Text: Mark 16:1-8
Mark began his gospel with a man, John the Baptizer, shouting in the wilderness, and ends it with three women, in a city cemetery, shaken to the core of their being, made silent by their fear and holy terror. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”, Mark says in his opening phrase….It’s more of a title, certainly not a complete sentence. The last sentence, also, if read in its original Greek, is also not a complete sentence. It is as if in the midst of everything, something totally unique intrudes and nothing can put an end to it. There is no period to mark the completion.
And there’s another important truth to be culled from this peculiar ending, as well as from the accounts of the other gospels. None of them know quite how to tell what they feel has happened. Matthew tells us that even at the last of the so-called resurrection appearances of Jesus that “some doubted”. So if you come to Easter each year with mixed thoughts, you aren’t alone. Even among those immediate followers of Jesus, the understanding of what had happened ranged from outright disbelief to confusion, to warm fuzzy feelings, to a kind of certainty that came only by trust, not by any proof, that something extraordinary had happened.
Without Easter, of course, we wouldn’t know about Jesus at all. If his story had ended with his crucifixion, he would most likely have been left in history’s dust bin….just another Jew executed by the Roman Empire in a bloody century that witnessed thousands of such executions. So Easter is utterly central, and yet it can’t be pinned down, fixed, captured in time. It intrudes with its mystery.
No wonder then the women fled the tomb in terror and amazement…and no wonder, that even today, we find ourselves a bit afraid of Easter. We know how to deal with dead Saviors. We honor them with perfumes and spices so that we can return to the sanity and predictability of our normal lives. We know how to deal with God—erect stone monuments that enshrine some holy words so that we won’t have to carry the words around in our consciences. Erect them at our places of Government. We remember the past with awe, but we prefer our present less unsettling, thank you very much.
Far more terrifying, or at least confusing and puzzling, is the prospect of resurrection that comes with new expectations of us. Resurrection, you see, is a word that means to be stood up again; to be put back up on your feet, after life has knocked you flat. The world seems to think of death as tragic, when in fact, the tragedy of life is rarely death, but what we let die inside of us while we live. So it is comforting, I suppose, to live flat, boring lives.
If the cross means anything, it means that that the rule of domination and the power of might makes right represents the defeat of the idea that might makes right, and that violence solves problems. Be clear about this: Mark calls him “Lord” to make the point that Caesar, the world with its self-aggrandizing ideologies, is NOT Lord..
Far more provocative than religion contained in rules and boxed up in a particular set of words, is the quiet invitation to go on to the Galilees of our lives with a promise that we will be met there by one who was crucified, who died, and who was buried.
Perhaps it was Ogden Nash who penned these strange little lines. I’m not sure where I picked them up, but here they are:
“They nailed his hands and his feet to a tree
that day and after that, well after that,
everyone wore hats!”
We could just as easily say, of course, after that, we colored Easter eggs and hung plastic eggs from our dogwood trees.
Sadly, much of Christianity as articulated today would rather embalm God in the certainty of the past, entombed and contained in the surroundings of the familiar than to entrust our lives to the transformation of resurrection power, that always, always, asks something new of us. A dead God may be safely approached, honored at any distance, near or far. A God confined to the Bible, and especially a certain translation of the Bible, or defined in dogmas and creeds, is far less scary than one who asks us to relate to nature, to ideas, to every living creature and person as holy, and sacred—a way of relating to life that would make everything else in our lives secondary to that relationship. A living God explodes into our present and reeks havoc on our assumptions, our expectations, our living.
Sometimes I wonder if the church has paid more attention to Good Friday, and the notion of Christ’s sacrifice for us, because it is so much easier, so much more welcome to feel pity for that poor wretch hung on that awful tree to die in agony, and to think that the sacrifice was for me, for us. Notice that our attention gets stuck on ourselves. And it places all the responsibility on the actions of Christ. All we are asked is to accept it rather dumbly.
But Easter is not for the dumb. Easter cannot be blindly accepted. Easter escapes finality. Easter says things are not doomed; our lives can be different; we can be new persons; we can move from living death to life abundant and eternal now.
In the gospel stories of the resurrected Jesus, the intent is to show us the world according to God. In Jesus Christ, the story doesn’t end, it is open to the future. It is a story that goes forward, and in going onward, we will meet him.
If, however, we want to keep him entombed, we will act like we are the only ones who have the Truth. Bill Coffin once warned in an Easter Sermon given at Riverside Church 30 years ago that “it is acknowledged ignorance that unites us, while acknowledged possession of The Truth divides us. Only seekers of the Truth,” he said, “ can create a community for all; those who have The Truth seem to have only a bottomless enmity for those who do not have it, or who have another truth. Beware of Truth Possessors,” he said. “…Possessors of The Truth don’t believe in the Word made flesh, they believe in the Word made words.”
But back to my point: In the gospel stories of the resurrection of Jesus, we now have a world where the meek will inherit the earth, even when they don’t have a deed to it registered in the courthouse. We have a world where the poor in spirit, which is to say not those who are arrogant about their faith and wish to force it on others, but the poor in spirit have the only riches, and among them the bread is blessed and broken and everyone has enough. We are given a new world of the resurrection where those who mourn are more than comforted; they dance before the Lord with their dead—often while they are still grieving. It is a world where the peacemakers know themselves, and everyone else, as children of God, and the merciful know what mercy does—it turns our enemies into our sisters and brothers and causes weapons to rust and corrode or be transformed into tools.
Too much of what is said this weekend will miss the stark power of that empty tomb, and will hide it behind a lot of pap whose aim is to make us all feel good.
Easter isn’t a story to warm the cockles of our heart and make us feel good. It is a story that has no ending because we are meant to be part of it, which means that we too must be turned inside out and upside down. Whatever happened on that first Easter morning, we are left with only two choices, really: we can either fight and guard against this day—as did the religious leaders and political leaders of that time—or we can embrace it even amid disbelief or puzzlement, and give it a chance to claim us, and then, after we have been silent long enough to let God’s word replace our stuttering, to share it.
The women went to the tomb that morning filled with grief, expecting nothing extraordinary. But their faithfulness in honoring Christ placed them at the center of something wonderful. And that is the way it often is with faithfulness. God meets us there in the Galilees of our lives where we strive to be true to the love of God that we have seen and known, and, over time, and occasionally all of a sudden, we may receive the gift of faith, which is trust where we cannot understand….faith that resurrection is loose in the world.
We arrive at the wild impossible truth: this story can’t be closed up, finished. We human beings may be able to kill God’s love, but we cannot keep it dead and buried. The power of God is loose in the world, defeating death, and bringing new life. Once it touches you, creeps into your awareness, moves your stony heart—O my God, then everything is forever different, forever new. Alleluia! Thanks be to God.
