This year the Christian feast of Easter will be celebrated by the eastern and western churches on the same week, an unusual calendrical event that creates a singularly ecumenical moment for Christian reflection. Of course, in Rome, the story of the Passion that culminates in the Crucifixion-and-Rising this weekend takes place under an unusual cloud of witnesses.
Gary Laderman’s provocative question in this week’s RD — what do Christians actually believe? — takes on an interesting complexion this week. I would like to suggest taking a closer look at one Christian’s answer: Mark the evangelist’s. For Mark’s is the gospel that goes out of its way to underline the mysteriousness and impenetrability of the figure of Jesus.
In one of the most shocking turnarounds in which Mark so clearly delights, Mark’s Jesus informs his disciples that he teaches in parables not to simplify his message, but actually to confuse people, “lest they turn and be forgiven” (Mark 4:1-12). Mark’s Jesus insists on secrecy; almost every time that someone figures out who he is, he tells them not to tell anyone else about it. Few follow his clearest commands. The only thing he says plainly to his disciples is that he will suffer, and be killed, and that on the third day there will be a rising. This, Mark insists, “he said plainly.” Somehow, the disciples missed that, too.
When the time comes, after a seismic three-week ministry, Mark’s Jesus is depicted in an agony of doubt in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging God, if at all possible, to pass him by. None of the men who accompany him see any sign that anything is wrong, and so they sleep through Jesus’s clear warning of an approaching storm. Jesus is betrayed by one of his own closest followers, a man who hands him over to the crowd, poignantly enough, with a kiss.
The torture to which the man is subject is revealed to us in an unblinking and shocking way. The Roman administrators go out of their way to break Jesus physically, and the larger story that Mark’s readers know is that this event cannot have failed to break him emotionally as well. He is abandoned by everyone who promised to follow him; he dies utterly alone and in apparent failure. Even the two men who are crucified to either side of Jesus mock him, in what is surely the most horrific detail of all those Mark reports. And so Jesus dies, with the desperate words of the Psalmist on his lips: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”
“For they were afraid”
And then something strange happens, something made stranger if you believe, as the manuscript tradition and Mark’s strange theology both make clear, that this gospel originally ended at the 8th verse of the 16th chapter. Given the imminence of the Passover, Jesus was hastily buried in a rough-cut tomb. The women who had come with him to Jerusalem had not had time to dress out the body, and so they return to the tomb to do so after the Sabbath has passed.
They discover the tomb to be re-opened and empty; a mysterious “young man” informs them that
“he is not here.” They are instructed to go tell Peter what has happened, and that Jesus will meet them, much as he promised, in the Galilee. But the women leave, “and they told no one, for they were afraid.”
Thus the earliest of the four canonical gospels ends without a resurrection appearance. This is not to say that Mark does not believe in Jesus’s rising; Jesus clearly foretells that event three times in Mark’s gospel. No, the remarkable thing about Mark’s rehearsal of the Passion is that he chooses not to show what he believes to have happened.
Instead, Mark’s telling ends with fear, a natural enough response to the tragedy of the story as he understands it. Aristotle insisted that “pity and fear” were the fundamental emotions created by tragedy, and what Mark offers us is nothing less than a Christian tragedy in which those very emotions are foregrounded.
Mark has also done something else that is even more remarkable: he has written a gospel in which the end is not the end. The women leave the empty tomb and do not tell anyone, out of fear. Period. Full stop.
But somehow, the word got out anyway, because Mark is telling this story, now. The story that ends with all-too-human frailty and fear also gestures forward to a more hopeful future. God, this tragedy suggests, finds a way past desperate straits to more open futures.
This version of Holy Week thus might be heard very differently, and even with a modicum of hope, in Rome today. For the scandals currently rocking the Vatican establishment have a fairly simple moral. The Church elites told no one, for they were afraid. But the word got out anyway; such a word always does. And there is assuredly a rising after a falling, if you are serious about tragedy, generating a hope that is sustained not just in the face of tragedy, but actually through tragedy, if you have the courage to face it squarely.
Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1528 painting of “The Four Apostles” (see above) is a diptych that boasts serene images of John and Matthew on the viewer’s left, with darker images of Paul and of Mark on the right. Mark’s face in particular stands out in this painting; he alone is depicted facing fully frontally, and his face is bathed in eery light. He looks out past us at something dark that we cannot see. He looks terrified, and we are meant to recall that his gospel ends that way, with fear. Confronted with a rising— a revolutionary moment, if ever there were one — Jesus’s followers are struck silent first, with fear.
The Passion is a tragedy, from beginning to end; the end of Mark’s version of the Passion is fear. But the very fact that the gospel exists in writing implies that human frailties were eventually sufficient unto the revolutionary new moment Jesus’s rising announced. And so the virtue of the revolutionary is a particular kind of hopefulness, a hope that takes tragedy seriously, worries about oppression and pain, but refuses them the final word.
It is all a gentle reminder that the true end of any revolution is justice, and that such an enactment of justice is the Church’s first and final calling.
