ISBC 25 - Telling the Right Kind of Story

Chapter 25 of Hope: A User's Manual

Here’s a fun thing to do.  Find a Star Wars group online and drop just three words into a message…

Drop those three words and get out of the way.  That film (the 8th in the Skywalker Saga) is one of those that, among Star Wars fans, has very little middle ground.  Either it is one of the most amazing, creative, and boldest of the SW films or it is the worst thing that has ever been made.  Personally, I think it is a brilliant film and I put it as my 3rd favorite of the Skywalker Saga behind Empire Strikes Back and A New Hope (and 4th if you include Rogue One).

But here’s the thing with the film.  It isn’t a simple “good defeats bad” story, or to use the language of this chapter...It is not a conservative story.  It is very much a “progressive” story in that things happen in the film that literally change everything in the Star Wars universe and there’s no clear sense of what is next when the credits start to roll.  MaryAnn writes and quotes sci-fi author Ted Chiang when she shares:

…between what he calls conservative and progressive stories. (In this context, conservative and progressive aren’t partisan/political distinctions but reflect how stories are constructed and how they resolve.) Conservative stories follow this format: The world starts out as a good place. Evil intrudes. Good defeats evil. The world goes back to being a good place. Progressive stories, by contrast, follow this pattern: The world starts out as a familiar place. A new discovery or invention disrupts everything. The world is forever changed.¹

Maybe that’s why I love the ending of the 2nd Jesus story, the Gospel of Mark.²  Each of the Gospels ends with some variation of the resurrection story of Jesus but Mark has the weirdest of all of them.  There are actually multiple endings to Mark (the Return of the King³ of the Gospel stories).  But the story that appears in the oldest and most reliable manuscripts of Mark ends this way.  Three women (Mary, Mary, and Salome) come to the tomb several days after the crucifixion and death of Jesus.  They are coming to anoint Jesus’ dead body.  But when they arrive, they find that the stone is already rolled away and an angel tells them that Jesus has been raised and that they were to go and tell others what they have seen.  (Women are the first tellers of the story!).  So here’s the last sentence of this ending of Mark.

So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.⁴

Roll credits.

Um…wait…what?!?! Somehow I don’t think that the TV Show The Chosen will choose this to be their depiction of the resurrection.

In the years that followed, two other endings of Mark started showing up to bring it more in line with the other Jesus stories in Matthew, Luke, and John.  But I LOVE the original, short ending of Mark.

I love it because it is so real and so honest.  It isn’t triumphal.  It doesn’t wrap up the story in a nice neat bow.  Instead, it is open-ended.  It recognizes that these three women would likely have been freaked out that this had happened, freaked out about an angel speaking to them, and freaked out about what the others were going to say when they told them (spoiler alert - the men think the women are crazy at first).  It recognizes that something has forever changed and that the world of these three women would never be the same.

But it is in that where I find the hope.  Because I think I’d be like Mary, Mary, and Salome.  I imagine that my response to this, if I were one of them, would not be dancing around, shouting and celebrating like my team won the national championship, but instead I would be pretty freaked out.  What does this mean?  What’s next?

I find hope in this story because I find myself in it.  I find myself in it when I still look at the world and events in the world and in my life and ask, “what does this mean” or “what’s next” or “where’s Jesus?”

(But there are no porgs in the Mark story...sigh)

How do you feel about this ending of Mark? What about The Last Jedi?

Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed

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1. Halimah Marcus, "Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In," Electric Lit, April 2, 2020, https://electricliterature.com/ted-chiang-explains-the-disaster-novel-we-all-suddenly-live-in/.McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (p. 112). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

2. Technically Mark is the first (oldest) Gospel, but it shows up second in the order of books in the Christian Testament.

3. Lord of the Rings (extended film version) reference

4. Mark 16:8 - NRSVue