Okay, this is the final end here. Mark leads us up in chapter 15. Once the disciples have left and there's nobody else around, All of a sudden, he points out that that's not quite correct. There were a few other people around. And then, out of nowhere, he brings on the scene these women. And they are not just people who happen to be there, but they are also told there were Women who had followed him around knew who he was and so they've seen everything that has gone on and they are the ones who know where he's buried. And so in a way we're kind of wondering what role they will play, what they will do.

[01:07]

And then Mark gives us his final paragraph. There's strong consensus that the Gospel of Mark ends with verse 8, chapter 16. A lot of people have not liked that and that's why you've got other endings to the Gospel and a myriad of explanations as to why that's not a good ending. I find it rather ludicrous that on the Feast of St. Mark, when there's 16 chapters and 8 verses to pick from, that whoever picked those texts chose one from the spurious ending of Mark. Makes you wonder what they were thinking about. Here's how it concludes. 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.

[02:12]

All the Gospels give us different motives for why the women are going to the tomb. Now, we already know He's been anointed. These women weren't apparently at that scene where that anonymous woman dumped all the oil all over him and got some of the local people upset. So, their motivation here is to make sure he gets the proper burial. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb? When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. So that gives us a clue that something's odd here. If you've ever seen those kinds of stones that were put in front of those tombs, we're not talking about a little rock you can kick over with your foot.

[03:20]

I mean, we're talking about one of those huge things that's very difficult to move. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe. All the other Gospels have two people there, because two makes it official witnesses, and we're told in the other Gospels they're angels. Mark doesn't say who this person is, just says a young man, dressed in a wide robe, but you can draw the conclusion that has angelic qualities, certainly, not just some other person. Sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. But He said to them, so here's the message, this is the important part. Do not be alarmed, you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified. He has been raised.

[04:24]

He is not here. Look, there is the place they laid Him. So that's the message. He is not here. The tomb is empty. He's gone. He's been raised up. Now here's what they're supposed to do. But go tell his disciples and Peter. Peter's centered out here. 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. If you read the Gospel, you know He told us this back in chapter 14. That's what He said He's going to do. And he's going to Galilee. Remember, for Mark, the dichotomy between Jerusalem and Galilee. Galilee is a place of life for Mark. It's a place he picked his disciples.

[05:26]

His ministry had its best success in Galilee. He was most comfortable in Galilee. The only time in Mark's Gospel he goes to Jerusalem is to die. Jerusalem is a place of death for Mark. And so, when it comes time for where Jesus is going to manifest Himself after His resurrection is not going to be in Jerusalem in Mark's Gospel. If Mark were going to add appearances, he says they're going to have to be back up in Galilee because that's where Jesus will show up. So they're supposed to tell everybody this. Remember the setup here. They are the only ones who know this message. They are the only ones who have looked in the tomb. They are the only ones that this young man has spoken to. No disciples, no anybody else. It all depends on them.

[06:28]

And then Mark gives his final verse. 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. Interesting, the last word of the gospel is one of those dichotomous terms that Mark has been talking about all along, the distinction between faith and fear. Now, people said for a long time, well, you know, Mark had better intentions. He was going to finish this, but it was at the time of persecution and just about when he was getting ready to add that last paragraph, somebody come and hauled him away. It's ingenious theory. No way on earth you could ever substantiate it. Others said, no, when you roll these scrolls up, what happened was the emerald just scrolled and broke off the inside.

[07:33]

Hardly the way the scroll works. Others said, well, grammatically you can't end it this way because in Greek, literally it says, and they said nothing to anyone they were afraid for. It ends in the word gar, for. And they said, you know, no decent Greek sentence ends in a preposition, just like in English. Until, about the turn of the century, good old Adolf Diezmann, in his research, found a whole truckload of little Greek papyri fragments, common, ordinary, koine fragments, tavern Greek, like the Gospels written in. with hundreds of examples of sentences ending in prepositions, including gar. So that grand theory just waltzed right out the aisle. Few people wanted to admit this is the way the story ends, because it sounds odd, doesn't it?

[08:38]

We're all build up and end. So they went out, fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid the end We're sitting there, the end what? Where is the end? How is this the end? Well, it fits Mark's theological perspective very clearly. It is true, technically it probably isn't an end, nor did Mark want it to be an end. And here we have to watch adding our own stuff. Well, they had to tell somebody, otherwise how would anybody have known all the kind of stuff we do to make it the gospel in our own image and likeness. But you see, if Mark were writing this in English today, he probably would have put those three little dots at the end of the last word, afraid. Because you see, here's what he's done.

[09:43]

He has set us up. He's shown us all along that those people who should have understood, who had all the information, those people that He called, have all failed now. Every last one of them. The last hope rested in these women. These women then, in a sense, became surrogate disciples. We thought, well, maybe they'll do it. The other guys can't, maybe these people can. And so, even they, out of fear, fail. So, what Mark ingeniously is saying is, or asking us, who's left? Who else knows anything? Well, you know, we can all look around and say, well, if you read the story, you'd have to know.

[10:49]

Ain't anybody left. That's why it's a silly ending. Nobody's left. It ends bad. And then Mr. Mark would say, oh, wrong, wrong. You haven't been reading carefully. Why do you think, Mark would ask us, I told you all that stuff. Why do you think I told you stuff I didn't tell anybody in the story? Why do you think I opened the whole story with that one sentence summary of what it's all about and didn't tell anybody else? Why do you think I had that voice pop out of heaven at the baptism to let you know who Jesus was? Why do you think I had that voice emerge again at the transfiguration when the disciples were fumbling all over one another to let you know what the real story is? Why did I let you come in to every major event

[11:50]

that I allowed Peter and James and John to be at and then, in a sense, explain it to you when they couldn't understand it. Well, you see where this is going. The only people left to tell the story as it ought to be told is now the hearer. Those of us who have heard this Gospel, we're the only ones who know the real story. We're the only ones capable of spreading this good news. Unless, of course, we do what everybody else has done. Falter because of fear. Falter because of fear. There is not one single person left who knows the story like we do. That's why Marx set up that little interesting way of developing the hearer.

[12:52]

using the images of ground. Because a lot now depends on how we've heard. What kind of ground we are. How all of this is going to pan out. There will be no gospel unless we tell it. That's why for this gospel it is supremely important for us to understand. which one of those four possibilities best fits us. Now remember, when Mark was writing this, Mark was of the assumption that those who were the good soil who heard the gospel, believed it, and were going to allow it to flourish, they were going to have to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. The dynamic of the gospel is, as the master goes, so goes the disciple.

[13:56]

Jesus is not one to sit down He's not portrayed as a person we are to sit back and just admire from afar, put him on a pedestal and say, isn't that interesting? He is one we are supposed to traipse after in his footsteps, as he does we are to do. And Mark has very carefully portrayed him that way. And so, The issue is we will have to suffer, even those of us who claim to be good ground and who have faith. Now, Mark was writing for a community that already was, or was preparing shortly, to actually suffer from persecution. And there was very, very strong concern because people had already left. Some think the allegorical interpretation of the parable was written by Mark to answer the question, why are some of our people leaving?

[15:00]

Because under persecution they weren't all hanging in there. Well, because they don't all have the level of faith that is required. Now, the enthusiasm for hanging in there and following Jesus is because Jesus had to suffer physically, emotionally, all levels of way. even to the point of dying in that sense of abandonment, but nonetheless turning to God, and that turning to God, that act of faith, was the saving act, and the curtain in the temple was torn, and then ultimate justice was done. Now, we don't know how we will fare. We don't know how it will all come out. Mark would say, well don't worry because it won't last a long time. Your suffering won't last forever.

[16:02]

Why? Because Mark was of the assumption that Jesus would return pretty quickly. And as we know, he was wrong there. He was wrong. That's probably what inspired the other Gospels to take up the story for their communities and tell it in a different way. Because now the other Gospels no longer focus on that notion of the coming of Christ as it portrayed here, nor do they focus so heavily on the Kingdom of God. They focused much more pointedly on the learners, for example, in Matthew's gospel, and on the person of Jesus, because they understood that it didn't quite happen as Mark had said it would. So, does that mean Mark's gospel is invalid because he had a theory and it didn't work out? Well, some would say so, and many people don't like Mark's gospel.

[17:05]

They think it needs to be supplemented, and so they do that all the time. We create this hodgepodge of gospel-esque that really fits no gospel at all, and we think that's fine. It's just, you know, we can do whatever we want. But they're not written like that. Mark's gospel obviously has plenty of validity, even though his driving thesis did not prove out. A number of years ago, there was a guy whose last name is Spestiguri. He wrote an intriguing book that not many people would find the title, at least, to be gripping. book on cognitive dissonance. The book was called When Prophecy Fails. And he did an analysis of religious groups from way back to current. And he says, there's an interesting phenomena that happens in religious people and their groupings.

[18:06]

When a religious community discovers that one of its driving tenets, one of its principal beliefs, ends up being false, you would think, I would think, that author thought, that'd be the end of it. You say you believe this, well, you believe A, B, C, and D. B, obviously, is not going to happen, therefore, you better fold up. But he says, that's not what happens. In his historical analysis, he says, the groups don't fail. Their prophecy looks like it fails, but they don't. What they do is they regroup. They come together and say, well, we thought it was this way, now we're going to think it a little differently. And they take the tenant that failed and they project it into the future.

[19:08]

so that the cognitive dissonance actually ends up being the basis for an eschatological view of things. That's exactly what Christianity did with the second coming of Jesus. Paul thought it was going to happen in his lifetime. Mark was convinced of that. Same thing. But as the church developed, all of a sudden you will notice that the tenant of the second coming, which was the driving force early on, all of a sudden starts to get pushed way into the future. And not so much does it just get pushed way into the future, but we're also told, don't worry about it. You'll never know. It'll happen when it happens. We don't have to know. And that gave rise to a different form. That gave rise, in a sense, to an institutionalized Christianity, because we discovered we cannot live off charism in the long haul.

[20:20]

And you can trace the history of the Church, very interestingly, by just looking at the way charism and institution are balanced, from the very early days of the Church to this very moment itself. We don't like charism too much because charism is power. It's the power of the spirit. And the one thing the power of the spirit insists on is we ain't gonna control it. We don't believe that, but our experience should tell us that. So we take institutions because we know we need institutions. Institutions are not bad things at all. They help us to survive. We know we can't live on charism alone. Those that tried it ended up drifting off into Gnosticism. We see that by reading the letters of John in relationship to the gospel. Without some kind of structure, you just go off into never-never land. And so, we try to take our structures and place them around the Spirit.

[21:29]

The problem is, the structures we make The spirit comes from God. And we get that confused, you see. We quickly end up saying, oh no, the structure is from God too. And then we make that structure as airtight as we can because that way we can control the spirit, see? And then what happens? Well, the spirit will take it for a while and it'll say, okay folks, enough. Blows up. Has from the earliest days of Christianity right down to the Second Vatican Council. And sometimes people get hurt and it's messy and then the spirit runs wild for a while because it can breathe again and then slowly it starts to come back again. Well you see, Shortly after Mark, everything was pretty charismatic, and then the structure started to work. And so it's back and forth. After Second Vatican Council, the spirit was loose for a long time. Then, last 30 years, they've been putting the structure back together.

[22:33]

And we're about that stage now where we think we're going to be able to just a little more effort. It'll become airtight. And we're pretty happy with that. And it's going to blow up again. today, tomorrow, hundred years, we don't know. But that's kind of the way that spirit works. But you see, whether any of that is important or not, see, Mark would tell us, if you could discuss this with him, and you know, he'd probably be a little sad it didn't work the way he did, but Mark and Paul both would probably say, well, I'll tell you how you get around that issue. You are encouraged to live every day as if it were your last. You see, Paul is very clear on it. If you live every day as if it were your last, and none of us do, see, we all think there's going to be tomorrow. You know, I got some things I'm going to do tomorrow. You got some things you're going to do tomorrow. And if somebody would say, well, you know, tomorrow might not come. Well, yeah, theoretically, but still, I'm going to do it tomorrow.

[23:35]

And it might not come. Paul says, if you live every day as if it were your last, who cares when the second coming happens? Because if it happens, we're ready. That becomes the guiding principle ethic. We live every day as if. it were the last. And so we don't have to fret about that. For Mark, there still is the importance of the four kinds of soil. That is what continues to hold through. That is as relevant now as when Mark was talking about it. And it has little to do with whether the Second Coming happens next week tomorrow, a million years from now. Because what Mark is telling us is, and it is, I think, in most people's experience, the good soil has always been a minority.

[24:38]

The good soil has always been a minority and probably always will. Those who have real faith have always been in the minority. The ones who have been in the majority are often the rocky ground people. The people who may claim to be followers, kind of like us, that's why this gospel puts us a little on edge, or it should. The people who claim to have a call, the people who claim to be following the call, the people who claim to have insight, like the disciples did. And yet, underneath, right underneath the surface, On the surface, it looks like faith. We all jumped out of the boat to follow him. Right underneath the surface, though, there's lots of fear and mixed motivations and a terrific amount of basic self-will, as our good old rule of Benedict tells us.

[25:40]

And that tends to win out over us many times. Now, we won't give in, and we'll We will make it in our own image and likeness, but it doesn't work very well. There are those that are just like seed thrown on path, who don't believe anything happened from the beginning. You know, we run into those, but that's not generally where we come in. Thorny ground, people almost there, almost, but can't quite make it. And of course, as Mark says, it all boils down with let anyone with ears to hear listen. And it's not by accident, that's the same theme that Saint Benedict picks up, the matter of listening. See, intensified listening is what Saint Benedict means, in my theory, by obedience. So Christian life is a life of obedience, but obedience is not just doing what somebody who has power over you tells you.

[26:45]

Real obedience is that intensified listening. The listening that comes from being the people of good soil. The people of good soil. And the danger of intensified listening, and it's probably why intuitively we're not so keen on that. You might hear something. When you intensely listen, God might speak. And then what? What if what we hear is not necessarily what we want to do? Then you have the tension. That's the tension Jesus had to operate with all of his life in the story that Mark tells about him. From his human nature he would have wanted to go one direction probably. His divine nature whereby he was listening carefully to what God was saying led him in a different direction. And it got to its tense interaction there in the Garden of Gethsemane, where the human and the divine really were at odds.

[27:53]

And you wonder, who's going to win out here? Especially when he says, let's negotiate this. And it's the divine that wins out. His faith wins out, and the same thing on the cross. The gospel is telling us that same access to the divine Word is available to us. If we can quit being so concerned about us, And we can listen, open our ears to listen. Because the other thing to remember is we don't have a clue the avenues through which God speaks to us. We claim we do. We know where God speaks and we can hear, hear, hear, not there, not there. We don't know that. God speaks any place at any time. So it's an interesting gospel. It's very challenging. It's all up to us now. We can close the book and say, well, that's funny. Or, we do what we want. But the ball is now in our court. When you read the gospel as Mark wrote it, then the ball gets knocked into our court and Mark walks away.

[29:00]

That's pretty neat, huh? And then we're sitting here wondering, what do I do with it? How do I tell this story? How do I live my life according to this story that I consider to be divine revelation? And of course, those in monastic communities, you know, we tend to think we are already somewhere along this way. We all hope that we, of all people, would be the good soil. That is our intent. But the Gospel forces us to ask, are we? We can get awfully, awfully concerned about us, can't we? We can get awfully complacent. Because we have a rich tradition, we can easily just sit back in that and rest and think, well, you know, it's the tradition that will carry us. It's the observance that will carry us.

[30:01]

Which is not to say any of those are not valuable and important things, but the thing that carries us is our faith. If monastic life doesn't provide us with a way to have dynamic faith through intensified listening, then we, of all people, have been fooled. We, of all people, have been fooled. Remember, we come to this way of life not because we want to have some kind of special work to do or whatnot. We are searching for God. and trying to search intently, trying to listen where that search takes us. And we know, being human, and certainly the rule of Benedict knows it very well, how easy it is for us to be sidetracked. and being sidetracked into these different kinds of soil, I would say. Try to use Mark's Gospel. So constantly, part of our vigilance always has to be to make sure we remain good soil.

[31:06]

We remain good soil. The temptation will always be to move over into the rocky soil. Quick enthusiasm sprouts up right away, looks good, but then gets distorted. Distorted. Now, of course, this has been my reading of Mark. You might say, that's interesting, but that might be the way they read it in Indiana, but in New York, we don't read it that way. And everybody can read it the way you want. I'm not saying my reading has any more claim to authenticity than anybody else's. Because as we well know, once something is in writing, then the author no longer has control over it. Then it's up to the reader to make it actual. But I think if you read it from a rhetorical perspective, like many people think Mark wrote it, then it takes a life that oftentimes people don't realize it has.

[32:12]

It looks harmless at first, doesn't it? 16 tiny little chapters with skimpy little beginning and almost no ending at all. You're thinking, how could that hurt anybody? And then when you get in it, you see Mark has taken us on quite a journey. On quite a journey. And if you read the other evangelists now, you'll discover they're going to take you on a different kind of journey, but it's not going to be any easier. They'll have some different stories, but it doesn't get any easier. Of course, it's not a question of what's easy and what's hard. It's a question of the levels of faith that we get immersed in. And for our tradition, of course, that's why we stay so close to these scriptures because we want to make sure that we, as much as we can, remain that fertile ground and that we do have ears to hear, and not only have ears to hear, but that this way of life allows us to listen in ways that perhaps other ways of life do not provide.

[33:25]

So they went out, fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Blessed be the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I think if I come back, one of the things I would do, although I'm sure it's the state and the county, I'd take down that dead end sign that you've got right before the monastery. I think symbolically you might want to reconsider it.

[34:31]

Rip that out maybe, but the journey begins here. He was dead young for a car.

[34:41]

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