The Holy Ellipsis

The splendor of divine cliffhangers

Easter has come. And Easter has gone. Yet Easter isn’t entirely behind us. While the day may have come and gone, we enter into that liturgical time of the year between Easter and Pentecost, called “Easter time.” This sacred season represents the fifty-day period of celebration and anticipation between the resurrection of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit—as narrated in Acts 2. Easter, then, is not merely a day for the Christian. Easter is a season in which we enjoy the news of the ‘death of death’¹ and sit, feet tapping, for the coming power of God’s Spirit from heaven. 

Having a hard time waiting (A.J. Swoboda via AI)

What happens after Easter in the gospels? To be candid, the gospels conclude their recounting of the stories and teachings of Jesus in the most perplexing of ways. The endings of each gospel teach us as much as their middle and beginning. Matthew 28, for example, gives a full report of Jesus giving his disciples their missional instructions (called the ‘great commission’) to go into the world to teach, disciple, and baptize the nations into Jesus. Following this, Matthew concludes with the comforting words of Jesus:

Surely, I am with you always, to the very end of the age. (v. 20)

Matthew does not end with the world worshiping Jesus. It concludes with the promise of presence. Mark’s ending is odd in its own unique way. Mark’s gospel—most New Testament scholars suspect—is likely to have ended initially with verse 8 as the women at the tomb run away “trembling and bewildered...[fleeing] from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.” (Mk 16.8) Luke underscores how the disciples remained in Jerusalem, “continually at the temple...praising God.” (Lk 24.53) However, John concludes his biography of Jesus by telling his reader that so much more could be said about Jesus. There simply wouldn’t be enough paper or books in the world to do so: 

Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. (Jn 21.25)

There’s much to be gathered from these endings. Scripture, of course, is inspired through and through—every “jot and tittle,” as Jesus would say.² The endings, no less. With that, one of the more unique features of the final sentences of many of the writings in the Bible is that they never actually finish. Or, they just end incompletely. Examples abound. Lamentations, for example—that book of ‘weeping’ over the destroyed Jerusalem—puts no ‘bow tie’ to the author’s suffering. There is no end to the tears by the end of the book. The scroll of 2 Chronicles—which would have been the final book in the Old Testament at the time of Christ—literally ends with an incomplete sentence:

Any of his people among you may go up, and may the Lord their God be with them... (v. 23)

Many scholars believe this intentionally incomplete sentence serves as an invitation to the reader who was likely in exile. The proverbial ellipsis provoked the question: will you return to the Temple in Jerusalem? Lastly, the unfinished ending becomes the distinctive mark of the Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15.11-32. After running away, the younger son has returned to the Father’s house. But the older brother appears to have none of it. He can’t stand all the grace and mercy and parties with fattened calves that the Father has thrown for the son. The story ends, unsatisfyingly, without any clear ending to the story: 

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and was found.’ (v. 31-32)

Why these incomplete endings? The impact of these unresolved endings, of course, is that they offer an implicit invitation to whatever reader would come to it. Will I continue to weep and lament with God even when no ‘bow ties’ exist in the context of our suffering? Will I be an exile who seeks to return to Jerusalem? Will I be an older brother who will learn grace and make room for the long-lost brother who had departed so long ago? 

I call these divine cliffhangers. Cliffhangers—in movies or books—can profoundly affect the observer. Hollywood has built an entire industry on them. As they’ve been called, cliffhangers go far back to the medieval period. The writings of the Middle Ages—like One Thousand and One Nights —would draw their readers in by ending each episode with an incomplete storyline. The Englishman Charles Dickens would use this literary device in much of his narrative fiction. So powerful were Dickens’s cliffhangers, it turns out, that riots are reported to have broken out in the streets of London because the masses couldn’t wait to find what would come next. Some have even surmised Harriet Beecher Stowe’s use of the cliffhanger in Uncle Tom’s Cabin was what lent it such popularity for mass audiences. Each of Stowe’s episodes (forty total) concludes with a cliffhanger, inviting her readers to rapt attention and anticipation. 

Scripture, it seems, offers us an array of divine cliffhangers, especially after the Easter event. Furthermore, given that each of the Gospels has embedded within it some form or another of a cliffhanger after the resurrection, it seems the Divine author wants us to come out of Easter willing to enter Easter introspection. How will we respond to the news of the resurrection? How will we live differently in light of the death of death? How does conquering our sin change how we think and live? 

The importance of these cliffhangers is that they remind the reader that God isn’t done yet. Nor are we. While the account of the resurrection may have ended, there is so much left to be done in our lives as a result of Christ’s accomplished work. When we confess our sins in church gatherings, we are invited to ask for forgiveness for what we did, which we should not have done. But we also ask for forgiveness for the things we have “left undone.” That line always catches me. There is so much “undone” within us that has yet to be written, fleshed out, and articulated. And these incomplete endings remind us of that. They remind us that not only is God never done.³ We are never thoroughly done due to God’s ongoing work. The work of God always has an ellipsis in our lives.

Photo by Jake Pierrelee on Unsplash

All the more, knowing God can never be exhaustively completed this side of our resurrection. Those divine cliffhangers invite us to embrace our intellectual and formational shortcomings and inabilities. Given how much is not written about God in the Bible, there is simply too much that a finite person cannot know about the infinite. This embeds intellectual humility into the Christian life. All of the Christian life is one long and holy ellipsis.

Reflecting on Easter, I have had to come toe-to-toe with my sin. Again. Just before Easter, once again, I had to invite my wife into another level of the darkness of my own heart. It’s exhausting—being known. But it is the Easter way. Only by entering the dark tomb can it be overcome. This Easter, I remember the darkness of my own heart and how God is overshadowing it with light and grace. Yes, resurrection has purchased our new identity. But so much about our identity has still to be worked out. 

As we wait for Pentecost together, what is your response? What is “left undone” now that you have seen the tomb empty? 

If Jesus indeed has been resurrected from the tomb...

1. John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ (Woodstock, ON: Devoted Publishing, 2017).

2. Matthew 5.18.

3. As is the theme of David Moffitt, “It Is Not Finished: Jesus’ Perpetual Atoning Work as the Heavenly High Priest in Hebrews,” in So Great a Salvation: A Dialogue on the Atonement in Hebrews (Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2019), 157–75.