Mark 16:1-8
16:1-8
– Mark has twice mentioned the Sabbath in
his account of Jesus’ burial—once, to note that he was buried at the end of the
Preparation Day, before Sabbath, and here in v.1, to indicate that just after
Sabbath came the discovery of the empty tomb. This is an important point to
note—that Jesus’ “rest” in death is, quite literally, a Sabbath-rest. Some
theologians of the early church were fond of pointing out this interesting
note, and surmised that it was perhaps in foreshadowing of this very event that
“God rested on the seventh day.” Why, after all, would God need to rest?
Certainly the institution of the Sabbath was for mankind’s benefit, to give a
needful cycle of work and rest to our days, but a second, hidden meaning now
also emerges—the Sabbath was a weekly enactment, a weekly anticipation
throughout the whole history of God’s people Israel, of the death of the
Messiah in their behalf. God’s first Sabbath-rest in Genesis marks the end of
his acts in making the old creation, and Jesus’ Sabbath-rest in the tomb marks
the inauguration of a new movement of creation—on the first day of the week,
with his resurrection from the dead, the “new creation” is set in motion. Even
with that understanding underlying the text, one might still wonder why the
women in Mark’s account even bother to show up at the tomb—they clearly think
it will be difficult to access the body, buried behind a heavy stone. The
reason for this seems to be that Jesus’ burial came so close to the beginning
of Sabbath (sundown on Friday) that there wasn’t time enough to complete the
proper burial rituals. Thus, they had to wait over the Sabbath, and then hoped
to be able to complete the work on Sunday morning. But they arrive to find the
stone already rolled away, and the tomb empty. Skeptics like to point out the
minor differences between the Gospel accounts of the resurrection (such as the
number of angels that speak to the women), but obsessing over such minutiae tends
to miss the point. Variances like this are not necessarily indications of
fabrication, but were considered well within the bounds of appropriate and
valid historiography in the ancient world. What is truly extraordinary about
the Gospels are the number of strong similarities in the accounts, together
with enough variation in incidentals to imply independent source material for
each account (thus pointing to a widely-held, established tradition of a real
event, rather than a conspiratorial deceit), and the truly astonishing fact
that each Gospel records women as making
the initial discovery of the resurrection. This is a point that would not have
been included if one were making this story up, for the simple reason that
women were (unfortunately) not considered reliable witnesses in the ancient
world. But every Gospel holds up their testimony as the primary witness of the
event, which really points to only one conclusion—that this was a real,
historical occurrence, which these women actually experienced, and which was indeed
confirmed by the many well-documented meetings with the resurrected Christ
recorded in the other Gospels and Acts. Mark’s own account probably ends with
verse 8, because this is where some of the best and earliest manuscripts of the
Gospel stop. It would be an unusual place to stop unless that was where the
actual text of the original stopped; so most scholars believe that the
additional verses, which traditionally have been accepted as canonical, were
added by later scribes in an attempt to fill out Mark’s account with details
from the other Gospels and bring it to a nicer conclusion than a jarring picture
of those poor women running away from the tomb, terrified by what they had seen
and heard. The addition of the other verses is understandable, then, but it
shouldn’t be taken as some kind of cover-up: even with Mark ending at v.8,
there is still a very clear proclamation of Christ’s resurrection (vv.6-7).