“And they said
nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
Except they did say
something to someone – we're reading it. By existing, the last
sentence of Mark contradicts itself.
Mark's Gospel ends on
the Greek particle gar.
That's not grammatically sound. You don't end a sentence on gar.
The sentence is not over.
They
said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid; then, evidently,
because this text exists and you are reading it, they mastered their
fear and said something to someone. Something:
this text, Mark's Gospel, the empty tomb. Someone:
you, the recipient of this text. You have to deduce the rest of the
sentence – “then they mastered their fear and said something to
someone” – for yourself. The ending of Mark's Gospel makes you
finish the sentence. It makes
you carry on the
story.
If
there's one message to be gleaned from all of Jewish and Christian
scripture and tradition, it is this:
Keep
interpreting.
Genesis
opens with two non-identical creation accounts. The New Testament
begins with four non-identical gospels. Throughout the Bible, as in
rabbinic midrash and churches' teachings, there are doublings and
recapitulations, glosses and rewrites, the same story told over again
but differently. You can't reconcile the differences between
alternate versions of the same story. You aren't supposed to.
The
ambiguities, the discrepancies, the omissions: they're there so that
you can interpret, and keep interpreting.
What you must never do is stop. If you declare one particular
interpretation to be singularly authoritative and let it rest there,
you leave the text lifeless in the tomb. A text lives as long as you
interpret it – as long as you read it and retell it and explore it
and criticize it and learn from it. If you are afraid to let the text
live – afraid to open yourself to the possibility that the text
might change you – you will have nothing to say to anyone, and you
may as well have left the book unopened.
Keep
reading. Keep telling the stories. The stories will change, and the
readers will change. This is good. This is the point. Keep
interpreting.
Master
your fear. Say something to someone.
Yes yes yes!
ReplyDeleteSo any Christian with half a brain cell knows Christ is not only about love. He is love. So then how come so many believe that He hates women and gays. Well, we know they always quote those verses. The ones I refuse to read. The ones that support the blasphemous male agenda of hating gays, hating and enslaving women and the idolatry of male supremacy. I have left a life-long church, one I otherwise would never have left, because of the relentless misogyny directly from the pulpit. Now I attend another church that at least refrains from blatant, proud misogyny. Any day now I'm going to be tested and could really use some scriptural ammunition to use. I can talk about it conceptually but I feel like I need a scriptural defense to hit them with when they throw down the black and white irrefutable Word at me like I know they will eventually. Is there a scripturally based talking point for those of us who get that God is not a bigot against women or gays.
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