I saw the movie 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri on an airplane recently. I was enjoying the film and then all of a sudden, it just ended. Talking with a friend who is a film studies teacher he explained to me why it’s a masterful ending. I understood what he was saying but I didn’t really want to hear any of his film studies blather. I wanted resolution. I wanted the writers to give me an easy ending that wouldn’t leave me having to do any of the work. I like to walk out of the theater (or off the plane in this case) with the good guy winning, the bad guy having gotten his due and for everything to make sense.
Which is why Mark chapter 16 is so unsettling. In the 16th chapter the 8th verse reads, “Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.” Then in parentheses our Bibles state (the earliest manuscripts and some other ancient witnesses do not have Mark 16:9-20.) Huh? Apparently, the earliest versions of the gospel of Mark do not include verses 9-20 which means the gospel of Mark may have ended at verse 8 with the women who’d gone looking for Jesus, fleeing from the tomb trembling, bewildered and afraid. And that’s it. That seems like an odd place to end. There was no explanation of what happened next as there is in the other gospel accounts. The earliest version of Mark gives us no resolution.
Nobody wants a movie to end before the bad guy gets what’s coming to him. Nobody wants to walk away from a book without reading the last chapter. Which is why the 3 Billboards movie left me feeling a bit unsettled. I believe that most of us long for resolution. Verses 9-20 provide the resolution. It’s the ending we all want. It ties things up nice and neat. And yet, many scholars suggest that perhaps the true ending of Mark takes place at verse 8; that verses 9-20 may have been added after the original had been completed. I wonder if it’s possible those verses were added to give us the resolution we desire; to bring the gospel to an acceptable close.
Even though I’ve already admitted I like resolution there’s something about the gospel of Mark ending at verse 8 that feels right to me. Jesus was an unsettling character and he called his followers into uncharted territory. He called them out of their comfort zones. His life as well as his death and resurrection left his followers with fear and trembling. Perhaps we’ve lost a little of that discomfort, that fear and trembling in our own lives. Perhaps we’ve managed to sanitize the gospel in a way that makes us feel good about what it means to be a follower. It resolves too nicely. It works into our schedules, into our worldview, into our hopes and dreams. If the gospel of Mark ends at verse 8 it would’ve ended with his followers feeling a bit of trepidation. It leaves the rest of the story untold. And yet perhaps that’s the way it was meant to be. Perhaps the ending was meant to be unwritten; left to be written by his followers. Perhaps, we are the ones who are meant to resolve the unresolved. We are the ones who decide if we want to follow God into uncharted territory. We are the ones who have to decide if we want to follow a God who doesn’t resolve everything perfectly like the ending of a fairy tale, but rather a God who leaves us with a little fear and trembling.
I invite us all into life as followers of a God who won’t always resolve things the way we’d like. There’s no guarantee how our stories will end, but we can be sure of one thing, we have a God who can make the impossible possible; who can bring hope out of despair and resurrection out of things that were formerly dead and buried. With God, may we continue to write the uncharted, unresolved but amazingly exciting story of the rest of our lives.
