The Transcendent Absence

The resurrection, that cardinal promise upon which Christianity stakes its claim to ultimate meaning, betrays what may constitute the Gospel's most radical theological insight, for when Mark's narrative concludes with women fleeing an empty tomb in wordless terror, offering neither the posthumous appearances that would vindicate faith nor the triumphant reversal that would justify suffering, what emerges from this narrative rupture transcends simple failure: the preservation of a divine love that manifests through absolute withdrawal rather than supernatural intervention, creating within its kenotic absence the terrible clearing wherein human meaning-making becomes simultaneously burden and necessity, gift and curse, freedom and abandonment.

This original ending, which biblical scholarship from Raymond Brown through Adela Yarbro Collins confirms as Mark's authentic conclusion before later redactors, unable to tolerate such theological vertigo, appended their resurrection narratives, confronts readers with a kenotic Christ whose self-emptying extends beyond the incarnational descent and crucifixion's physical suffering into the very structure of divine presence itself, suggesting that what Christianity has spent two millennia interpreting as temporary absence awaiting glorious return might constitute instead the permanent gift of divine withdrawal, wherein love completes itself through the radical gesture of creating space for human agency by evacuating the cosmos of transcendent guarantee.

The theological implications cascade through every assumption upon which traditional Christianity constructs its soteriological architecture, for if divine love culminates in permanent abdication rather than triumphant return, if the kenotic movement reaches completion in absence rather than presence, then the entire economy of salvation requires reconceptualization that shifts from vertical dependence upon transcendent rescue toward horizontal imperative of human creative responsibility within acknowledged finitude, a transformation so fundamental that it undermines the consolatory function religion has served throughout human history while simultaneously opening possibilities for authentic freedom that theodicy's apologetics have consistently foreclosed.

Mark's Jesus, who cries "My God, why have you forsaken me" without subsequent vindication, without the comfort of resurrection appearances that would retroactively transform abandonment into temporary trial, embodies the complete trajectory of kenosis that Paul glimpses yet cannot fully embrace in Philippians, experiencing within that cry the ultimate self-emptying wherein divinity discovers what creatures have always known: the terror of meaninglessness when cosmic purpose withdraws, leaving consciousness naked before the indifference of material reality, yet precisely within this divine experience of abandonment emerges the possibility that love might manifest most completely through withdrawal rather than presence, that transcendence achieves its ultimate expression through self-negation rather than self-assertion.

Consider how this reading transforms our understanding of the empty tomb, which becomes the architectural representation of divine absence itself rather than the site of miraculous reversal, a space evacuated of both body and presence that the women encounter with appropriate terror because they recognize, perhaps unconsciously, that the absence they witness remains constitutive rather than temporary, that the emptiness before them represents the permanent condition of post-theistic existence wherein humanity discovers itself thrown into creative responsibility without the safety net of supernatural intervention, forced to generate meaning within the void left by divine withdrawal while knowing that no transcendent validation awaits their efforts.

The preacher who promises resurrection functions, within this hermeneutical framework, as Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor protecting humanity from the burden of freedom that Christ's complete kenosis offers, substituting comfortable dependence for the more demanding calling of creative agency within acknowledged limitation, offering theological narcotics that enable acceptance of material oppression through promises of otherworldly reversal, yet what Marx failed to recognize when he identified religion as opiate was that authentic Christianity, preserved in Mark's original ending before theological anxiety demanded its suppression, offers cold clarity rather than narcotic comfort: divine absence that demands human action beyond patient endurance, revolutionary praxis emerging from the recognition that no divine justice will correct earthly inequality.

The death of God theology that emerges from thinkers like Thomas Altizer and Mark C. Taylor finds its scriptural foundation in Mark's narrative structure rather than Nietzsche's philosophical declaration, presenting divine death as theological reality accomplished through love's ultimate expression in complete self-giving rather than through human rejection or philosophical critique, for the God who dies in Mark's Gospel embodies intimate presence whose love manifests through withdrawal, creating space for what Bonhoeffer called "religionless Christianity" wherein faith survives the death of its object through transformation into creative praxis, discovering that authentic spirituality emerges precisely where traditional religion collapses.

Yet this freedom arrives as burden rather than gift, for within the absence of divine guarantee, every human action carries the weight of ultimate significance without promise of eternal preservation, making each gesture of love, each act of creation, each moment of beauty more precious precisely because it lacks transcendent validation, because it emerges from finite consciousness confronting infinite void, asserting value despite the cosmos's indifference, creating meaning that death will erase yet which matters precisely because of its impermanence, its fragility rendering it more rather than less significant.

Here Tolkien's conception of sub-creation takes on meaning he himself might not have recognized, for we become makers in response to divine absence rather than in imitation of divine creativity, crafting meaning within the void left by kenotic withdrawal, discovering that the eucatastrophe emerges from human creative response to acknowledged finitude rather than from external intervention, that joy arrives precisely through accepting mortality rather than escaping it, that the unexpected happy turn gains its power from occurring within a cosmos that promises no such reversals, making human creativity the sole source of transcendence in a universe evacuated of divine presence.

The Scouring of the Shire, that often-overlooked conclusion to Tolkien's epic wherein the hobbits return to find their homeland ravaged by industrial exploitation and petty tyranny, provides perhaps the most accurate literary representation of this post-resurrection existence, for when no wizard arrives to restore the damage through supernatural intervention, when Gandalf's absence forces the hobbits to confront their responsibility for their own liberation, the narrative enacts precisely the transition from dependence to agency that Mark's unresurrected Christ demands, demonstrating that restoration emerges through collective labor rather than magical reversal, that Sam's replanting of the Shire with earth from Galadriel represents material transformation through human work rather than divine grace, the box containing merely soil rather than supernatural power.

This reading necessitates a fundamental reconception of religious socialism that can no longer depend upon divine justice to correct material inequality, recognizing instead that justice emerges only through human action within history, that the kingdom of God represents present imperative rather than future promise, that liberation theology's "preferential option for the poor" derives from human recognition of suffering's scandal rather than from divine mandate, for within the absence of transcendent guarantee, we bear sole responsibility for creating just social arrangements, making solidarity sacred precisely because it lacks divine authorization, generating value through collective action while expecting no validation beyond the material transformation such action achieves.

The collective becomes sacred through its function as humanity's response to divine absence, the formation of meaning-making communities that generate value through solidarity rather than through revelation, creating networks of mutual aid that replace vertical dependence on divine providence with horizontal interdependence among finite beings who recognize their shared vulnerability within a cosmos that offers no supernatural protection, discovering that authentic communion emerges precisely where traditional religious community, built on shared belief in transcendent guarantee, dissolves into communities of practice united by commitment to material transformation rather than metaphysical conviction.

The women fleeing Mark's tomb thus become our teachers through their terror rather than through their faith, for they recognize what two millennia of resurrection theology has worked desperately to obscure: that divine love manifests most completely through absence, that transcendence expresses itself through withdrawal, that the ultimate gift of Christianity consists of creative freedom within acknowledged mortality rather than eternal life, their wordless flight preserving what later evangelists could not tolerate, the recognition that we are magnificently, terrifyingly alone with our creative powers, called to become ourselves the intervention that history requires rather than to await divine intervention, to transform material conditions through collective action rather than through prayer, to create justice through struggle rather than through eschatological patience.

What emerges from this reading inverts nihilism entirely, for meaning becomes more precious when recognized as human creation emerging from collective struggle rather than divine gift bestowed from transcendent heights, love becomes more powerful when understood as finite gesture between mortal beings rather than as eternal preservation within divine memory, justice becomes more urgent when acknowledged as historical possibility requiring revolutionary transformation rather than as eschatological promise demanding patient endurance, each act of solidarity gaining significance from its emergence within conditions of divine absence, its value deriving from human commitment rather than from cosmic validation.

The absence of resurrection in Mark's Gospel thus reveals Christianity's most radical success rather than its failure, preserving in narrative form the complete accomplishment of divine kenosis that creates space for authentic human freedom, terrible and beautiful in its lack of guarantee, demanding everything precisely because it promises nothing beyond what we ourselves create within the clearing left by divine withdrawal, forcing us to discover that the sacred emerges through collective human action rather than through divine intervention, that transcendence manifests through material transformation rather than through spiritual escape, that the kingdom of God exists only insofar as we create it through revolutionary praxis within history's unfolding.

 

References

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