The resurrection stories found in the longer ending of Mark’s Gospel are brief sketches that don’t dwell on the experience of meeting Jesus; instead, they focus on the response to these stories by the eleven remaining apostles.

And that response? ‘They would not believe it . . . they did not believe them.’ (Mark 16:11,12) Well, who would believe that a man executed in front of a crowd of witnesses was suddenly alive and walking around the countryside? And yet when he appears to the eleven, Jesus ‘upbraided them’ for two things: lack of faith and stubbornness. The lack of faith was not about faith in Jesus himself: it was ‘because they had not believed in those who saw him after he had risen.’ (Mark 16:14) In other words, they did not trust their companions—the women and the disciples who were not in the core group. Instead, they stubbornly clung to their group consensus, to their own, ‘obvious,’ truth.

But Jesus deliberately chose to appear first to the fringe members of his followers. The good news of the resurrection comes from the periphery, following the pattern that Jesus established in his ministry. Starting from an obscure little village, Nazareth, he shunned the places of power and influence, attending to the poor and the outcast.

The Gospel, the Good News, always overturns our human expectations and power structures, and the Resurrection itself is the ultimate overturning. The most powerless, a battered corpse, springs to life: will we truly believe it, with all its implications for our own lives, our relationships, our institutions? Will we proclaim this Good News? Or will we cling to the security of the old ways, huddled with like-minded companions in our own locked little rooms?

by Chad Hargrave