I may have mentioned this before, but I visited an old African
American woman during one of my hospital rotations in Atlanta . . .she’d been a
holiness preacher for fifty years, for half a century she’d labored in the
vineyards of the Lord, and now here she was, the victim of a stroke, on the
fifth floor of Grady Memorial Hospital.
She talked about her life, her alcoholic children and cheating husband,
and her church which, despite her being a preacher and all, wouldn’t let her
divorce the guy because they were against it.
Her life was full of great heartache and acute joy, and she represents
as well as anybody the life from death we celebrate this day . . . her greatest
joy was a trip to the Holy Land she’d scrimped and saved for over the years,
and she told me about the time she visited Jesus’ tomb, and her voice was
urgent, immediate, as if she were reliving the experience “I walked up to that tomb,” she said, “and
stuck my hand all the way in – it wasn’t very big – and there was a sign on it
said ‘He is not here,’ and you know what?”
I said “What?” she said “He wasn’t!”
That sums up the Easter story in a nutshell . . . he is not
here! The women have come into the
garden graveyard, talking and wondering who would help them roll the stone
away, and they find it already gone! And
then inside, the young man in white – they just knew it was an angel –
proclaims it to the now-petrified women – he is not here. He’s not in the grave, not in the
carved-out, rock-hewn hole in the garden wall where he’d been laid. And it’s hard to know what shocked the women
more, the angelic visitor in white, or the stark, terrifying fact of Jesus’
absence. He just wasn’t there. “Do not be alarmed,” the angel said, “He has
been raised . . . if you don’t believe me, Behold! There’s the place they laid him.”
And that’s the end.
There is no more to Mark’s gospel, at least in its original form . . .
if you look in your pew Bibles, you’ll see that there are two additional
endings, and neither of them were in the original, first-century version – they
were added at least 100 years later than the original . . . and to Mark, verse
eight was enough – the women went out and fled from the tomb – like the
disciples from Gethsemane at Jesus’ arrest – they “fled from the tomb . . . and
said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
And that’s an understatement—the Greek implies trembling,
amazement. Terror had seized them, it
had taken them in its clutches as like a beast.
They were so frightened that they shook uncontrollably. And that’s how the gospel ends, just hanging
there, on the fear of Mary, Mary and Salome.
About ten years after Mark wrote his version, Matthew adds some
of the appearance episodes to his version . . . a meeting with the women on the
way home and the famous scene on the mountain, where Jesus personally gives the
disciples – now only eleven – the great commission. Luke and John add even
more, like the appearance on the Emmaus road and the upper room where he ate
and drank and they touched him . . . and that final scene in John, where he
cooks the disciples a little fish breakfast.
But Mark includes none of those, and in fact, he leaves us in
silence . . . the women, he says, tell no one, but of course, we know they did
eventually, because they were the only witnesses to the empty tomb, and they
had to have told somebody about it, or we wouldn’t have heard about it .
. . and this ending in silence and fear struck some anonymous scribes so hard
that they felt compelled to tack some of the appearance stories they’d heard onto
the end of Mark a century later, and those became the extra endings . . .maybe
they felt the need for closure, the urge we all feel to know the end. Everybody likes closure . . . have you ever
sat through a movie, only to have it end ambiguously? Maybe the hero’s in the hospital, hanging on
by a thread, and his wife or girlfriend is crouched over the bed, sobbing, and
instead of a doctor coming in, telling them he’s going to live, or maybe the
hero breathing his last, the camera pulls slowly back and the credits roll, and
you don’t know what happens? Or
the romantic comedy, where the man and woman meet cute, and go through all the
usual ups and downs and ins and outs, but in the end, it’s ambiguous, they’re
just friends? Don’t you just hate
that? You just want to strangle the
writers . . . maybe that was the impulse at work with the folks who added onto
Mark. Perhaps they just couldn’t stand
to leave it hanging, and so they added incidents from the other gospels they
knew to be true. Or maybe it was to prove
somehow the resurrection of Jesus, to prove that he is what he says he
is – see, he has conquered death, he must be who he claims. Behold!
What the angel said turned out to be true! Jesus did appear to the disciples, to
Mary Magdalene and the remaining eleven, just as we were told. A satisfying ending, all tied up in a great,
big bow.
The great theologian and mystic Howard Thurman tells a story
about the time he and his wife were on their way to a round of speaking
engagements when they received word that the caretaker of their aged
grandmother had just died, and someone would have to go take care of her for
the summer. As they talked it over, it
became apparent that Thurman and his wife couldn’t get out of their speaking
engagements, which meant their two daughters would have to take turns caring
for their grandmother until their parents were free. With that, the youngest daughter burst into
tears and ran upstairs to her room. When
Thurman followed, he found her sprawled face-down on her bed, crying her eyes
out. He sat on the bed and put his hand
on her shoulder, and he said “I didn't come up here to urge you to stop crying.
I came to explain to you why I think you are crying. I don't think you're
crying because you don't want to go away for the rest of the summer and miss
the fun with your friends. You're crying because for the first time in your
life the family is asking you to carry your end of the stick as a family
member. Something inside you knows that when you get on the train tomorrow, one
part of your life will be behind you forever. You'll never again be quite as
carefree and unaccountable as you were before.”
Could this be why Matthew and Luke and the unnamed scribes were
dissatisfied with the ending? Could it
be that they couldn’t stand the thought of being on their own? It’s a scary, scary world out there, to be on
your own . . . and the disciples and the women were spiritual children,
immature, whose parents seemed far away . . . they didn’t understand what had
happened, they never had, and now they were alone, and no amount of stories of
Jesus out and about could change that.
And for Mark, writing at the time of the failed Jewish revolution, it
must have seemed doubly frightening . . . his community, far from Jerusalem,
had never experienced the risen Christ in the flesh, and for him, this was the
reality, the empty tomb and nothing more . . . Christ’s disciples found Jesus
gone, and now it’s time for them to grow up
– it’s left to them to continue the work of Christ on Earth without his
physical presence.
Is that all there was for Mark, an empty tomb, frightened
women, fearful disciples and only memories of the teachings of their crucified
master? Is that all there is for us? Of course not . . . what the angel says
to the women applies to us all. “Tell
his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of them to Galilee; there you
will see him, just as he told you.”
Jesus will be with you, just as he said.
He will go before you, to guide you and help you . . . he will be with
you. And for Mark, it isn’t an empty
tomb, or stories of a resurrected Christ, but the words of Jesus himself. After all, there at the Mount of Olives Jesus
had promised them “after I am raised up, I will go before you to Galilee,” and
for Mark, that was e-nough. For him, and
for his community of Christians thirty-five years after Christ’s death, it had
to be enough. Jesus had said it,
Mark believed it, and that settled it.
John tells us that when Thomas beheld the nail-scarred hands and
the pierced side of the resurrected Christ, he cried out “My Lord and my
God!” But Jesus, far from congratulating
him on his insight, chided him instead – “Have you believed because you have
seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Jesus knew that soon enough, they
wouldn’t be able to touch him, wouldn’t be able to talk with him
or walk with him or have breakfast with him.
And when that happens, all they’ll have is the word, all they’ll have is
the recollection and experience of those who’ve gone before.
And it’s the same for us today as well – belief in the
resurrection is still a matter of Jesus’ word, it hasn’t changed in the
two thousand years since Mark wrote his gospel.
Nobody in this room has seen him in the flesh, nobody has touched him,
yet still we believe, still we have faith in the resurrected
Christ. As Paul put it, “we walk by faith
and not by sight.” And this
faith itself comes from the Word, it’s nurtured by it, nourished by it. Our faith was born in those words
spoken in the Garden, and repeated by the angel – I will go before you to
Galilee, I will be with you unto the ends of the earth. It’s recorded in the pages of scripture, but also
burned into the experiences of countless Christians – like Mark and Augustine
and Howard Thurman – over the millennia.
As Paul says “faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes
through the word of Christ.”
When the women came to the tomb, they were reminded of those
words by the man in white, they were reminded of what Jesus had told them, that
he would go before them to Galilee, as he had promised . . . and they fled,
they ran, just like the disciples after Jesus’ arrest. When the angel said “he is not here,” they
took it literally, as if they were abandoned, and they ran off and told no one,
because they were afraid.
And when that holiness preacher put her hand into that same
tomb, she was told the same thing as the Mary’s and Salome – “He is not
here.” But the preacher’s faith – unlike
the earlier women – was strong, it had been nurtured by over half a century of
prayer and reading and listening to the words of Christ. She knew that it meant what it said, no more
and no less – he isn’t here physically,
his body isn’t in the tomb. She knew
where he wasn’t – the sign told her that much – and her faith—her
unquestioning belief in the word of God—told her where he was as well.
Brothers and sisters, we know where Christ is
too, don’t we? We know he’s not in the
ground, not in the tomb . . . we know he’s not up in some celestial mansion
somewhere, as romantic as it may be to think so. By his resurrection from the dead, we are
assured that he is alive, and by his absence from the tomb, we know that
he’s right here, with us, all around us, in fact, in our hearts and in
our minds and in our lives. Christ is
risen, he is risen indeed! Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment