You may have noticed that I did not post for the last couple of days. I have a simple explanation for my absence — Life Happened.
Not anything earth shattering.
No one died.
Everyone in my family is well.
Life just happened.
Oh, I could tell you about being out of town or term papers or djing a wedding. Yes, all of those things happened, but most of all life took over ritual.
I felt neither compelled or desirous to post. I became uniquely aware that I was empty of things to post. I had great plans in September of all of the things I want to post in this blog, but the truth is that in my business in talking about God, I forgot to spend time with God.
When I was out at Camp Butman I had the chance to work on a paper due for my Synoptic Gospel class. 10 pages about the essence of Mark including the “real” ending of Mark. If you look in your bible, you’ll likely see that at Mark 16:8, you will see a notation there that says something like, “Most early documents do not include the following verses.”
If you read the following verses, they are the ones about a resurrected Christ. Mark at 16:8 ends with the women at the tomb hearing a boy say that Christ is risen and that he has gone ahead to Galilee, but the women at the tomb run away in fear AND TELL NO ONE. What? That’s not the way I remember the story, but that is what is in the text. Most of our Easter story is understood by the other gospels of Matthew, Luke and John and Paul’s epistles.
If that is true that the early Christian communities first gospel (most scholars believe that Mark was the first gospel written) did not have the resurrection sitings in them and that there is a whole air of discomfort in the conclusion of Mark. At the encouragement of Dr. Miller, I sat a while in that discomfiture and I re-read Mark again in the discomfiture.
It came alive to me to hear this story again. I saw Mark in a new light and saw a message I hadn’t seen before. I was moved to re-examine life and my expectation of God.
That being said, I did not feel compelled to fill this space with fluff or at least not until I was certain that it was fluff with a purpose.
I will be posting again daily (most likely) until Thanksgiving, but I hope to be at peace with what words are on these pages.
My hope is that you might spend a moment and re-read Mark. Read the words that are there and to not read it from a 21st Century Christian, but one who was part of the early Christian community. Not that it doesn’t have a message for you today, but step inside their shoes and see if it offers a different message for you today.
Blessings on your reading!
