Brown's Daily Word 4-24-08

Good Morning,
Praise the Lord for this fabulous Friday. It is going to be bright, brilliant, and beautiful. Thank you Jesus. Plan to be in the Lord's House on this coming Lord's day with Lord's people to worship the Risen Lord. Alice is going down to Philadelphia to spend some time with Jessica. Jessica told me yesterday that it will be 90 degrees in Philadelphia this Saturday. (That will be a temperature shock to my wife.)
I love to read the Resurrection accounts of our Lord and Savior as they are recorded in all the four Gospels. Mark 16 begins much like the rest of the gospel accounts of the resurrection. Early on Sunday morning a group of women gathered up some spices and headed off to anoint the body of Jesus. Then there was the prerequisite question: "Who will roll away the stone?" The story continues as they approached the tomb and, lo and behold, the stone is rolled away! An angel appeared with the good news of the resurrection. Everything seems to be going according to the common Gospel account, but then Mark’s Gospel account diverges from the rest. Notice that little footnote in the NIV - "The most reliable early manuscripts and other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20." Mark’s gospel originally ended, not with the appearances of Jesus to the women and disciples, not with great commission, not with Jesus’ ascension into heaven, but Rather with these disturbing words: "They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid."
What kind of ending to Easter would this be? Yet, the great and glorious news of the resurrection has been proclaimed. Death has been defeated, Satan subdued, and Sin squashed. The witnesses have been commissioned.
Yet, for Mark, Easter ends with the words, "They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid." Someone has noted that it is "...not an ending that inspires confidence." Not only does the story end on a down note, but even grammatically the gospel ends peculiarly. In the Greek the last words in the text are "ephobounto gar", literally "they were afraid for..." This is very strange. Every Greek writer (and English student, for that matter), knows that you don’t end a sentence like that. One commentator has noted, "Gar is a small, transitional word that leads into something else. It serves as a kind of hesitation, getting us ready for the next statement." Yet,in Mark, that next statement never comes. Where we would expect to see the story neatly wrapped up with a post-resurrection story of Jesus - all we hear is silence. Easter seems to have an incomplete ending in Mark. In general we are people who don’t like things left hanging. We want our stories neat and tidy. That’s just human nature. So, as we can see, other people began providing the "rest of the story" [ala Paul Harvey] to the resurrection account in Mark’s gospel. They were not entirely wrong in doing this, for we have the evidence to "prove" that what is recorded in the additions to Mark are true, and the other gospels bear this out. Jesus did appear to the disciples; the message of salvation did go out into the world and indeed Jesus is Lord of the living and the dead.
Still, the original intended meaning of Mark has as its purpose anything but making us feel safe and comfortable. Mark intended his gospel to end with that little word gar. Eugene Peterson explains: "The gar leaves us in mid-stride, of balance. The other foot has to come down someplace. Where will it come down? In belief or unbelief? Will the invasion of new life that completely rearranges reality for us, confronting us with more life than we ever imagined and so calling our minimal lives into question, send us scurrying in anxious fear for cover or venturing in reverent fear into worship?" By ending his gospel with that little word gar, Mark in a sense is saying to each of us, "How does the resurrection story end in your life?" We have been entrusted with that good news that He is Risen. What do we do with that news? Mark’s resurrection account leaves the women and us with a promise; the promise of Jesus himself. Listen to verse 7 again: "But go, tell his disciples and Peter, He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you." That is the message that the women take to the disciples: "He will meet you in Galilee." Galilee is of course a real physical location. But it meant more than that. Galilee was the place where they had lived out their daily existence. Galilee is where they fished; where they had families; where the mundane little things of their life were located. By promising to meet them in Galilee Jesus was promising to be there in their everyday experience; to be with them in the little things as well as the big ones.
That is the Easter promise - that Jesus will meet us as we live out our lives in the "real" world. "He is risen...he is going before you to Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you." So as we live out the ending of Easter in our own lives we just need to keep filling in the locations of our own "Galilees - our own unique situations: "He is risen…he is going before me to my every life situation, there I will see him, just as he said."
He is Risen.
Brown
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4Q5vVa0q8Q