NOTES for Mar 16:9-20

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.

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.

In the Gospel of Mark, the account of the Resurrection is much shorter than in the other Gospels; it fits into only twenty verses. And the basis of the account here, paradoxically, is the theme of unbelief or distrust toward the testimony of those who saw the Risen One (v. 8, 11, 13). It would seem that the apostles could and should have been glad to hear the news of the Resurrection, because only recently, just three days earlier, it had seemed to them that everything was already over and there was nothing more to wait for. Of course, there was an element of surprise and of the incredible in what was happening. But there was probably something else as well: unpreparedness to accept such a long-awaited surprise. Long-awaited indeed: most believing Jews of the Gospel era believed in the general resurrection on the last day and in the Last Judgment. In addition, Jesus had spoken to His disciples more than once about His death and about His Resurrection, which was to follow that death. And this very thing was least able to fit into the apostles' consciousness; that is why the news of the Resurrection turned out to be unexpected for them. Here, apparently, a general trait of fallen human nature shows itself: inconstancy. Of course, in principle none of the apostles would ever have doubted the general resurrection or the Last Judgment. Probably, in principle, even the resurrection of their Teacher would not have seemed impossible or incredible to them. But when it happened, it turned out that all this was precisely "in general" and "in principle." And not at all because the apostles' faith was weaker than the faith of their contemporaries or ours. It is simply that when centuries pass between a promise and its fulfillment, faith in what was promised becomes somewhat abstract. It ceases to be a concrete reality expected from day to day, as the first Christians expected the Second Coming promised by the Savior. What becomes the object of spiritual attention is not the promised event, but the expectation itself. It becomes the goal and content of religious life. And then it often turns out that, when what was promised arrives, those least ready for its arrival are precisely those who prepared for it longest and most actively. But when what has been awaited for so long does happen, each person has, as it were, to see and experience anew the new reality entering the world, a reality that brings an end to everything that came before, including the waiting itself. This is the last boundary; beyond it is the Kingdom.