a fearful- and God-inspired spiritual awareness (in the sense of an ecstasy of perceiving certain spiritual knowledge). Mark is telling us the two women were petrified to the point of death not in finding the tomb empty except for this young man, but to know with certainty they were in God’s presence receiving this revelatory Good News and fearing/doubting their adequacy to respond to the command from the young man “to go and tell his disciples and Peter.”  (Would the men believe them? Could they convince them?)

Mark seals the prediction of Jesus of his death and resurrection with the certainty of the faith of women that they were in the Divine’s presence and fearful of being able to complete a religious duty. As Jesus has repeatedly said in his ministry, faith is the criterion for healing, even the sickness of sin. (See Mark 9:14-29, for an example.)

These verses contain the last great sandwich of Mark’s gospel in verse 7. The message of the young man is not only that Christ is alive, it is “he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you.”

If we go to Mark 1:9, we find these words, “In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” Jesus enters Mark’s gospel coming out of Galilee, and Mark’s gospel ends with Jesus going back to Galilee. Thus all that has happened, the complete good news is bracketed by the entry into and exit from the world by Jesus through Galilee.

Reflection: Here are three considerations about Mark’s gospel and its ending:

  (1)  What do you think the abrupt ending suggests is Mark’s message about the good news? Is its message about faith?

Mark offers no road to Emmaus and demonstration of his bodily resurrection found in Luke, no reappearance of Jesus with the Great Commission. Mark offers only the testimony of two women who were awestruck feeling they were in Divine presence and carrying great fear and doubt of being able to complete the task they were commanded to fulfill, to go and tell the others about this good news.

  (2)  On the other hand, this ending also invites us to write our own beginning and ending of the Good News.  

We may find an answer by asking, “What is the significance of Galilee?” Galilee is part of the Northern kingdom of Israel. When the Assyrians defeated Israel, they accomplished a wholesale upheaval of the people, taking the so-called “upper crust” of Israeli society to Assyria, and importing people (gentiles) from other conquered lands. Galilee had become a land of few people of gentile heritage and the remnants of Israel’s lesser society who had been left behind with limited resources. Israel was also the very wealthy, successful if not contentious, sibling of its brothers and sisters in Judah/Jerusalem. Over the succeeding years immigrants from Judah and Jerusalem gradually amended the population of Galilee giving it a reputation for being the outpost of rubes and outcasts, of rebels and Robin Hoods. Galilee is a transliteration of the Hebrew “District (or circle) of the Gentiles.” It is a puzzling place for the Messiah to emerge and return until we witness Mark unfolding the ministry of Jesus – and, of course, when we take accounts such as Luke 4:16-21 that may offer an amplified account of the event of Mark 1:21-22.

I call Mark the Gospel for the marginalized, the outsider and the downtrodden. Jesus fulfilled the Law by opening the promise in Isaiah of salvation to everyone. Thus, is Mark inviting each of us to seek out our own Galilee to live a life that proclaims to others this great, good news?

  (3)  Finally, the existence of these longer endings can be read two ways. We can read them as a consequence of humanity’s distaste of uncertainty. We don’t like loose ends and want a concrete answer. We want someone to testify they have seen this risen bodily Jesus rather than having to rely upon faith alone to believe it. Yet faith alone is all we have.

The other way to read these endings is to be humble about how rigid and fixed is the canon we call the “Bible.” Over its history righteous, penitent believers have not hesitated to utilize or edit more than one version of the texts of scripture. A great example is the Book of Joshua where scholars have convincingly demonstrated at least three independent versions containing distinctly different texts with distinctly different theological emphasis.

These three texts are the Masoretic Text (that has become the Protestant Old Testament), the Septuagint (the Greek translation of another set of Hebrew manuscripts that formed the basis of the Christian New Testament until the Reformation and remains the Catholic Old Testament), and a set of scrolls found in the Dead Sea collection that clearly derive from a different, older and perhaps more faithful translation of Hebrew scripture. The three were in general circulation for over 300 years.

The message one gets is that over the history of God’s people, we have sought to use the essence of scripture, it core message, by adapted it in new text forms to fit real, current circumstances. Thus, there is some irony that upon the Protestant Reformation, scripture was cast into a rigid canon where amplification or new discoveries are not admitted. The older Septuagint used by the Catholic Church for the "Old Testament" was abandoned for the newer (1008 CE) MT translation which was embraced within 100 years as an absolute, invariant standard.

In conclusion, we have multiple endings for Mark’s gospel whose provenance we cannot know with certainty short of some new discovery of an essential manuscript. The mystery of the shorter ending of Mark leaves us with the messages that faith alone leads us to salvation, not wisdom, scientific knowledge or logic. We want proof, it is our nature, but what we have is something we believe on faith, the experience of the women in the tomb was one of awareness of God’s presence, the absence of rational proof and uncertainty of the ability to fulfill the received command. Even Paul picks up this theme in Corinthians when he says of the message of the gospel is foolishness to the rational mind.

The other unavoidable message is that in spite of the fear, uncertainty and amazement that the command invokes within us, Jesus invites us to find him in our own Galilee and to testify to this good news by our living among the people of the world. There in our work as our deeds testify, we will find Him just as the young man said, “He has gone ahead of you to Galilee. You will see him there.” For me, this is the essence of Christian faith.

Happy Easter, people.