Mark 16:1-8
Heaven’s
Representatives
James Sledge Resurrection of the Lord April 4, 2021
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The Empty Tomb, He Qi © 2021 All rights reserved. |
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. Someone needed to tell Mark, or whoever wrote the words we just heard, that this is a terrible way to end your gospel. They said nothing, because they were afraid? That’s the end?
New Testament scholars debate whether or not this is the original ending of Mark’s gospel. Some argue that the writer ended it this way to create a sense of urgency in his faith community about the need to share the good news. Others argue that the peculiar Greek grammar of the ending indicates that the original ending must have been lost at some point.
One thing most all scholars do agree on is that those words, for they were afraid, are the last words we have from the original gospel of Mark. Two additional endings were added at some point, typically labeled in Bibles as “The shorter ending of Mark” and “The longer ending of Mark.” Whoever wrote these endings, likely in the fourth and second centuries, clearly weren’t happy with for they were afraid as an ending .
But that is the ending of our reading for Easter morning and the only ending we have from the gospel writer’s pen. So what are we to do with such an unsatisfactory ending?
For starters, we need to go easy on the women. Notice that there are no male disciples in the story. There’s a reason for that. The men had all disappeared. According to Mark’s gospel, when Jesus was arrested in the garden of Gethsemane, All of them deserted him and fled. Peter apparently snuck along behind for a little while, just long enough to deny even knowing Jesus, and that is the last appearance of any male disciple in the gospel of Mark.
Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome, however, are there at the cross. They see the horrible events of Jesus’ execution. They follow along and see where his body has been placed. And they are determined to ensure that Jesus has a proper burial. The women have been a great deal braver than the men in the story.
They become too frightened to act only after they discover the empty tomb, after the young man, perhaps an angel, tells them that Jesus has been raised and that they will see him again in Galilee. But why would this news frighten them so badly? Well, are you ready to meet Jesus?
That is what the young man in the tomb tells them they are about to do. I don’t know if that is what scared them so. Perhaps it was simply seeing a strange man in the tomb where Jesus was supposed to be and hearing that Jesus had been raised. Perhaps it was the combination of all that, but I can’t imagine how startling and frightening it must have been.
If I went to visit a friend’s grave a few days after the funeral and found the casket out of the ground, open, and a man in a robe beside it, I’m not sure I’d stay long enough to hear the message that my friend would soon meet me at our old stomping ground.
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We’re a long way from that first Easter. For us it’s a day of joy and celebration, a day of flowers and Easter baskets. The Easter bunny sometimes brings me a bottle of single malt; a very good day indeed.
On Easters when we could gather here together, people often wore a new spring outfit. When I was a small child, my grandmother would make my brother and me new sport coats, and today I’m wearing my pastel blue Easter tie. Easter for us is spring and rebirth all around. Trees and plants push out flowers and leaves as a landscape turned gray by winter suddenly brims with colors. But the resurrection of Jesus is about none of those things.
For a variety of reasons, the idea of resurrection has somehow gotten confused with going to heaven when you die. There’s actually almost nothing in the Bible about humans going to heaven, and neither the Jews of Jesus’ day nor the first generations of Christians had any notion of going to heaven when they died. They did, however, believe in resurrection.
Resurrection was something that was supposed to happen at the end of time. It belonged to an age to come. It’s why the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed say that Jesus will come “to judge the living and the dead.” This refers to the end of the age, when a general resurrection occurs and the dead who have been raised, along with those living in that time, will be judged before taking their place in the new age, the kingdom, the day when swords are beaten into plowshares and wolves will live with lambs.
If Jesus died and his soul went to heaven, that is not resurrection. If the disciples somehow still experienced Jesus’ presence with them spiritually after his execution, that is not resurrection. But if he had been raised from the dead, a bodily resurrection, then something profoundly and fundamentally new had happened, something that belonged to that new age of spears turned to pruning hooks and lions lying down with calves. If Jesus had been raised, God’s new age had begun to break into the present.
No wonder the women at the tomb were terrified. Jesus’ body was gone, a strange man said he had been raised, and if that were indeed true, the kingdom was arriving, and the world was about to change. Their lives were about to change in ways they could not imagine. No wonder they at first said nothing.
But it seems that God’s new day doesn’t come all at once. Jesus’ resurrection is a start, a beginning. As Anglican scholar N. T. Wright says, “Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project not to snatch people away from earth to heaven but to colonize earth with the life of heaven.”[1] And Jesus’ followers are given this work of bringing the life of heaven to earth. We are also equipped for this work. The good news of Easter morning is that a power has been set loose in the world that lets us live as new people, resurrection people.
Jesus’ death and resurrection do more than conquer the power of sin and death. They transform his followers from those who belonged to a world that is passing away to those who belong to God’s new day. The Spirit allows us to experience this newness and so take on the work of colonizing, of transforming the world so that it more and more mirrors heaven, so that it is more and more like the new day Jesus says has drawn near.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! His resurrection is the down payment on a new world, on God’s coming new day. And if Christ truly is risen, then nothing can ever be the same. We who are in Christ can never be the same again. We are now citizens of heaven, not because that is our final destination, but because we are now heaven’s representatives here on earth.
Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! And we who are joined to him by faith are made new creations. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! We have become resurrection people, people who belong to a day that is just dawning, a day the world cannot see unless we show it to them.
Christ is risen! Christ is risen indeed! Alleluia! Alleluia! Thanks be to God!
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