What are you going to do about it?

More from the Archbishop who loves The Simpsons:

Some scholars have cast doubt on the historic value of the [Easter] stories because of their apparent confusion and unclarity and have argued that all we have is a symbolic narrative expressing the fact that the disciples felt their faith miraculously renewed after his death. If that were the case, they made a disastrously bad job of it.

The feel of these texts is far more that of people struggling to make sense of something that has happened outside their heads, not inside, wrestling with an intractable set of experiences and meetings, not finding a helpful metaphor for their emotions.

The untidy character of the stories leaves the reader or listener with work to do. Whatever else this is, it isn’t the account of an event happening just to someone else in the past. It tells you that something in the world has opened up; that meeting Jesus of Nazareth is possible, despite his horrendous and very public death and that if you do meet him, there is an influx of some vision and energy that takes you beyond your normal frame of reference.

The resurrection isn’t a happy ending to a sad story. It is the beginning of a new story, a new phase in the life of the disciples – potentially a new phase for the reader too.

That seems to be what the abrupt end of Mark’s gospel suggests. The women ran away in terror, and... “Well?” we ask impatiently. And the writer lifts his head and says, “Why do you think I’m writing this? And what are you going to do about it? Because nothing is the same now.”