NOTES for Mar 16:1-8
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.