Mark 16:1-8
As Good as Dead
James Sledge March
31, 2024
“Jesus Christ is risen today, Alleluia!”
The tomb is empty! Christ is alive! It is the day of resurrection! Tell all the
good news. Easter is here, the biggest day on the Church calendar.
As a result, most of us know well the
story of Easter morning. Jesus had been executed, dying late on Friday, which
was just before the Sabbath day began at sundown. And so his burial was
accomplished in a hurry. There was little time for putting spices and perfumes
on his body as was the practice. It was almost Sabbath, when all work and
unnecessary activity ceased. What a strange Sabbath it must have been for Jesus’
followers.
When the Sabbath ended on Saturday
evening, some of the women who followed Jesus began thinking about what they
could do to give Jesus a decent burial when it got light enough to go out. They
bought some spices so that they could anoint his body. They wanted to do what
little they could for him.
As soon as the sun was up on Sunday
morning, they headed to the tomb with their spices. Now they would have their
chance to properly mourn their loss, to properly prepare Jesus’ body, and to
pay their last respects. As they went, they wondered how they would get into
the tomb. (The stones that covered tombs were not the large boulders that we
sometimes see in paintings. They were more like carved wheels, sometimes as
tall as a person. They sat in a groove running along the face of the tomb, and
workmen could roll them in it like a wheel. There was a depression in front of
the entrance so that once the stone was in place, it took a great deal of
effort to get it rolling.) The women had seen the tomb late on Friday, and they
knew the stone was too large for them to move. But they were determined to do
this last thing for Jesus. They didn’t know how they would get in, but they
would.
To their surprise they arrived at the tomb
and found the stone already rolled back. This was most fortunate but was also a
little disturbing. Why was the tomb standing open? And when they stepped into
the tomb they were startled and frightened to see a young, robed man sitting
there, like he had been waiting for them. Perhaps he was an angel for he said, “Do
not be alarmed.” That’s the sort of things angels always say when they
encounter people in the Bible, though it doesn’t seem to have calmed the women all
that much.
Then the man tells them the incredible news.
“You
are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is
not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But go, tell his
disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to
What wonderful, wonderful news. Jesus is
risen! And we know how the story goes from here. The women run out to tell the
others, to tell everyone, “He has been raised and we will see him in Galilee
just as he said would happen.”
But our scripture reading says something
quite different. So they went out and fled the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized
them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. As hard as
it is to fathom, that is how Mark’s gospel ends.
It’s a terribly unsatisfying ending, which
likely explains why the Bible contains a couple of endings added later. Many
Bibles mark them with the imaginative titles, “The Shorter Ending of Mark” and
“The Longer Ending of Mark.” Scholars of all stripes agree that these two
endings don’t belong with the original gospel. The only debate is over whether
Mark intended to end his gospel this way or the ending was somehow lost. It’s a
debate that can’t really be settled. The only thing that can be said for sure
is that in God’s providence, the gospel the Church received ends this way: So
they went out and fled the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and
they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.
In Mark’s gospel, there is no joy on
Easter morning, no shouts of “He is risen!” only terror, shock, fear, and
silence. Not all that surprising when you think about it. Centuries insulate us
from the drama of that morning, the raw emotions of going to a friend’s grave
and finding it open and empty, a strange man sitting there, saying your friend
has been raised.
On top of that, we aren’t much worried
about meeting our now risen friend. Jesus is not going to be there when we get
back home. No chance he’ll say anything to us about our behavior or ask if we
denied him. We’ve got Jesus safely confined to heaven, not running around loose
where we might bump into him.
For many of us,
Jesus might as well be dead. We’ve heard about him, learned stories about him,
are perhaps impressed by some of his teachings, but he doesn’t really intrude
into our daily lives. Jesus is no more alive to us than family, friends, and
loved ones who’ve died. He’s gone to heaven, unseen by us. In a sense, he’s as
good as dead.
I’ve lived my entire life in the
Presbyterian Church. That’s less and less common, so I can’t assume that all of
you know the stereotypes about Presbyterians, our obsession with doing things
“decently and in order,” or of our nickname, “the frozen chosen.” Suffice to
say that we have a long history as staid, buttoned-down, well-educated, neck up
Christians.
That’s made us suspicious of things that
seem overly spontaneous or enthusiastic. We’re uneasy with people doing crazy
things because of the Holy Spirit, and we’ve made sure such things don’t happen
in our congregations.
Some of our caution is appropriate. We do
need to “test the spirits,” as the Apostle Paul wrote, to see which are from
God. We do need to confirm that some fit of inspiration does indeed align with
the God we meet in Jesus. But we’ve rarely stopped there.
The Holy Spirit didn’t really come up all
that often in the churches where I grew up, and decently and in order was usually about maintaining control, making
sure nothing happened that we couldn’t manage. No letting the Spirit hijack our
worship or other church programs. No danger of bumping into the risen Jesus.
For the very first Christians, meeting the
risen Christ was not restricted to those few who were around in the days
following the resurrection. By the power of the Holy Spirit, the risen Christ
continued to be present to the community of faith. The Apostle Paul goes so far
as to say, “Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.”
For Paul and the other early Christians, there was new life in Christ
because Christ dwelled in them through the Spirit. Christ was alive, not safely
sequestered off in heaven for all eternity. He was present in the here and now,
really and truly alive.
I wonder if Annie Dillard, Pulitzer Prize
winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, was thinking of such things when she
wrote,
On the whole, I do not find Christians,
outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have
the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect,
does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the
floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday
morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we
should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and
signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake
someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can
never return.[1]
I think the women at the tomb understood
this better than we do, and so they had the good sense to be a little
frightened. If Jesus was alive, God had indeed stirred. This had never happened
before. Resurrection is not reanimation. It is not going to heaven when you
die. It is the raising of the dead at the end of time. If Jesus had truly been
resurrected, then a new age was breaking in. Everything had changed. Of course
the women experienced terror and fear. Life would never be the same again.
Christ is risen! Not he died and went to
heaven, but he IS risen! IS. And in our baptisms we are joined to
the risen Christ, and he dwells in us. Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!
Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Christ is risen! Christ is risen
indeed! And the risen Christ calls us to follow him, to be his body in the
world, so that the world may know that he lives.
Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed!
Alleluia! Thanks be to God.
[1] Dillard,
Annie. Teaching a Stone to Talk: “Expeditions
and Encounters,” (New York: HarperCollins, 2007) Kindle Edition p. 49.
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