2nd of 2 posts — click HERE to see first post
Mark 16 (NRSVUE): When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James and Salome bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. 2 And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. 6 But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. 7 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.” 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.
Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels doesn’t quite describe herself as “spiritual but not religious,” but I sense a kindred spirit. As a teenager, she belonged to an evangelical Protestant church but drifted away when she was told a close Jewish friend couldn’t go to the Christian heaven. When she went through a crisis of grief and despair as an adult, she drew life-affirming sustenance from the Episcopal and Catholic spiritual traditions.
And over a 40-year career at Columbia and Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies, she has written powerfully — for an academic — on subjects ranging from Adam, Eve and the snake in the garden to the “secret” Gospel of Thomas and the book of Revelation. In a book titled Why Religion? A Personal Story, Pagels says:
Many of us, of course have left religious institutions behind, and prefer to identify as “spiritual, not religious.” I’ve done both — had faith, and lost it; joined groups and left them. To my own surprise, I then went back, seeking to understand what happened and to explore how the stories, poetry, music, and art that make up religious traditions have grown out of specific communities and institutions, yet sometimes still resonate.”
Hardly best-seller material! (It’s #75,880, in fact, on Amazon.com’s Best Sellers list.) But I’m an armchair theologian and aging academic with degrees in English and history, and I like Pagels’ academic writing. So when I saw she’d written a book with a title like Why Religion?, I ordered a copy immediately.
I can’t quite pigeonhole it. Perhaps Paul Massari of Harvard’s PR shop describes it best: “Part spiritual biography, part memoir, the book is ultimately the story of Pagels’ own search for meaning after suffering the sudden and successive losses of her young son and her husband a year later.” It’s also a review of her scholarly work. “Since the work I do as a historian of religion is deeply connected with finding meaning,” she told Massari, “I had to explore how my scholarly work and my personal life converge.”
A passage I found especially meaningful came as she described a sermon she gave after her husband’s death; in it she contrasted the “facile comfort that churches often dole out like Kleenex” with the narrative arc of Mark’s gospel, which “ends in disaster” with Jesus’ crucifixion but also “suggests that what looks like total defeat may end in hope.” Says Pagel:
[…] For those who find suffering inevitable — in other words, for any of us who can’t dodge and pretend it’s not there — acknowledging what actually happens is necessary, even if it takes decades, as it has for me. How, then, to go on living, without giving in to despair? I recalled lines from Wallace Stevens: “After the final no there comes a yes / And on that yes the future world depends. / No was the night. Yes is this present sun.” Only when I began to awaken in the morning and see the sunlight, grateful for its warmth, could I dive into the secret gospels again. [The italics are Pagels’.]
That speaks to me. After the final no there comes a yes. I blogged about it HERE last month, under the headline: “After the final no comes a yes’: An English major-y romp through Wallace Stevens and the empty tomb in Mark 16:1-8 (1 of 2).” When I uplinked it, I knew I wasn’t finished with it. In fact, I’d barely gotten into it. So I tacked on “1 of 2” and promised to come back to it.
So here we are. And that’s why today’s headline says “2 of 2.”
The line from Wallace Stevens speaks to me. Stage 4 bladder cancer can look like a final no, and for a while there it looked like it was going to be very final no indeed. But now, a year later, I’m responding to immunotherapy. There comes a yes. The bladder’s gone now. In its place I’ve got an ileal conduit; somewhere I read it helps psychologically to name your prosthetic devices, and I’ve named mine Willie. (Don’t ask — if you have to ask, you don’t want to know.) We get along. And I’ve adjusted to living with a chronic disease, from day to day — or from CT scan to CT scan — not knowing what tomorrow will bring. (Do we ever?)
Which brings me back to the gospel of Mark.
In Why Religion? Pagels notes that Matthew, Luke and John all have post-resurrection appearances; even Mark ends with a passage, tacked on later, in which Jesus appeared to the disciples “in another form,” he was “taken up into heaven” and they “went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere.” Part of me wants to set it to music and add “tra la la” at the end. Having engaged with the passage after the death of her husband, Pagels merely says:
Troubling as others found Mark’s original version, I preferred it. What he wrote sounded more like the world in which we live. For when he began to write, he faced a challenge, like so many of us, could understand: how to hold on to hope when confronting what looks like disaster.
To which I can only add: Preach, sister! I can imagine myself tagging along with the three Marys, as they are traditionally known. (The Revised Standard version now commonly used identifies them as Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome, aka Mary Salome. Ask me sometime about the pastor who read the passage aloud as “Mary […] Mary […] and Salami!) I think it’s important to preserve the tradition that the risen Christ first appeared to women, but I can see myself as half-grown, maybe a nephew, a servant or a kid in Jesus’ retinue when they all came down from Galilee. I would have been terrified too!
In fact, the last few days have been terrifying from start to finish. I was with the women the night Jesus was taken into custody by the Romans, and I was laying low with rest of the group the day he was executed and the next day during Shabbat. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t too happy about going out Sunday morning.
Just after daybreak we went out through the city gates, down into kind of a ravine where there’s an old quarry. Folks in Jerusalem call it the Place of the Skull, and that’s a pretty good name for it. The Romans do executions there, and it’s awful. Just awful! Like there’s something in the air, this is where the Empire does its dirty stuff, its really nasty, dirty, awful stuff.
So we get to the tomb. It’s more like a little cave, hewn out of the rock among a pile of boulders left from the old quarry. There was supposed to be a big rock over the entrance. That’s what they told the women back at the room where we were hiding. But the rock was gone. Nobody has been talking very much anyway, but the women fall silent. After a minute or two, they go in.
This is all beyond creepy, but I’m fascinated and I poke my head in the entrance to the cave behind them. Back in the shadows, there’s this guy dressed in white robes. “Do not be afraid,” he says, and I’m thinking, yeah, right! Easy for you to say, buddy.
The guy tells the women Jesus has been raised, he isn’t here, to go tell Peter and the rest of our guys he’ll meet us back in Galilee. I have no idea how that’s going to happen, but you know what? I really, really like this idea of going back to Galilee. Right now! Let’s get out of here! The rest of it is just too much to process.
It looks like the womenfolk have the same idea — we all back out of the tomb and start back up the hillside to safety behind the walls of Jerusalem.
That’s where my meditation ends. At that point of discovery. I can well imagine the three Marys hurrying back to the upper room, or wherever Jesus’ followers were hiding out, and sharing the news. Good news, yes! But what does it mean? What do we do now? Another question, one that comes to me 2,000 year later. What do I do with this good news? What do we all do?
Pagels has one answer. After exploring the resurrection stories in all the gospels, she comes back to Mark:
Paradoxically, [Mark’s gospel] allows for hope, even when his raw narrative seems to offer none. […] While refusing to give up hope that God reigns in heaven, Mark ho longer sees his rule uncontested. Instead, he pictures Jesus living in a world in which evil forces hav gained the upper hand and now virtually dominate — a scenario that resonated with many among his earliest audience, and with the experience of many people ever since.
Writing for Luther Seminary’s Working Preacher website, a service for pastors preaching from the Common Lectionary, Philip Ruge-Jones, associate pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Eau Claire, Wis., has another. Noting that “the ending of Mark’s gospel is notoriously odd” and Jesus “does not even come by for a cameo,” he concedes the story (and the pericope for the day) is difficult. But he finds a clear message in it:
The story leaves many wanting more resolution, but has the restraint not to give it away cheaply. If you want to experience the risen Jesus, you have to go back to Galilee where he promises to meet us. Going back to Galilee means going back to the margins where Jesus ministered and encountering him again feeding the hungry, driving out the demons that torment people, preaching words of hope to the broken-hearted, healing those in distress, and breaking down the barrier walls that separate people.
Jesus has been raised, go back to Galilee? I’m thinking this is as close to the historical record, as close to what actually happened that spring morning around 30 CE, as we can ever get. As Pagels explains, the post-resurrection appearances came later. But that’s church history. Where does Mark’s story leave me?
One place it leaves me is remembering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I didn’t see the Edicule, the shrine that tradition holds is Christ’s actual tomb (the lines were too long, and our tour group was running behind schedule). But we did see another first-century tomb hewn into the ancient quarry beneath the church. From a dank, oppressive space like this, one of the world’s great religious traditions arose? Miracles happen.
Pagels suggests that by ending his account of the good news of Jesus Christ where he does (in the original version), Mark allows his audience to fit themselves into the story. He has been raised. (The passive voice is important.) He’s waiting for you back in Galilee. Like Pastor Ruge-Jones, I interpret that as a call. A vocation. Get back to work. The Empire still rules, but the hungry are still there to be fed, the sick to be healed.
In my case, the good news goes something like this — I’ve still got a chronic disease, but it looks like we can keep it under control, day by day and CT scan by CT scan. That sure looks like a reprieve. So what am I going to do with it? What unfinished business, what opportunities await me back in Galilee?
A footnote (kinda) on Mark. Especially after reading Pagels’ exegesis of the empty tomb story, I’ve been reassessing the gospel of Mark. I’ve read somewhere before, I forget exactly where, that he was more of a literary craftsman than I was willing to give him credit for at the time. That not a word was wasted from the first — The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ […] — to the last — So they went out and fled from the tomb, […] for they were afraid. But I figured, well, everybody’s got a right to their own opinion. Now I agree with Pagels that I like Mark’s ending better. Something is calling me to go back and give him a second chance.
So I was struck by an offhand remark of Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama’s, in an interview in Christian Century. An advocate for peace and gay rights, he was speaking of his spiritual formation when he said:
In my late teens, I heard a few lectures from biblical scholars, one of whom, [Irish Catholic educator] Frances Hogan, focused on the gospels. I loved the way she’d say, “Well, this is the Jesus of Mark we’re talking about here.” I’d never heard anyone say that. Again, I asked, “Can you say that?” I loved that she had read closely enough to say, “Jesus of Mark and Jesus of John are very different characters; my God, I don’t think they would have liked each other at all.” Mark’s Jesus would have told John’s Jesus to shut up.
There’s nothing I could possibly add to that.
Links and Citations
Pádraig Ó Tuama, “The making of God,” interview by Lisa M. Wolfe and Leslie Long, Christian Century, May 15, 2024 https://www.christiancentury.org/interviews/making-god.
Elaine Pagels, Why Religion? A Personal Story (New York: HarperCollins, 2018): xvi, 168-75
__________, “Why Religion? Elaine Pagels, PhD ’70, searches for meaning in the loss of her son and her husband,” interview by Paul Massari, Harvard Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Sept. 12, 2022 https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/why-religion.
Philip Ruge-Jones, “Commentary on Mark 16:1-8,” Working Preacher, Luther Seminary, April 1, 2008 https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/resurrection-of-our-lord-2/commentary-on-mark-161-8-6.
Header art: Pierre Jean Van der Ouderaa, De heilige vrouwen keren terug van Christus’ graf (The Holy Women Return From Christ’s Grave), 1893, Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pierre_Jean_Van_der_Ouderaa_-_De_heilige_vrouwen_keren_terug_van_Christus%27_graf.jpg.
[Uplinked June 14, 2024]
Ordinary Time 
