NOTES for Mar 16:1-20

Mark depicts the events after Christ's Resurrection very briefly. Almost every episode in this account is described in more detail in the other Gospels. Mark wants to emphasize the most important thing. So the disciples are hiding from persecution, overcome by grief and despair. Only certain women, who did not leave Jesus in the hour of His death, now want to pay Him their last duty and complete the burial they had not finished because of the Sabbath rest. It is to them, His most faithful followers, that the Angel announces the stunning, fearful, and at the same time joyful news: He has risen. He is not here. But the disciples cannot believe Mary Magdalene, to whom Jesus appeared, or the two other disciples who saw Him. They are so absorbed in their grief and despair that their hearts close themselves to hope, even though Jesus had repeatedly predicted His Resurrection to them. Finally, Jesus Himself appears among them and rebukes them for hardness of heart and unbelief. By His appearing He scatters their grief and fear.

The risen Savior sends the disciples to proclaim to "all creation" the joyful news of the new life that began with His Resurrection. He says that through faith and baptism a person already in this life enters salvation: liberation from slavery to fear, sin, death, and eternal condemnation. Christ names the miraculous signs and gifts now possessed by the new humanity, reborn and raised to life in God. The authority of Christ's disciples over death, illness, and dark powers is testimony to the presence of Christ Himself among them. Even now He lives among us and in us, blessing the preaching of the Gospel of Life.

There is one point in common for both of today’s readings. In the Gospel of Mathew Jesus says: ‘As the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.’ (Mat. 24:27). And Paul writes in his letter to Corinthians: ‘God, who commanded the light to shine out of darkness, hath shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ (2 Cor. 4:6) The New Covenant is not a secret knowledge available just for a few chosen ones. It is not an exclusive association hostile to aliens. Nor is it a list of requirements that sets up a scale of good and evil based on the depth of the person’s fall into the abyss. The New Covenant is not an ideology intended to mould the souls and minds of its disciples. It’s not even a life-pattern that brings you flowers and fruits in return for rejecting something. It is the light that shines as a lightning from one end of heaven to the other. The light that illuminates and reveals everything – truth and lie, good and evil, life and death. The light beaming from the face of Jesus Christ. And is not just that it can be hard to live without this light in a world that is dark, frightful and cold. Reality proves there is simply no life at all outside of this Light.

As soon as it became possible, the myrrh-bearing women went to anoint Jesus' body with special aromatic spices. When all the other disciples were asleep or in confusion, these women came to the tomb to do the little that was in their power. Without hesitation, they intended to pay the last honors to the body of their beloved Teacher, even though no one was with them who could roll the heavy stone away from the entrance of the cave.

They went by the path of the heart, not of reason. And on this path they were the first to meet the news of the Resurrection. The hearts of the myrrh-bearing women were so simple and open that they immediately believed the words of the angel, who told them about Jesus and showed them the empty tomb. To the other disciples the Lord appeared Himself, and He even allowed some to be convinced by touch that it was truly He. But those who learned about the Resurrection first were truly poor in spirit, because they demanded no proofs and no signs.

Mark describes the Resurrection as an event completely unexpected by everyone, including the disciples themselves. The women going to the tomb are concerned with only one problem: the stone that usually closed the entrance was too heavy for them, and they would not have been able to roll it away by themselves. They are not expecting any miracles anymore. Their Teacher is dead, and He went to His death voluntarily, so everything is over.

In reality, however, events unfold from the very beginning in a way completely different from what they expected. The very stone about which they had thought so much, and which seemed to them to be the main problem, caused them no trouble at all: it had already been moved away from the entrance. Everything that followed also proved entirely unexpected, unlike anything that could be expected according to the logic of our fallen world. Instead of death, the women who came to the tomb find life; instead of burial rites, for which they had come, they receive the news of the Resurrection.

The logic of the Kingdom has always been unlike the logic of the fallen world, and from the very beginning of its entry into the world this logic of the Kingdom has bewildered people who were not ready to meet it. And no one is ready, not even someone who personally heard about the Kingdom from the One who brought it into the world. Why, one might ask, should the women be frightened when they hear of their Teacher's resurrection? They must have heard about resurrection on the last day not only from Him, but also from others. Faith in the general resurrection was widespread among believing Jews, if not everywhere, then at least very widely. Only some representatives of the priestly elite and "liberal" thinking aristocrats did not believe in it, and all of them were more an exception to the general rule.

One could, of course, think that the women were simply frightened, as the apostles were later frightened when they saw the risen Jesus and took Him for a ghost, a shadow that had come out of the tomb. It is also possible that they were frightened when they saw the angel and understood who stood before them, since meetings with God's messengers were not always considered safe. But above all, they were frightened because they simply were not inwardly ready for something they knew about in principle and did not doubt as a reality when speaking of it "in general."

They believed in resurrection "in general," as everyone did, but they were not ready to believe in its reality here and now. Hence the fear, the flight, and, most importantly, the silence. It is impossible to bear witness to what has not yet truly entered one's own life, to what has not yet been understood and fully lived through. Later the time of witness would come, but not at once. It would come after Pentecost, when the Spirit of God would help the witnesses of the Resurrection understand what they had become witnesses of.

Those who came to the tomb were horrified when they saw the stone rolled away and the angel announcing the news of the Resurrection. Even after his words "do not be alarmed," they continue to feel fear to such a degree that at first they say nothing to anyone.

A meeting with the Higher always shakes a person; it evokes entirely natural fear even in those who were frightened neither by the possible anger of rulers nor by the hostility of "public opinion." But precisely the One who is higher than everything natural constantly says: "do not be afraid!" For He has brought joy.

The joy of the Resurrection, which remains joyful news, however incomprehensible it may seem.

The angel whom the women who have come to the Teacher's tomb meet gives them astonishing news: "He is risen." Thus a fact comes into the world that lies at the foundation of the Christian faith. I want to stress: not the idea of God-manhood, not the beauty of Jesus' moral teaching, but a fact. And Christianity is not theological constructions, but the acceptance of this fact into one's own biography. See how the content of the verse we have read helps this.

First of all, the news is brought by an angel, a messenger from God, which means the information he transmits has a supernatural level of truth. He begins with the words: "Do not be amazed." This is how God begins practically every contact of His with a human being, making it clear that His almightiness will not be directed against the person. "You seek Jesus of Nazareth": the matter is not an abstract idea, but a completely concrete Man who lived a real earthly life. "Who was crucified": without death, more precisely without sacrifice, still more precisely without an execution voluntarily accepted for my sins, Jesus has no relation to me, to my biography. "He is risen": this is the center of the message, meaning Christ's victory over death, every death, and therefore mine too. "He is not here": Christ cannot be "caught" by any place, including a tomb. He is free and able to free us.

But all this is not merely an abstraction, not a purely spiritual event: "See the place where He was laid." All this happens in time and space, where our own life also unfolds, now able to receive Christ's resurrection.

Having risen, Christ did not appear to the apostles at once, but first to Mary Magdalene, one of the women who had buried Him, and only then to some of the disciples. Even the apostles found it hard to believe those who first saw the Risen One. For this, when He appeared to all the apostles, He reproached them not simply for unbelief, but also for hardness of heart.

Reasoning in human terms, one can acknowledge the fairness of the reproach and begin recalling what else the guilty ones had done to deserve it. But it is precisely to them, the hard-hearted, that Christ immediately entrusts the task of carrying the Gospel to the whole world. More than that, He gives them the ability to support their preaching with signs confirming the truth of the saving teaching. This means that the disciples' hardness of heart is not fatal; its ice can be melted by the sun of the Resurrection.

The Lord does not push away those who have stumbled, but calls them, and us, again to follow Him, precisely because His gifts, salvation and transformation, can be received only by following Him.

Before ascending to the Father, Jesus sends the disciples out to preach and addresses them with parting words. He calls them to proclaim the good news to the whole world, to "all creation," and after this He lists the miracles that are to accompany those who believe. These signs of divine presence look simply fantastic, and there is a strong temptation to understand them figuratively rather than literally. Yet in the last verses of this chapter Mark clearly says that their preaching was carried out with "the word confirmed by the signs that followed."

How often we preach only with words, retelling Gospel truths, but do not embody them in our own lives. The Savior warns us against this before His Ascension, insisting that words must be accompanied by signs. Of course, our faith is not as strong as the apostles' faith was, and we cannot heal the sick with our own shadow, as Peter did. What we can do is only to trust that the Lord Himself will work a miracle, and according to our strength to try to relieve our neighbor's suffering. This will be a real sign of our living faith.

These words about those who have believed often frighten us deeply, because they imply that there are almost no believers among us. But often we do not know about certain things happening in our life. Casting out a demon is not always the healing of a demon-possessed person. Very often in our life we encounter, for example, the demon of malice or envy. People are arguing; you quietly pray to yourself and try to reconcile them, and you succeed. You have cast out the demon of malice, of anger. A person who sees no gifts in himself and lacks confidence envies a friend who, as it seems to him, is more talented. You quietly pray to yourself and explain to him that he is valuable in himself, that God has given him other gifts, that he should not compare himself with his friend but should look to God. The person believes you, which means you have cast out the demon of envy.

You are a missionary, or simply someone who is not afraid to bear witness to Christ. You find yourself in unfamiliar company, with its own rules of behavior, special words, and so on. You find the manner of behavior and the words by which you will be able to tell them about Christ. They listen to you, and someone receives Christ into his heart. You may never even learn about this; it is not important. But you have spoken in a new language. We often ask God to deliver us from danger, but rarely thank Him for all that we have avoided. How many times a day a brick or an icicle does NOT fall on us, how many times a day we do NOT break a leg, do NOT become infected with a dangerous disease; we do not know this, but in reality perhaps we are constantly picking up snakes and drinking deadly things, and they do not harm us.

The main thing is that this is God's action, not ours. We lack faith so much that we do not notice the miracles that the Lord sometimes works through our own hands. Therefore we perceive these cases as happy accidents, and therefore we do not work miracles as the apostles worked them. This does not mean that times have changed and become worse. It does not even mean that we ourselves are worse than the apostles. What we have forgotten is not how to believe, but how to see and hear; we do not notice God in ourselves, in one another, in the world around us. We are like Mary Magdalene at the tomb: we think He is the gardener, and we do not always even hear when He calls us by name.

Mark describes briefly and concisely the forty days that passed from the Savior's resurrection to His ascension, much more briefly than the other evangelists. And he concludes his account with an equally brief description of the Ascension, reducing it to one sentence, unlike, for example, Luke, who in the Book of Acts wrote a whole account of this event, though a short one. As is evident, for Mark both events, the Resurrection and the Ascension, are connected with each other, and not simply connected, such a connection can also be seen in Luke, but exist as stages of one and the same spiritual process, determined by the dynamic of the Kingdom entering the world.

When viewed from our world, still not transformed by God's breath, the Resurrection, the Ascension, and what we usually call the second coming of Christ are seen as different events, though connected with one another and logically flowing one from another. Being in a world separated from the Kingdom, we perceive the elements of a single process as separate events. In reality there is no break between them. One could say that Jesus rises in order to ascend and then return in glory, but that would be the picture opened to a person looking at what is happening in the Kingdom from outside.

In reality He does not disappear anywhere; we simply, like the apostles on the day of the Ascension, lose sight of Him. We lose sight because we cannot look deeply enough into the Kingdom, at least in our ordinary state. The meeting with Him by the apostle Paul on the Damascus road, for example, testifies clearly: He had not gone away at all. The question is only how much we live the life of the Kingdom, and therefore His life.

Immediately after the Resurrection, during those very forty days, the disciples saw Him distinctly because He had not yet moved far from the boundary that divides the Kingdom and our world, not yet transformed. At that time the Kingdom had only begun to open itself to the world; it was not yet so vast that it could not be seen as a whole, even without crossing the boundary dividing the two worlds. This, however, could not continue forever: the Kingdom had to enter the world in a fullness far greater than what was visible to the apostles in the first forty days after the Resurrection. Accordingly, Jesus, as its King, had to take His royal place in it and disappear from the sight of those who had not yet crossed the boundary. For those who had crossed it, however, He was always visible. Paul, it appears, was the first, but by no means the last, of those who were granted to see Him in this way. And when at the end of time the Kingdom opens in fullness, everyone will again see the Risen One; whether the meeting will be joyful or not depends on the person himself.