The Power of Belief: A Meditation on Mark 16, for the Eastertide Festival of St. Mark

Now when Jesus was risen early the first day of the week,

he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had cast seven devils.

And she went and told them that had been with him, as they mourned and wept.

And they, when they had heard that he was alive, and had been seen of her, believed not.

 After that he appeared in another form unto two of them,

as they walked, and went into the country.

And they went and told it unto the residue: neither believed they them.

Afterward he appeared unto the eleven as they sat at meat,

and upbraided them with their unbelief and hardness of heart,

because they believed not them which had seen him after he was risen.

 

And he said unto them,

Go ye into all the world,

and preach the gospel to every creature.

He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved;

but he that believeth not shall be damned.

And these signs shall follow them that believe;

In my name shall they cast out devils;

they shall speak with new tongues;

 They shall take up serpents;

and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them;

they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.

 

So then after the Lord had spoken unto them,

he was received up into heaven,

and sat on the right hand of God.

And they went forth, and preached everywhere,

the Lord working with them,

and confirming the word with signs following. Amen.

 

The last half of the 16^th chapter of Mark’s Gospel has been pilloried by textual critics for a long time, with accusations that it doesn’t appear in their preferred manuscripts.  Some of the ancient scrolls of Mark’s Gospel have damage near the end of the scroll, where the last of the words would be written, and some appear to have verses added which reflect the words we read above.  Over the centuries, the church accepted this ending of Mark as part of the canon of Scripture, noting its wide use as testimony to its authenticity and accuracy, regardless of damage found on some early manuscripts in Alexandria.  Since Alexandria, Egypt, was a hotbed of early heresy, one should be circumspect in accepting many of their butchered Biblical texts at face value, despite their dry climate which preserved so many early manuscripts.  Regardless of the handwringing and pearl clutching of modern textual critics and liberal theologians, the text we have of St. Mark’s Gospel is fully reliable and worthy of the church’s meditation.

 

A key point of this text is the distinction between belief, and unbelief.  After Jesus’ resurrection, He appeared to several people besides the disciples, and the disciples did not initially believe their testimony.  Mary Magdalene, the other women at the tomb whom we learn of in the other Gospels, two people walking along a road, all came back to tell Jesus’ closest disciples that He had risen from the dead, just as He said He would.  Yet until Jesus came and appeared to the disciples directly, they didn’t believe the witness of others about Him.  It was for this unbelief that Jesus upbraided them—not only had they disbelieved all He had taught them for the three years they followed Him before the Crucifixion, they refused to believe the testimony of those whom Jesus sent to them with the good news that He was risen.  Mary Magdalene, sometimes called the Apostle to the Apostles, bore witness of her first-hand encounter with the risen Jesus, and the rest of the disciples disregarded her.  St. John records in his Gospel account that Jesus spoke peace to them, but somewhere in the midst of that peace, He also clobbered them a bit for their thick headedness and hardness of heart.

 

To make His point resoundingly clear, Jesus then commissioned His disciples to do exactly what He sent Mary and the other women to do for them:  preach the good news.  This preaching, teaching, and making disciples by teaching people everything Jesus had taught them, was to become the primary Means of Grace for the salvation of souls.  Through such preaching would come faith and repentance, as hard hearts like theirs would be broken by the Holy Spirit working through the Gospel of Jesus’ victory over sin, death, hell, and the power of the devil.  This simple means of preaching would bring people to faith, to a trusting belief in Jesus which would give them a new birth from above by Water and Spirit.  Those who refused to believe would remain in their sins, damned to the consequences of hell they earned by their evil hearts, minds, and actions.  But whoever believed and was baptized would be saved, all for the sake of Jesus’ Vicarious Atonement for the sins of the world, won through His Cross, offered freely to everyone by grace through faith in Him.  The disciples, now made Apostles, were sent to do precisely what they had refused to accept through the Word sent to them by Mary and the other witnesses.  I can only imagine that this lesson was not lost on any of the Apostles as they went forth in heroic faith, most of them to gruesome martyrdom or exile, even as they turned the world upside down with their preaching of Christ crucified for the salvation of sinners.

 

If read wrongly, the following verses can be a stumbling block.  When Jesus told His Apostles that signs and wonders would accompany the preaching of the Gospel, He was absolutely correct:  signs and wonders did accompany their preaching, and they have accompanied it ever since.  In the Book of Acts we read of many such miracles occurring with the Apostles, and with St. Paul, and various others.  Yet even with the Apostles themselves, in whom many of these miracles were manifested and recorded, there is never a sense that all the miracles and wonders would occur with every individual Christian all the time.  Quite to the contrary, St. Paul taught, as he did with the church at Corinth, that there are a multitude of gifts given to the faithful across the entirety of the Body of Christ, and that these gifts make Christians a blessing to each other and the world around them.  Not all spoke in tongues, not all had gifts of healing, not all prophesied, not all taught with authority, not all took up serpents or were unharmed by the ingestion of poison, not all cast out demons—but in the community of the church, all these gifts and a multitude more were manifest in the first century, and are still manifested today.  Where faithful preaching of the Word of God continues, the power of the Holy Spirit still raises dead hearts and souls to eternal life, still accompanies such preaching with signs and wonders, and still enlivens the whole community of the faithful to heroic faith even in the darkest times of oppression.  Time would fail to recount the stories of faithful martyrs and preachers across the globe and down through the ages, who stood before every power of devil and man, rebuking the darkness that others might see the saving power of Jesus Christ.

 

What this doesn’t mean is that we should put our God to the test by playing with snakes, drinking poison, or cavorting with demons.  God works His wonders for the salvation of souls, accompanying the preaching of the Gospel with that which is necessary to bring back lost people from the brink of hell, and reunite them to His mercy and life.  He does not work for the amusement or pride of men, but for their salvation.  The signs and wonders which accompany the faithful preaching of the Word of Christ continue in our time, and will continue until the Lord returns, according to His unsearchable wisdom and immutable power manifested throughout the communion of the saints.

 

During this Easter season, the Word of God recorded by St. Mark is as urgently needed now as it ever has been.  Too long has the Church of God been muddled by poisonous false doctrine and wavering belief in the Word which is their very life.  Too long have Christians allowed apostates, pagans, and atheists to dictate to them what they will believe, how they will live, and how they will preach the Everlasting Gospel of Salvation in Jesus Christ alone.  Too long have Christians forgotten the power of their omnipotent King of Creation, the Lord of Glory and the Angelic Hosts of Heaven, with their courage drained and their minds a mush of post-modernism and technological idolatry.  Long after every technocrat and bureaucrat and corporate mogul and academic fraud and political tyrant have moldered into dust, the Living God will continue to empower His saints to preach the forgiveness of sins, life, and salvation by the finished work of Jesus Christ, saving every person who repents and is baptized, and leaving all who reject Him to the hell they both earned and chose.  Now is the day for the Church of God to rise in the power of His Word, to send the armies of darkness scattering back into their foul crevices, to preach liberty to the captives, and eternal life to the dead and damned.  As we do, we shall see the hand of God at work among us, full of signs and wonders accompanying the preaching of the Eternal Word of Jesus Christ for the salvation of souls.  Amen.