A sermon preached on Easter Sunday: The Sunday of the Resurrection at
The Anglican Church of St. Thomas the Apostle, Kefalas, Crete
on 31 March 2024, 11:00 am.

The readings were: Isaiah 25:6-9; Psalm 118.1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; and Mark 16:1-8.

Why does Mark not have a resurrection appearance?

The passage just read today for our gospel ends rather abruptly. The women go to the tomb, find it empty, see and hear the angel, and are commanded to go and tell Peter and the disciples that Jesus is risen, and that they will see him in Galilee. And yet we read,

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 16.8

It is a bit unusual. We have been conditioned to expect a resurrection appearance by the endings of the other gospels. And not just that, the women are afraid, and silenced by their fear. Of course, they must have eventually overcome their fear and told the disciples, and the author of the gospel¹ knows there were appearances, and yet he makes no mention of this. It seems a bit of a downer, kind of incomplete. Is this any way to conclude a gospel?

The other gospels in the New Testament do not have this reticence, and neither did Paul.

• In the Gospel according to Matthew Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”, and then to the disciples on a hill in Galilee.
• In the Gospel according to Luke on Easter Sunday Jesus appears to Simon Peter, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, and then to the disciples in the Upper Room in Jerusalem.
• In the Gospel according to John Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, then the disciples in the Upper Room, first with Thomas absent, then again a week later in the Upper Room with Thomas present, and then again to seven disciples in Galilee beside the Sea of Galilee.
• In the Acts of the Apostles we read that he appeared to the disciples repeatedly over forty days.
• In our second reading today, from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, we heard that:
  • Jesus appeared to Cephas (i. e. Peter),
  • then to the Twelve,
  • then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom were still alive when Paul was writing, though some had died,
  • and then he appeared to James (the brother of Jesus, and later the leader of the church in Jerusalem after Peter left),
  • then to all the apostle,
  • and, finally, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to Paul.


The passage from First Corinthians predates the Gospel according to Mark by some two or three decades, so even if it is the earliest gospel of the four, as scholars scholars believe, and even if it created the genre of “gospel” (i.e. a narrative of Jesus’s life with sayings, miracles, with an inauguration of ministry near the beginning and a conclusion with the suffering and death of Jesus), there was precedent for mentioning the appearances. Indeed, it was an original and basic part of the good news, as Paul indicates: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received” as Paul says, it predates him. Assuming 16.8 is the ending of the gospel, the author of the gospel was intentionally going against what the informed listener might expect.

Of course, some scholars, acknowledging the problem, have suggested that there was a resurrection appearance to conclude the gospel, but that it was somehow lost in the very early transmission of the manuscripts – maybe it got torn off the scroll soon after the author or his scribe put stylus to papyrus. If you read the King James Version (“KJV”) (also known as the Authorised Version (“AV”)) (1611) the gospel does indeed carry on until 16.20, because the printed Greek text that the translators used did have an ending. The printed Greek text that they used was known as the Textus Receptus, and it was based on the Greek text in common use in the Greek Orthodox Church; furthermore, none of the source manuscripts were older than the eleventh century. However, in the 19th century scholars began to believe that 6.9-20 was never part of the original text, but was added by a later copyist. We can be reasonably certain that this ending was not written by the author of the gospel, as is evidenced by its absence in the best and oldest manuscripts (from the fourth century and earlier papyrus fragments), and the difference in style and language from the gospel proper.

In fact, the abrupt ending seems to have resulted in the creation of no fewer than three different endings written by later manuscript scribes or copyists – the “shorter ending”, the “longer ending”, and the “even longer ending”; these are typically reproduced in any modern translation of the Bible. These endings were attempts to fix scripture, to right what appeared to the copyists to be a defect. There are some very conservative scholars who try valiantly to prove that 16.9-20 was the original ending, but this appears to be driven more by a theological concern to endorse the textual integrity of the “Byzantine text/Textus Receptus” over the Nestle-Aland/UBS 5 critical edition that conforms more closely to the “Alexandrian text” of the New Testament, which is supposedly closer to the original text than other families of texts.²

So, again, why does Mark not have a resurrection appearance? Why does it appear to end with the downbeat ending, where the angel tells them:

But 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.

Why do we hear:

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.



Let’s think this through. The first hearers of the gospel would not have read it, but would have heard it, just as you just did. Typically a reading would have been done by someone who had prepared themselves to do so, and, of course, they would have used a manuscript, not a printed page – not an easy thing, for as you can see from the picture to the left, the text had no spaces between words and no punctuation, and words behgan on one line and continues on the next one with no warning. The reader would have had to repeatedly read the text and practice it. Once they did gt to know it, I imagine they gave it a dramatic aspect.

Now, the first century was a fundamentally oral culture, whereas we are a very text-driven society. We live in the shadow of the invention of the printing press and its adoption in Europe in the 15th century, and the proliferation of cheap books printed on paper, and now via electronic media. In the time of the apostles people did not so much read texts as they listened to people read them. Furthermore, if Mark is indeed the earliest of the four gospels, as the scholarly consensus believes, when interpreting Mark one needs to forget what one knows about the other gospels – for the first hearers of Mark’s gospel they haven’t been written yet. Maybe they know about Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, perhaps the collection of Jesus’s saying known as “Q” and embedded in Matthew and Luke, but even if any of this had been read in their church it would not yet have acquired the status of being inspired scripture – that was still reserved for the Old Testament.

So, the gospel was fundamentally oral, and the experience of the gospel before Mark was written down was that people would have heard the good news proclaimed, and the people would have experienced it as an immediate invitation to confess aloud their faith. Even when someone read aloud from a written text such as the Gospel of Mark, it would have been heard aurally. There was no reading a proposition in a text, mulling it over, and giving it intellectual assent on one’s own – rather, one heard the good news proclaimed by someone, most likely in a small group, perhaps by someone personally known or by someone whom others regarded highly, and the person addressed was put in the situation of figuring out how to respond. It was highly personal, very immediate, and not an abstract text removed from personal relations. The authority was not in the text, but is the person proclaiming.³

The Gospel of Mark is known for what has been called the Messianic Secret. The secret is not a secret to the reader or hearer of the gospel – the true title of the gospel is announced in 1.1: “the good news of Jesus Christ.” The hearers already know that Jesus is the Messiah, which is the Hebrew word for “the anointed one” of God, or in Greek, “Χριστός”. In the Hebrew Bible priest, kings, and prophets were anointed as they began their work. The Messiah was the person expected to restore the kingdom of God, the kingdom of Israel. However, whenever Jesus did a miracle of healing, or driving out a demon, he would solemnly tell the person just healed not to tell anyone about what he had done. Repeatedly people in the gospel try to announce that Jesus is the Messiah, the Christ, but Jesus just as repeatedly tells them not to publish it abroad. The twelve disciples also just as repeatedly misunderstand who Jesus is. Peter confesses him as Messiah, but when Jesus reveals that he is to be betrayed into the hands of the chief priests and scribes, and suffer death, and after three days be raised from the dead, Peter tries to persuade him that this cannot be, and Jesus says to him, “Get behind me Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things” (Mark 8.33). Jesus in the gospel of Mark is the Messiah who suffers, so in addition to being the Christ, and the Son of God, and the Son of Man, he is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah (Isaiah 42:1–4; Isaiah 49:1–6; Isaiah 50:4–11; and Isaiah 52:13–53:12.). Instead of understanding this, that he was sent to serve and not to be served, the disciples jockey for exalted positions in the kingdom of heaven (Mark 9:33-37). In the end, all the male disciples fail him. At his arrest one betrays him, another denies him, and the rest fly away. Only the female disciples, the women who served the needs of Jesus and his followers (Mark 15.41), get any kind of commendation. They observe his death and they watch where he is buried. Where they men failed, they remained faithful.

Only with the end of the gospel text do we hear the full gospel proclaimed by the angel: Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, has been raised – so go and tell Simon Peter and the other disciples about it and go to Galilee to see him. The story of the suffering servant who is also the Son of Man, who is the Messiah and the Son of God, has been proclaimed in your hearing. Now go and tell others. But the women hesitate, perhaps in shock at this unexpected news, perhaps not believing what they heard, but perhaps also hesitant to tell the others this unbelievable instruction.

Why were they hesitant? Perhaps they were still in shock at the unexpected news. After all, people do not normally rise from the dead. As well, while there was in the First Century among many Jews an expectation that there would be a general resurrection of the dead, some to eternal life and others to judgement, there was no expectation that one person would somehow be raised on his own before others (what Paul in 1 Corinthians called being “the firstborn of the dead”). Perhaps they were just freaked out by the angel, who are usually portrayed as being frightening. Or, perhaps, reading into them a kind of modern sensibility, they were fearful and silent because they were afraid no one wold believe them.⁴

Today, my friends, you are in the same position as the women at the tomb. You have heard the good news proclaimed to you. What will you do now? Do you join in the proclamation of Christ’s death and resurrection? Do you hesitate? Do you celebrate the one who dies in solidarity with all who suffer oppression, and the victory revealed in resurrection? Are you fearful? Do you rejoice at the beginning of a new creation in Jesus Christ, the firstborn from the dead?

My friends, today is not a time for hesitation and holding back. Proclaim the good news with abandon! Behold, now is the accepted time! Behold, now is the day of salvation! Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

1. I consider Mark to be an anonymous gospel that later tradition attributed to John Mark, an associate of Paul. Indeed, none of the four gospels claim an author, but are anonymous. ↩︎
2. This is a separate issue from whether Mark 16.9-20 (and the other variant endings) should be read as scripture. Fundamentally, something is considered to be in the canon of Christian scriptures because the church has said it is, and traditionally Mark 6.-20 has been part of the canon, just as John 7:53–8:11, which while undoubtedly not by the author of the Fourth Gospel, is still considered to be scripture. When it comes to textual issues the Western Church typically defers to scholars, whereas the Eastern Orthodox affirms the Greek translation of the Old Testament and the late Byzantine of the New Testament as the inspired, authoritative scriptures. Of course, people and churches disagree about what books should be in the canon, just as scholars will disagree about which is the most likely version of the original text. It would be most helpful if there was a test by which one could discern whether a particular text or verse or translation was inspired, but, unfortunately, that is often more a matter of opinion than fact; thus I rely on the authority and tradition of the church to say what should be in the Bible. ↩︎
3. This paragraph has been influenced by my reading of Werner H. Kleber, The Oral and the Written Gospel: The Hermeneutics of Speaking and Writing in the Synoptic Tradition, Mark, Paul, and Q (Bloomington & Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press, 1997 (originally published 1983). I hope to write a summary of this important book and offer some reflections in a future post. ↩︎
4. This paragraph and the next are derived from Thomas Boomershine’s critique of English Bishop and New Testament scholar J. B. Lightfoot’s (1828-18) interpretation of Mark 16.1-8. See Thomas E. Boomershine, “Mark 16.8 and the Apostolic Commission”, Journal of Biblical Literature Vol. 100, No. 2 (1981), pp. 225-239. Don’t you wish you had a surname like Boomershine or Lightfoot?
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