Easter,
2000
EASTER
[Mark l6:l-8]
THE SACRED AND
IMPERISHABLE PROCLAMATION
When the sabbath was over, Mary
Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome
bought spices, so that they might go and anoint him. And
very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had
risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one
another, "Who will roll away the stone for us from the
entrance into the tomb?" When they looked up, they saw
that the stone, which was very large, had already been
rolled back. As they entered he tomb, they saw a young
man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side;
and they were alarmed. But he said to them, "Do not be
alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was
crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look,
there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his
disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to
Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." So
they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and
amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to
anyone, for they were afraid.
(The shorter ending of Mark) And
all that had been commanded them they told briefly to
those around Peter. And afterward Jesus himself sent out
through them, from east to west, the sacred and
imperishable proclamation of eternal
salvation."
One of our student members, who
is now at university in the U.S., sent me an e mail last
week. He wrote: "Pastor Gene: I'm learning lots of
interesting things in my Religious Studies class. I have
learnt about the Pauline epistles: how some are truly
written by Paul, some are pseudonymous, and some are
anonymous…and I have some questions to ask you:
First, how do you explain the ending to the Gospel of
Mark (the real ending, not the added short or long
endings?) I mean, isn't it a cheap shot to say that the
women ran away because 'they were afraid.'"
Thank God for open, inquiring
minds like this young man. Their questions keep those of
us who are old timers in the faith from being stuck in
the dismal state of mind that we have figured it all out.
The future of the Church and the vigor of its faith hinge
on strong, inquiring minds.
Our student correspondent raises
the awkward matter of the terse ending of the Gospel of
Mark, an Easter climax without a single resurrection
appearance of Jesus. It's timely since this is the text
assigned this year to be read on Easter Sunday. I believe
many churches will take a safe course and either augment
the original short ending with one of the later, two long
endings, or shift to another Gospel entirely. At Easter
people expect to be confirmed in the sacred and
imperishable proclamation that Jesus is risen; and Mark
doesn't satisfy that yearning easily with his strange
climax whose original text ends at verse 8 on a fearful
note: AND THEY SAID NOTHING TO ANYONE, FOR THEY WERE
AFRAID.
Mark's original ending so upset
the early church that very quickly Mark was edited by the
addition of the two sentences, which end today's reading.
Scholars call this "the new short ending." And then a few
years later the second longer ending, verses l4-21 was
added allowing Jesus to appear to Mary Magdalene, then
two unnamed followers, and then the eleven disciples
before the first gospel ever written draws to a close.
Now that's Easter satisfaction!
Why in Mark's original Easter
story are people afraid and why does Mark does include at
least one Resurrection witness? I do not for a second
believe that Mark just forgot to include something so
central to our faith as one or more resurrection
appearances of Jesus. Mark is good at detail so he could
not have been absentminded.
I assume Mark tells us what he
thought we needed to know in order to believe in Jesus
and to have our own personal encounter with the Living
Christ. Irony is the mark of Mark, his writing style and
his outlook. Throughout the first gospel the real thing
is happening off center; a favorite Marcan phrase is "on
the way" and "as they went along" and in Mark's story
about Jesus the Lord is always finding people not where
they may expect to find him but out there, out there in
their lives when the unexpected breath of God breathes on
them in unusual places and ways.
The women, of course, did not
expect to find Jesus alive at the tomb; but we do expect
the risen Christ there because later faith and later
gospels envelop the whole story of death with the much
more powerful theme of life. So Mark disappoints us all
because Jesus is not where we expect him to be. He is
gone; he is out there.
Earlier in his story it is Mark
who conveys the sense of haste after Jesus' crucifixion.
The rush to the tomb meant the body could not be properly
prepared for burial. The women were anxious to do the
traditional ritual of washing the body in spices. In
their anxiety they were up before dawn on their way to
the tomb but totally nonplussed at the thought of how
they would ever enter a sealed tomb.
Arriving at the burial spot, and
seeing the stone rolled away, their anxiety is increased
by seeing the tomb open because their first thought is
not, "he is risen" but "the body has been stolen and we
shall never be able to anoint it."
The women have approached death
and the tomb, stone or no stone, with the naïve hope
that somehow they can anoint the body. And then their
naïve hope is confounded by fear: the body has been
stolen. Death is like a stone, which separates us the
living from the dead. And whether the stone is in place
or rolled away, death is a canyon, which only one person
can cross at a time. The poet Robert Frost said: "The
nearest friends can go with anyone to death comes so far
short they might as well not try to go at all." The women
had tried to go as far as the sealed tomb; finding it
empty their despair only deepened.
Mark does not have Jesus appear
to the women; he has a young man, presumably a divine
messenger or angel, who announces tersely: "the Jesus you
seek is not here. He is risen. He has gone ahead of you.
Go and tell his disciples. There in the Galilee you will
see him as he promised you." This is Mark's sacred and
imperishable proclamation, even though it does seem
rather anti-climactic to our Easter
expectations.
And then the women fled for
their dear lives. It would appear to be a most dismal
ending to the first telling of the Easter
story.
For those who feel a need to try
to explain Mark, some suggest the women were
understandably afraid because they feared the powers that
be would punish them if they reported the resurrection,
or even the missing body. That is possible because in the
book of Acts we learn that a bit later Peter and other
disciples were punished when they began to spread the
news of the risen Christ.
But most of us can hardly keep
quiet about anything so we must wonder if these women
expecting to find a body, and being instructed by an
angel that the body had been changed into a risen Christ,
would have remained quiet for very long. They did not
need to shout from the rooftops and alert the
authorities, but they surely told someone about it. And
the two later editors of Mark assume that they did blab!
In other words, their fear was real but passing.
Others suggest that Mark ended
his story with its aggressive emphasis on "Go' in order
to convince believers that they must get involved in
spreading the good news. The women were afraid, to be
sure, but anyone reading Mark's short ending picks up on
the clear implication that believers are to get busy
running toward Jesus in the world and helping with his
mission. Jesus is already in the world and we have our
part to play in spreading the good news.
But finally it may be that we
misread the nature of the fear the women had. Perhaps it
was not the kind of mind numbing fear which accompanies a
horror film like Scream 3; maybe they went forth not in
terrified silence but in trembling and hopeful
expectation that the words of the angel would prove to be
true for them, that Jesus truly had gone ahead of them
and that they would soon see him.
How many of you would have
rushed into the APEX this morning bubbling with chatter
if last night an angel in your dream had told you
"tomorrow you are going to come face to face with Jesus
at Easter worship." I imagine if that were your
experience you would have come up soberly, entered
cautiously, hoping and yet trembling in your hope that
your dream prophecy would come true. It wouldn't be that
you don't want to see Jesus face to face, but awestruck
fear and trembling would certainly qualify your
hope.
Mark wants to challenge us to
believe that Jesus goes ahead of us, that Jesus is active
in the world, and that anyone can expect to encounter
Jesus in their daily lives. Mark, I believe, records no
particular resurrection appearance because for Mark the
risen Christ was available, not to a select few, but to
anyone who lived in trembling hope of new life and new
direction from God.
And that has always been the
case because even if we tally up everyone who saw the
risen Christ in the resurrection body in all four Gospels
it's only a few hundred. And yet tens of millions have
experienced the risen Christ, not in bodily form, but in
their real life resurrection experiences and convictions.
Not the first, but one of the most memorable, was Paul's
experience of encountering the risen Christ, not in
bodily form, but in nonetheless vivid and life
influencing experience.
In the current film, THE GREEN
MILE, based on a story by the horror writer, Stephen
King, the striking black actor Michael Clarke Duncan is
John Coffey, a convicted murderer, who is befriended by a
compassionate guard, played by Tom Hanks. John Coffey,
who we later learn is no murderer at all, is a Christ
figure, a giver of hope and new life to everyone who
encounters him on death row, except to two demonic men,
the villainous guard Percy and the deranged serial
murderer.
It is strange that Stephen King,
a writer famous for his morbidity, malignancy, and an
instinct for evil, shows an authentic Christian
sensibility, in his novel which is the basis of this
movie. Part of the evidence is Coffee's lines from the
Green Mile. He says: "Only God could forgive sins, could
and did, washing them away in the agonal blood of His
crucified Son, but that did not change the responsibility
of his children to atone for those sins (and even their
simple errors of judgement) whenever possible. Atonement
was powerful; it was the lock on the door you closed
against the past."
Atonement is the lock on the
door which we close against our past! That is a spin on
Easter which should induce fear and trembling.
In a reenactment of the
atonement of Jesus Christ for our sins, John Coffee,
though innocent of any crime, assumes the evil of the two
evil men sharing death row with him, and transfers all of
his goodness upon them to eradicate their evil. As God
gave the life of Jesus to atone or cancel our sins, so
Coffey gives his life to cancel out the evil and sin of
these two vile persons who threaten everyone else in that
prison. The good of Coffee does cancel out and overcome
the evil of the other two but at a cost: the wages of sin
is death to the two; the cost of redemption is death for
Coffey.
Stephen King takes his guidance
from Mark for whom The Easter Proclamation, Sacred and
Imperishable as the later editor phrased it so just
because it is sobering and fearful and trembling if it is
absorbed into our lives. And without our personal
assimilation, the proclamation hangs there like every
proclamation, imperial and royal ones or popular and
revolutionary ones, hangs there in the air and eventually
collapses and perishes. The reason the Easter
proclamation is imperishable is because he has found many
in their lives. Otherwise it is merely sacred propaganda
on which the sun will set.
The Easter story, according to
Mark, is sobering and trembling in its implications;
death is overcome but at the price of death; sin is
defeated but at the sacrifice of good. Jesus is still
active in the world but it remains to be seen who will
see him, who will experience his redemptive power in
their lives, who will run toward Jesus and believing in
him help him fulfil his ongoing ministry of salvation.
For Mark the women go in fear
and trembling because they are yet to encounter the risen
Lord and that encounter will hinge on their belief in
him. Mark may not have felt any need to infuse his Easter
story with multiple evidence of Jesus' appearance because
he knew that belief in Jesus must be and would be the
precursor of the experience of Jesus.
A missionary in Africa
experienced great difficulty in trying to translate the
word BELIEVE into the local dialect. He simply could not
find the corresponding expression in the local language
for belief or faith in Jesus.
Then one day a runner came
panting into the camp, having traveled a great distance
with a very important message. After blurting out his
story, he fell completely exhausted into a nearby
hammock. He muttered a brief phrase that seemed to
express both his great weariness at finishing his race
and task and his contentment at finding such a delightful
place of relaxation. The missionary, never having heard
this phrase before, asked for a translation of what the
runner had said. "Oh, he is saying, 'I'm at the end of
myself, therefore I am resting all my weight
here!'"
The missionary exclaimed,
"Praise God! That is the very expression I need for the
word BELIEF" And so he was able to complete his
translation.
To believe in Jesus, you must
run toward Jesus in the world. You must give your all in
that race. You must sacrifice all your energy, your very
self, in the commitment. And then you can turn and cast
yourself wholly and unreservedly on Christ, the hammock
of your salvation, the place of rest and recreation for
new and eternal life.
The first additional ending to
Mark, which appears in this text tells us that afterwards
Jesus sent out through the disciples THE SACRED AND
IMPERISHABLE PROCLAMATION OF ETERNAL SALVATION. What a
memorable phrase "THE SACRED AND IMPERISHABLE
PROCLAMATION OF ETERNAL SALVATION", and that is the
essence of the Easter story.
The Good News of Jesus, but the
good news only begins in the proclamation. It needs to be
claimed by us all.
We need to leave the church at
Easter confident that whatever information and
inspiration we have received here is only the precursor
to meeting Jesus. He is here, but he is not here. He is
in the world; he really is risen and still active
wherever life overcomes death; goodness redeems
disappointment; hope breaks the bondage of fear; and love
sweeps over and lifts up the affections of humans.
Of course, we go in fear and
trembling into a world where we expect to find Jesus and
expect Jesus to find us.
Pastor Gene
Preston
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