Best to be honest; the ending of Mark’s Gospel leaves a lot to be desired.

Best to be honest; the ending of Mark’s Gospel leaves a lot to be desired.  Almost all scholars agree that Mark ends his gospel at chapter 16, verse 8.  However, if you take a quick look at your Bible, you will notice that there are two alternate endings—a shorter ending (verse 8b) and a longer ending (verses 9-20).  Since none of the earliest manuscripts contain these endings, the general consensus is that they were added later, perhaps centuries later.

I can understand why someone might have done that, though, because while Mark starts off the resurrection story well enough—the women go to the tomb, and hear that Jesus Christ has been raised from the dead—he seems to botch the ending completely: “So the women went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

As an ending, that’s not very satisfying, is it?  For starters, it’s the only resurrection story in the New Testament where the risen Christ never makes an appearance.  That’s problematic, in and of itself.  But to make matters worse, the women don’t do the one thing that they’re supposed to do.  The angel who meets them at the empty tomb is very specific: “Go and tell the disciples and Peter that Jesus is going ahead of them to Galilee.”  But according to Mark, the women never deliver that message.  They flee from the tomb, filled with fear, and don’t say a thing to anyone!

And that’s where Mark ends his gospel—a resurrection story, without the risen Christ, and in which the only witnesses fall silent.  So it’s not surprising that a well-intentioned scribe, at some later point, decides, “I think this needs to be fixed,” and adds a few sentences that, while they don’t sound anything like the rest of Mark, at least bring the story to a more satisfying conclusion.

However, I would like to suggest that Mark deserves a little more credit than that.  I do not believe that he is a bad writer, or that he couldn’t come up with a good ending and so he just quit.  Perhaps Mark put down his pen at verse 8, because he intentionally wants to keep his gospel open-ended.

In other words, I think Mark is inviting his audience—meaning you and me—to be more than merely spectators.  He is offering us an opportunity to play a part in this story.  It’s almost as if he is saying, “Okay, now it’s your turn.  You get to pick up where the women left off.  It’s time to start spreading the word that Jesus Christ is risen.  He is risen, indeed!”  Looking at it that way, this is not a bad ending; it’s a brilliant ending, because it signifies that the story of the resurrection doesn’t stop with those first witnesses.  It lives on through us!