They seized on these words and discussed with one another what this ‘rising from the dead’ meant.
the earthy one says shhh
in due time today’s choices
will be revealed
until that brighter day
our darkness holds a tight reign
on improbabilitieswhat is a brighter day
what soil and seed multiply
what rises from mothering
such questions bring forth
more questions until
a question authority is stumpedof such there is no end
our experiences hide and reveal
fear and hope in their turn
turning speculation to fate
limiting horizons
favoring fantasiesrising from the dead
asks us to bury
each and every boundary
until a small blue dot blesses
our death-wish divisions
with dearly beloved
It is difficult to live in ambiguity, but this is exactly what Mark leads us to. There are questions from the Pharisees, scribes, disciples, Pilate, and even Jesus himself about his being—“Who do people say I am?”, “What might it mean to rise from the dead?”
With framing questions such as these in the background, Aichele33 recognizes the reader’s position, whether contemporaneous with Mark’s writing or generations and centuries later, when he reflects:
But the gospel of Mark, like the character Jesus in its story, gives the reader “no answer.” Its enigmatic style and paradoxical narrative provide no readerly satisfactions. Mark is a great tease, suggesting possibilities which it then fails to fulfill; as a story it is profoundly incomplete. It is not surprising, then, that readers, beginning with Matthew and Luke, go beyond Mark, re-framing Mark and rewriting it to satisfy their own desires.
Sabin-1176 moves this unsatisfactory-ness from the nature of narrative to a related category of the human condition. She notes that the command from the previous verse “seems to be superfluous; the disciples have already returned to their uncomprehending state.” Sabin continues, “They appear to have already forgotten the vision, and not linking the idea of resurrection with their most recent experience, they are “seeking together what it is to be risen from the dead”.
Both comments reveal how much we desire to get our story in. We will reframe and seek reductive “meaning” to comfort ourselves.