Much has been made over the “shorter ending” to the Gospel of Mark in recent years. Some early circulating manuscripts of the Gospel end at verse 8 of chapter 16. This is an attractive avenue for preachers, to be sure, since it leaves the women at the tomb running in fear and invites us modern hearers to consider the question: “What are you going to do? Just sit there or proclaim the Gospel?” (paraphrase of Dr. Thomas Ridenhour) It’s abruptness is inviting.
However, the received canonical text of the Gospel goes all the way through 16:20. The verse that gets me is 16:18, especially the parts about drinking poison and snake handling and faith healing. This is not stuff normally taken up by Lutherans–on Sunday or any other day of the week. [For a great treatment of modern “snake handling” churches, see Salvation on Sand Mountain by Dennis Covington, Penguin, 1996 (also title link above).]
And yet, why should it surprise us that what Christ does on Calvary is made manifest in the community of his followers? For he took up the snake, the serpent, satan, the age-old foe and “handled” him on the Cross (cf. Genesis 3:15). He drank the poison of death, the wormwood and the gall, and yet it did not destroy him (on the contrary, death tasted what it could not swallow). He laid his hands on the sick and they were healed.
Thus the end of Mark’s Gospel (the long ending) proclaims that the Risen Jesus is on the loose, living quite audaciously and concretely in the community of his followers, his Body the Church, that rag-tag band of snake(devil)-handling, poison(death)-drinking, faith-healing rascals from Galilee.