Happily Ever After

We love stories don't we? I wonder if one of the reason the Olympics Opening Ceremony was better received than the Closing was that it told a story. We like stories because we're caught up in one, and despite post modern attempts to deconstruct it, we need to be involved in one.

Stories, as any five year old can tell you, need a beginning, middle and end. The Bible's full of stories will endings, but some of them stop, well, they just stop. What do we do at the end of Jonah, with the shorter ending of Mark or the way Luke stops telling us about Acts? I think those books finish in that way to turn the attention to the reader and make us think about our response.

Jonah
Jonah tells the story of a disobedient prophet who enjoys and shares the grace of God despite his best efforts. In chapter 4, just after Nineveh has repented and God has turned His anger away Jonah sets up on a hill to watch the action. He makes a booth out of a plant the shade him, but God sends a worm to kill the plant. Jonah stamps his foot and gets upset about the loss of the plant, and God looks at him and asks whether or not He should pity Nineveh. We never get an answer from Jonah, we're supposed to work it out for ourselves. What do we do with God's challenge to Jonah? Do we care about the lost or not?

Mark
If we take the shorter ending of Mark as the end of the original text, then it ends with the women at the tomb being terrified because they had been told Jesus was risen. Douglas Moo offers a couple of a couple of alternatives, maybe the last page of Mark was torn off and lost, or that Mark died before writing the end, or this was where he meant to finish. Why? To turn around and look at us. Mark wants us to consider who Jesus is, and this is the final part of his evidence.

Acts
The way Luke finishes Acts is sort of out of character with the rest of his work. His Gospel and his history are so well organized that i can't believe he'd end it like that. So what happened? Maybe he died, maybe his plan was to write another installment later, or maybe he meant to turn the spotlight on us. The Gospel had reached Rome. It had gone from Jerusalem, through Judea and Samaria to the ends of the earth. Are we going to join in? Jesus had led Paul to Rome, the Gospel was at the heart of the world, now what about you, reader? Will you take part in Paul's mission, in Jesus' mission to spread the Gospel around the world?