Easter Day 2021

Easter Day 2021 April 4, 2021 Those of you who know me or have heard just a few of my sermons know that I’m an avid reader. I read lots of different types of books—books of poetry, books on religion, leadership, and psychology, the occasional work of non-fiction, but mostly, I read novels. I’ll confess that I’m one of those people who, when about mid-way into a novel, will occasionally flip to the last page and take a peek at how it ends. Because I love a good happy ending, with all loose ends tied up not too neatly but just neatly enough. Which could explain why I find the gospel of Mark to be so unsettling. Imagine sitting down to read this short, action packed gospel, where Jesus is constantly on the move, constantly irritated and frustrated with the denseness and ineptitude of his disciples. So about half-way through, say about at the Transfiguration, when God has revealed God’s glory through Jesus and Jesus predicts his death for the first time and the disciples misunderstand it all spectacularly, imagine that you flip to the end to see if you find a happy ending, some nice, clear resolution. And you get the reading from today’s gospel with the very last line of Mark being: “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.” (Now, if those of you who are extra-curious about Mark’s gospel go home and look up the end in your Bibles, I should tell you that there are other verses included that scholars believe were not a part of the original gospel and were written by someone else.) “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.” It’s definitely not the most satisfactory closing line of a story and other gospel accounts give us appearances of the Resurrected Christ who speaks a good word to his confused and frightened disciples. So what does Mark’s version of the resurrection have to offer us? Once the sabbath is over, the two women make their way to Jesus’ tomb with spices to anoint his body. Along the way, they are fretting about how they will roll away the heavy stone that blocks the tomb’s entrance, but when they arrive, they discover that the stone has already been rolled back. As they enter the tomb to investigate, they see a young man dressed in white seated on the right side. And they are understandably alarmed. He says 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.” The strange messenger gives them the good news that Jesus has been raised, and he gives the women a task—to go tell Jesus’s disciples and Peter (the one who denied him) that he is going ahead of you to Galilee and there you will see him. He’s going home, where the story all began, and you should go there too. And Mark tells us that the women’s first response to this astonishing news is to be seized by terror and amazement, fleeing from the tomb and being silent about what they had seen. And we get that don’t we? We who have lived through the events of the last year. We’ve learned about the unpredictability of life and death. We are starting to understand that resurrection doesn’t mean resuscitation, that though we may long for things to “go back to normal,” the way they were before we were all faced with a global pandemic that our lives won’t just be resuscitated to resume at some magical point in time in the future. We have learned that resurrection, that new life is mysterious and unpredictable, that we often have to rely on strange, unrecognizable messengers who we only understand and recognize later, and that there is a certain amount of terror involved when facing resurrection. [And the good news of Mark’s gospel is that, despite its unsatisfactory ending, Jesus’s resurrection did, in fact occur, and the disciples eventually overcome their terror and their silence to spread the good news that God’s love is stronger even than death and that we, as Jesus’s followers, get to participate in that victory both in this life and in the next.] Let us pray. Heavenly Father, we approach your Son’s resurrection with joy and with fear. It is, as birth always is, filled with delight and danger. Bring resurrection to our lives in spite of us. May we allow you to roll the stones away from all that entombs us, to set us free to liberate those around us. Help us to surrender to you that we may be victorious through him who loved us and gave himself for us. Amen.