Our reading this week (Mark 16.1–8) is the Easter story as told by Mark, and it ends in a very strange way.  The resurrection has just occurred, and the response of the first witnesses - and the final words of the evangelist about it - is that ' 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.'

It's such a downer of an ending that at some point or other writers have tried to add something on to tidy it up and neaten it out.  It's quite clear from the style, tone, and quality of the verses after this point that everything else was written by someone else - that's why if you find your Bible and look up the end of Mark's gospel you will find it replete with subheadings, brackets, and footnotes.  

Others have suggested that maybe we've lost a page or two of the original, and that's why it ends so pessimistically.

But when you think about it, perhaps particularly in the midst of the pain, fear, and trauma of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, doesn't the 'short' ending (as it's known) feel really quite likely?  If you were there that morning, knowing how dead Jesus had been, having watched them bang in the nails, and him breathe his last, would you take it on a stranger's word and an empty cave, that someone had come back from the dead?  And in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion, amongst the fear and worry that you might be treated the same way by the authorities (as evidenced by the disciples hiding away at the beginning of Acts), even if you did, would you be likely to risk others being as crazy as you?  I'm not sure I would.

And yet at some point they must have done, or Mark never would have known about their first response, and he never would have written it down, or any of the rest of his gospel for that matter.

So maybe there's something deliberate here.  Maybe by ending the gospel in the midst of fear and failure, but with the acknowledgement by it's very existence that it isn't really the end, Mark is suggesting to us that it's precisely from those moments of falling short that the greatest grace is made known, and that even the deepest silence, as deafening as it can be, is really just the moment of breath before the Word.

Maybe in a weird way he's reminding us that even we, in our fears, failures, and faults aren't able to stop the power and presence of God.  If death couldn't do it, how could something as small as us?  Maybe he's telling us to get over ourselves, and get on with what happens next - because the story of the living Christ doesn't end on the page of any book, certainly not neatly - it is still being written in and through the tangled mess of our hearts and lives.  Isn't that what Easter is really about?  The risen Christ, entirely unconstrained, and alive in your heart and mine?

So get out there you glorious, redeemed mess of a human being, and show the world what God is made of!