April 20, 2025

The Unfinished Story

You know what really gets me?  It’s when a TV series ends the season with a “cliffhanger” episode, and you have to wait until late September or even October to find out what happened.  Like the time on West Wing when the season ended with a bunch of shots fired on the President and his staff as they walked to the motorcade and you had to wait four or five months to find out who was shot, who was killed, who survived.  That really annoys me.  Sometimes I think they do that as a negotiating strategy with their cast.  You know: “Go along with our contract offer, or come September it’ll turn out you were shot in the last episode.”

I don’t know if any of you have ever noticed, but the Gospel of Mark ends right in the middle of a story, like one of those season ending cliff-hangers.  Except Mark doesn’t come back in September and finish the story for you.  He just leaves you hanging.

O sure, there are nice tidy endings to the Gospel, but if you read the fine print, you realize that Mark didn’t write any of them.  In some translations, these clever little closures to the story are referred to with headings like “the first alternate ending, the second alternate ending, etc.”  In other translations, these add-on conclusions are simply listed in the footnotes with the explanation, “Other texts and versions add the following passage:” and “Other authorities add the following:”

The logical conclusion is that in ancient times people were just as uncomfortable with season ending cliff-hangers as I am.  They didn’t like Mark leaving them dangling, so they came up with endings to the Gospel and stuck them on themselves.

What’s really interesting is to see what these uneasy folks added to the Gospel – and therefore what Mark left out.  What was added, and what Mark made no mention of, was the women running to tell the disciples, and the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus in the flesh.  Mark ends his Gospel with this ponderous curiosity: the women visited the tomb and found it empty.  Then they were ordered by this strange young man to go and tell the disciples that Jesus had risen.  Mark simply says, “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.”

Thus ends the Gospel of Mark.  They were afraid, and told no one.  Story over.  Some biblical scholars speculate that by ending the story with the determination of the women to keep their silence Mark was offering a sort of explanation for the Apostle Paul’s silence about the empty tomb in his letters (which are actually the oldest writings we have in the New Testament).  The theory is that the resurrection, to Paul and those in the early church, was more of a metaphor about the spiritual presence of Christ in their midst than about his body getting up and walking out of the tomb.

I don’t know about that, but I guess I’m a lot like those ancient folks who had such a hard time with his ending that they had to add more to the story.  I want to see what happens in the next season’s first episode.  But on a bit more reflection, I think I like Mark’s unfinished story.  Because every story is really unfinished.  Mark just makes it a little more obvious.

When the fairy tale’s handsome prince and beautiful girl are married to “live happily ever after” we’re not told what their married life was really like.  How the prince got along with his mother-in-law or whether he paid attention when his wife talked to him, or whether the lovely new princess squeezed the toothpaste from the wrong end of the tube, or loaded the dishwasher funny.

Every story is unfinished.  And when the sky seems to fall on your head leaving you with a burden almost too great to bear, when a loved one dies too soon, when debilitating disease takes over a life, when a job is lost and a career goes up in smoke, the story is not finished.  After every dark night the sun rises, after every bleak winter the flowers emerge, after every ferocious storm the clouds pass.  And still the story is not over.  There are days yet to be seized, there is life to be embraced, there is love to be found.  Every story is unfinished.

That is true for each of us as individuals, and it is true for this interconnected web that is the human family.  You and I are part of that web as we move through our days, and we so often go to bed with the notion that what we have done in the day is past and gone.  But is it?  We rarely stop to consider how every little moment of the past day lives on in the ways that other lives were touched, other experiences altered by our actions and decisions.  We have no idea what the consequences of our living have led to.  For us, the story of our day remains unfinished.

Fifty years ago, I was a police officer in Aurora, Colorado.  I, like other officers, used to supplement my income with off-duty assignments.  One such job was walking the concourses of a large shopping mall to provide uniformed police protection.  One afternoon while walking the mall, I spotted through the crowd amidst a group of African-American men a familiar black face.  Instantly, I blurted out a name.  “Zeltee,” I called out, and the young man walking with a group of other young men looked up with a start.  It was one of my old track buddies from high school.  I hadn’t seen him in five years, and here we were in a shopping mall, almost a thousand miles across the country from that high school, and I picked his face out of the crowd in an instant.  That’s not like me.  I think it shocked me almost as much as it did him.  But then I realized there was more to the story.  The group of guys he was with were clearly rattled by this cop calling out to their friend.  And Zeltee was noticeably nervous.  He spoke to me politely for about a minute and then left the mall with his buddies.  I have wondered about that brief incident many times.  I’ll never know, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.”  What were Zeltee and his friends doing in that mall?  What were they so nervous about?  Why did they leave so suddenly after encountering me?  How was it that I instantly picked his face out of that crowd?  Did I stop something from happening?  Did I make something else happen?  Did that possible change in plans keep something from happening to Zeltee?  Did it cause something to happen to him?  Did it keep something from happening to someone else?  Did that person have an impact somewhere else or on someone else because of what did or didn’t happen that day?

Thinking about such things quickly leads to the realization that every decision one makes in the course of a day, every action, every trip you take, and every trip you forego, every encounter with another person, every turn of the steering wheel or decision to pick up the telephone has some result, some impact on the lives of others.  And even a seemingly insignificant impact might be momentous.  A kind word or welcoming gesture might come at a crucial moment of decision for a person, and their decision might have rippling consequences that lead to changing the course of history.

George Bailey learned it in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life.  When he was shown in detail what his community would have become had he not lived – how individual lives would have been altered and how those lives so altered would have led to a chain of events that sent the entire town into a destructive tail-spin, it became clear that the impact of his one life was vast beyond his comprehension.  Every one of us is part of an incredibly complex web of human interaction, and every one’s life has untold impacts on the lives of others, and on the outcome of the entire human adventure.  The old Zen masters were right: separateness is an illusion and in truth all is One.  And when you lie down at night, the impacts of your connection to the web of human existence keep reverberating around the community, and I daresay, around the globe.  You will never know what those impacts are.  Your story is always unfinished.

And when the burden of too many hurts, too many disappointments, too many broken dreams becomes hard to bear, what you do matters.  Your decision either to collapse beneath the weight of that burden or to seize yet another day of opportunity may have consequences for good or for ill far beyond your reckoning.  And those consequences will remain shadowed and out of your reach.  They will never be entirely known.  Your story is always unfinished.  But the joy of living is not in fairy tale endings where everything miraculously gets tied up with pretty ribbons.  True and abiding joy is found by reveling in the story, unfinished though it may be.  It is claimed by celebrating your participation in the larger story, the Divine story of the great human adventure.

Mark’s Gospel ends abruptly with the women keeping their silence about what they’ve seen in the garden.  Was Mark trying to offer an explanation for the silence about the empty tomb in the letters of Paul?  We’ll never know that either.  But he was trying to tell us something, and I kind of like that it isn’t entirely clear, that it’s left dangling like the cliff-hanger episode at the end of the season.  Because that’s how life is lived, and that’s what Jesus presented to us: the unfinished story of our own existence, the unknown ways in which we change the world with only a word, the opportunity to choose life in the midst of every crucifixion moment.

And in the end, what Mark in his gospel is brilliant enough to hint at, without hitting us over the head with it, is that because the tomb was not the end of the story for Jesus, the tomb may not be the end of the story for us either.

There is plenty of room in an unfinished story for many different endings – plenty of room for different views and different theologies, for literal understandings and appreciation of the metaphor.  But because each of us relates the story in our own way, no matter how you tell it, you can stand here this morning, shoulder to shoulder with other folks living unfinished stories, and together proclaim, “Christ is risen!  Christ is risen, indeed!

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!

Hallelujah!”