Tonight over 11 million people won’t move for an hour. It’s the ending of Line of Duty. After six series of unanswered questions we are promised an ending. It might shock us, we have no idea. The writer tells us we must watch right until the end. For those of you who’ve never watched it it doesn’t matter, but for those of us who’ve tried to follow the various plots, the ending matters. I don’t want to yell at the set at 10pm “you can’t end it like that!”
How does the story of Jesus end?
How does the Gospel of Mark end? We think this bit is an appendix. For the early church the women running off in fear was a bit abrupt.
Eusebius in the 4th century remarked that “accurate” copies of Mark’s gospel ended at verse 8adding that verses 9 to 20 were missing from “almost all manuscripts”.
A number of copies that DO have verses 9 to 20 have the verses marked by asterisks which were conventional signs used by scribes to mark off questionable additions to the text. All the extra bits are in the other Gospels.
I’ll look at verse 8b in a bit, but from verse 9, we get brief mentions of Jesus appearing to Mary Magdalene, about men not believing them, of him appearing to two travellers walking into the country and again the rest not believing them, and then him appearing to the eleven, upbraiding them for their lack of faith and their stubbornness and then there’s a commission.
“Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to all creation.” The work of Jesus is a sandwich between the beginning of the Gospel and the end. Marks first words are “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God” and his last words are “they went out and proclaimed the good news everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the message by the signs that accompanied it.” The earthly story of Jesus ends with a commission: it ends with the Church being born. And what’s the Church? A people raised up to tell good news…
That’s the longer end of the Gospel. There’s a shorter ending.
“And afterward, Jesus himself sent out through them, from east to west, the sacred and imperishable proclamation of eternal salvation.” Again the end involves us. How do we feel about that?
Here’s the thing. Whatever is now, our faith is that the end will be different. Remember what the evangelist Billy Graham once said: “I’ve read the last page of the Bible. It's all going to turn out all right.”
How does it end? My late beloved college principal at Hartley Victoria in Manchester, Rev Graham Slater used to come and assess our services on Sundays but you’d never know when he’d pop up. We’d be planned miles away in the wilds of Lancashire in exotic places like Bacup, and we’d think he’ll never have driven all this way and you’d come out of the vestry and there he’d be sitting. He used to sit with his eyes shut all of the service.
He was taking every word in and when we met to hear his verdict he’d say “where was your clincher young man?” He liked a proper ending. What are we going to do because of what we’ve just heard?
In “Living His Story” Hannah Steele talks about the Church and how we’ve been in this pandemic. She reminds us that in previous pandemics wealthy pagans would run to the hills for safety, whereas the Church would stay, caring for the sick, witnessing through terrible times, sometimes even at the cost of their own lives. The Church was shown to be reliable, compassionate, unafraid to run to the crisis rather than away. The Church was determined to be “out there” as a witness.
Maybe then when we work with people where they are today, we point them to another possibility. We lead them from fear to faith, from despair to hope, from worry to confidence in certainty. Maybe the end is up to us. If this is the era of the Church, then what we share matters.
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