sudden end to Mark's account, verse 8

from Derek Thomas:
Look at verse 8: They went out, they fled, for trembling and astonishment had gripped them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.

And that’s the end of the Gospel. (Now, I know! You’re hiding verses 9-20!) That’s the way the Gospel ended. They fled. It’s the same word in the same tense of what the disciples did in chapter 14 when they abandoned Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when He was arrested. The very same word.

What a way to end the Gospel. No appearance of Jesus. The women do not do what the angel asks them to do, namely, go and tell the disciples and go and tell Peter. (Remember, Peter is probably the one dictating this Gospel to Mark; very significant that Peter should be mentioned here.) You know, there’s a contrast here, because right at the beginning of Mark’s Gospel you have the story of the way in which a leper is healed, and he is commanded, you remember, not to go and tell anyone...and he goes and tells everyone! And here the women are told to go and tell, and they’re silent. They tell no one.

Now, Matthew tells us they did go and tell the disciples later, and the disciples didn’t believe them. You see, Mark is answering the question, not ‘How do you know that Jesus is risen?’ – (answer: The tomb is empty); but Mark is answering a different question: ‘How come all Jerusalem didn’t hear about the resurrection immediately?’ Surely a bunch of hysterical women rushing through the streets of Jerusalem early in the morning, screaming about a resurrection...everyone would have known about it in an instant. And the answer: Because they were afraid...because they were afraid.

Now, why would Mark end the Gospel that way? Think about it for a minute. When did Mark write his Gospel? Probably A.D. 65, just at the onset of Roman persecution of Christianity. And do you see what Mark is saying? That the Christian church began not in a great bang of human power, but it began by the power of Almighty God.

You know, the church began out of nothing, out of a small little group of women who, when they saw the empty tomb, ran because they were afraid. Imagine, twenty, fifteen years later, you’re trying to write this down and to give some credence to a movement that is now under attack from the authorities. Would you want to give the church an account of the resurrection which was the catalyst of the church and say nobody believed it at first?

And you know what? The first person who said “He is not here, but He is risen” - no one ever saw him except these women. No one was ever able to interrogate him. He disappeared. And why is Mark saying that? Because Mark wants us to focus not on the faith of the disciples, because they didn’t have any; not on the faith of these women, because they didn’t have much, either. But it wants us to focus entirely on the power of God that is manifested in that empty tomb. You can imagine it, can’t you? The camera focusing on that empty tomb and panning out...and there’s the start of it. There’s the genesis of it. The putting forth of the sovereign, supernatural, power of God in raising His Son from the dead, and in so doing demonstrates the validity of Jesus’ deity, underscores the validity of everything that Jesus ever said and did, assures us of the forgiveness of our sins by faith alone in Jesus Christ alone, promises to us a bodily resurrection in the life to come, and says to us with absolute certainty – not because it’s based on the faith of some women or the faith of the disciples, but because it’s based upon the power of God – that all of this...all of this...is true.