April 21: Catch up; Psalm 39, Mark 16

We will have some catching up to do.  My last blog post was for April 17.
I may in the future edit this post to add something about Leviticus 22-27, but I think it's more important to move forward.  Our celebration of Easter day was glorious.  Preparation for the Easter Triduum (Maundy Thursday to Easter morning) took precedence over this blog.

Psalm 39  
39:1--what a challenge it is to "keep a muzzle on my mouth" sometimes!
39:12--This is a rather unusual figure of speech:  "I am your passing guest, an alien like all my forebears."
39:13--and this is even rarer, quite paradoxical, actually.  Usually we see the psalmist begging for God to see, to notice.  Yet the gaze of the Holy One can be overwhelming at times, and so he writes: "Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again…"

Mark 16
Here we get to the last chapter of the second Gospel. This is Mark's account of the resurrection. It might be helpful here to explain that we have multiple endings for the Gospel of Mark in different manuscripts.  Remember: we do not have any absolutely definitive text: complete, written in the hand of the original writer, corrected for mistakes.  Our oldest manuscripts are from late in the 2nd century CE.  This means that scholars have to do their best to figure out what the best texts are.  Or they need to do what the editors of the NRSV have done and label the verses after 16:8 "The shorter ending of Mark" and "The longer ending of Mark."

What it truly remarkable about the end of the Gospel of Mark (the tradition that ends the gospel after v. 8 is the strongest--and then many scholars wonder if there may be a part of the manuscript that went missing) is that Jesus does not himself appear.  The angels share the good news: "You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified.  He has been raised; he is not here." (16:6)

Brendan Byrne says about this:  "Perhaps the odd ending of the gospel, the breaking off in mid sentence, so to speak, is an invitation to allow our own lives to be written into the ongoing story--so that we too can be not only beneficiaries but also servants of God's costly outreach to the world" (Byrne, A Costly Freedom, p. 259).