Re/born: Mark 16:1-8
Easter Sunday
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. 2 And very early on the first day of the week,
when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. 3 They
had been saying to one another, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the
entrance to the tomb?” 4 When they looked up, they
saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. 5 As
they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting
on the right side; and they were alarmed. 6 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. 7 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.” 8 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. (NRSV)
Christ is risen! (Christ is risen indeed!) Christ is risen! (Christ is risen indeed!)
Do you know how long I’ve been
waiting to say that, to hear its corollary returned? It’s been a year, Church, a full liturgical
year and oh what a year it has been! But
this—this fact of a risen Christ Who defeated death sent an angel to reassure
the ones who loved Him; I needed some good news and this is definitely it. “He has been raised—He is not here.” This is fantastic! What we thought was ended is still going;
what we thought was dead is living. It
is the end of the season of Lent and the beginning of the fifty days of Easter;
it is the rollout of vaccines after a year of a pandemic we did not control; it
is knowing that the snow this past week is a last hurrah rather than a permanent
fixture. Easter is here, Christ is
risen, the alleluias can come back, the stone has been rolled away, praise the
Lord!
Yes.
And.
The numbers here in Bay County are
rising again and one of the COVID variants has been charted in Bay City; we are
currently at “very high risk” and some of the areas of the Thumb have the
highest numbers of new cases in the nation.[1] Only 30% of Michigan’s population has had
even the first shot of the vaccine.[2] This past week, this Holy Week, has been the
trial of the police officer who killed George Floyd after kneeling on his neck
for nine and a half minutes despite Floyd’s protestations that he could not
breathe. That death at the end of May
sparked protests all over the world about police violence, especially against
people of color, and ten months later there are children in a witness stand in
Minneapolis testifying to what they saw of the end of a life.[3] The women came to a stone that was already
rolled back and heard Jesus was not in the tomb and they fled, saying nothing,
for they were afraid.
Mark is the earliest of the four
canonical gospels, written about forty years after Jesus’ resurrection, and the
earliest manuscripts we have stop here:
“they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Later writers came along and added a happier
ending, a tidier ending; in most Bibles, you can see that verses 9–20 are set
apart because they are an addition to Mark’s text. “They said nothing” not only doesn’t fit with
our narrative of Christianity—somebody had to have said something since we’re
celebrating a resurrection we didn’t personally see, after all—but it’s also
not a pleasant end to the story. “They
were afraid” doesn’t give us alleluias and trumpets and lilies and moments of
saying Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed.
“They were afraid” does not fix “He breathed out his last and
died.” “They were afraid” sounds an
awful lot like a fourth wave of COVID, like not knowing whether there will be
justice for a dead man, like Lent, and Lent is supposed to be over.
Right?
Christ is risen.
Christ is risen indeed.
Dean Ira Brent Driggers points out
that what may sound like the blunt drop-off of a narrative likely wasn’t so harsh
to its original listeners. “I don’t
think Mark wants us to imagine Peter and the others never hearing the good news
of Easter,” Driggers writes. “After all,
Jesus had already promised them precisely what the angel describes to the
women: a post-resurrection rendezvous in Galilee (Mark 14:28). Also, I have to
think Mark’s first Christian hearers had some knowledge, however rudimentary,
of disciples spreading the Easter message and the risen Jesus appearing to them
(see 1 Corinthians 15:5-8, which predates Mark).
“That said, Mark has clearly thrown
up a narrative roadblock. By concluding with fearful silence, he forces us to
contemplate how the story can move from empty tomb to disciple rendezvous after
the connecting human link has been broken.
“Why throw up this roadblock?
According to one common interpretation, Mark’s ending functions rhetorically as
an invitation of sorts, an opening into which the Gospel audience is
invited to step. It invites Mark’s hearers (past and present) to finish the
story that the disciples in the narrative—not just these women but also the men
who abandoned, betrayed, and denied Jesus—failed to finish themselves.”[4]
An invitation to the listeners—that’s
us. We are invited to carry the message
because somebody needs to. The very last
of the ones who had stayed with Jesus—after Judas’ betrayal, after the
disciples’ desertion, after Peter’s denial—were the women who stayed even to
the foot of the cross, but this? This
breaks them. And why shouldn’t it? After one of the most intense weeks of their
lives, the women who loved Jesus find not only that the massive stone has been
moved but that the body of their beloved is gone and a young man is telling
them they have missed Jesus, He is not here.
It’s a lot to take in. It was so much that “terror and amazement”
seized them—in the Greek, tromos kai ekstasis, trauma and ecstasy.[5] It was traumatic, this second loss of
Jesus. No wonder they ran without saying
anything. And yet here we are, thousands
of years later, saying that Christ is risen, Christ is risen indeed.
Today is Easter Sunday but Easter is
itself a fifty-day season, a weeks-long celebration of the reality of
resurrection that bridges the time between Holy Week and Pentecost. Every Sunday is a remembrance of Easter but
these fifty days make special effort to examine Christ’s resurrection and His
subsequent appearances as the continuation of Emmanuel, God with us. In this season, we become the messengers; we
are the ones who can move beyond trauma and ecstasy because we are a bit
removed and can see the wonder that, in one sense, Christ is reborn—reborn,
“brought back to life or activity.”[6]
In the gospel of John, chapter three,
we get the story of the doubtful religious leader named Nicodemus who sneaks to
Jesus under cover of night and asks if He’s really for real with this different
life preaching:
“Rabbi, we know that you are a
teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart
from the presence of God.” 3 Jesus answered him,
“Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born
from above.” 4 Nicodemus said to him, “How can
anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the
mother’s womb and be born?” 5 Jesus answered,
“Very truly, I tell you…no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born
of water and Spirit. 6 What is born of the flesh is
flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit…9 Nicodemus
said to him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus
answered him…16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave
his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have
eternal life.
17 Indeed, God did not send the Son into
the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved
through him.’”[7]
It’s not about being reborn in the
physical sense, Jesus says to Nicodemus, because that isn’t the point—and when
Jesus is resurrected, it is not physical rebirth. But it is a recalibration, a rewriting of the
story that once walked down a path toward death and now moves in the direction
of eternal life, of life abundant, of life that heals the soul captured by
trauma and ecstasy. It is a life that
invites us to tell the story, we who understand that they were afraid but also
that Jesus was waiting in Galilee.
Do you hear this good news,
Church? We are not asked to come to the
day of Easter, the season of Easter as though everything is fine and back to
normal and the end of Lent means we have to ignore that things are still
uncertain and strange. We are asked to
come to the garden where the stone has been rolled away by means we do not know
and to hear that Jesus is already moving again, is reborn to the ministry that
has shifted to a new scale. Christ is
risen, risen indeed in the middle of a long arc of stories that are yet to be
told even in our time and that, Church, is why it matters that we come
back to the cross and the grave every year to remind each other that Christ is
risen. It is the continuation of hope,
hope that overcomes the trauma and ecstasy, hope that tells the story, hope
that goes on ahead to Galilee to see the risen Lord, hope that lives alongside
the fear and the uncertainty because it can handle them. It’s a durable thing, hope, especially when
grounded in the flexibility of something like rebirth, like a Light not
overshadowed by darkness, like Jesus Who doesn’t stay dead. So we begin this new liturgical season by
saying yes, Christ is risen, and my but that’s a strange and wondrous thing to
ponder for many, many days.
Debie Thomas writes it like this: “As
I’ve reflected on the past year during this Lenten season, I’ve been struck
again and again by the enormity of what humanity has just endured. We’ve
witnessed and/or sustained losses on a scale we’ve barely begun to register,
much less to grieve. We’re weary, we’re numb, we’re bewildered, we’re
sad. We hear what the angel at the tomb is saying to us, and in some deep
recess of our souls we know that the angel’s words are the most consequential
words we’ve ever heard. But we’re still trembling in alarm. We’re
still trying not to flee.
“Maybe, what we need this
Easter is Mark’s version of the story. Maybe we need
time — as the women in Mark’s account needed time — to sit with the
terror and the amazement that must fall upon us when God’s incomprehensible
work of redemption collides in real time with the broken bewilderment of our
lives. Maybe we don’t need to shout right away.
Maybe it’s okay to whisper.
“This year, I’m allowing myself to
practice a slow Easter — an Easter that takes root within me as
imperceptibly as seeds break into life beneath the earth. Anyone who
grows green things knows: the process of transformation is hidden from our
eyes. Every spring, it is shrouded in mystery. It has a timeline of
its own, and we tremble at its seeming fragility. And yet? And yet
the tender shoots break through the soil, and new life emerges. Every
time.
“Likewise, I believe that there is
life we cannot see, the life of God hidden within us, tenacious, dynamic, and
sure. It might take time to emerge and flourish. But the life
itself is certain.
“Every Gospel account of the
resurrection tells us that the most important event in history happened in
total darkness. Sometime in the predawn hours of a Sunday morning two
thousand years ago, a great mystery transpired in secret. No sunlight
illuminated the event. No human being witnessed it. And even now,
centuries later, no human narrative can contain it. The resurrection
exceeds all of our attempts to pin it down, because it’s a mystery known only
to God. Whatever the raising was and is, its fullness lies in holy
darkness, shielded from our eyes. All we can know is that somehow, in an
ancient tomb on a starry night, God worked in secret to bring life out of
death. Somehow, from the heart of loss and misery, God enacted salvation.”[8]
May rebirth make its slow, painful,
beautiful way through your life, siblings.
May the season of Easter hold space for your uncertainty and invite you
to joy, deep and bright, that is strong enough to withstand the trauma, fear,
ecstasy. And may you know in all the
ways you need to that Christ is risen; Christ is risen indeed. Amen.
[2]
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/01/28/960901166/how-is-the-covid-19-vaccination-campaign-going-in-your-state?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&fbclid=IwAR3uSWMQ95Fmk2EVcGWnewOfgAiNT7mjxFvVrkF2BoW2iO6pKKYvAf6ccYc
[5]
τρόμος καὶ ἔκστασις; Greek Bible
Mk 16:8.
[7]
NRSV.
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